The Shondes Issue #31

The radical Brooklyn four-piece is a delightful disgrace, stirring up buzz without an album or a label

By Mairead Case
Published: March 1st, 2007 | 12:00am

When you’re trying to describe a band, it’s almost impossible not to treat it like a cake: how many eggs? What kind of sugar? How many solos yoinked from the Kill Rock Stars back catalogue? So it’s easy to talk about the Shondes, a rock quartet based in Brooklyn, like you do chocolate babka: four instruments (drums, bass, violin, and guitar); four vocalists, often singing simultaneously; and influences ranging from feminist punk to Judaism to classical music. The Shondes — Louisa Solomon, Elijah Oberman (both ex-Syndicate), Temim Fruchter, and Ian Brannigan — are queers and trannies, radical activists, three anti-occupation Jews, and one Irish shiksa. Next question: does it work?

Many people say “no,” and it’s easy to see why. The Shondes have so many different ingredients that it’s almost impossible for them not to offend somebody.

Fittingly, “shonde” is Yiddish for “a disgrace,” “an outrage,” or “a pity.” But the Shondes embrace this monstrous metaphor just as fiercely as Patti Smith did buttered stars or Courtney Love a sky like amethyst. The Shondes are committed to being disgraceful, as long as that means speaking for justice, organizing for Palestinian self-determination, and working to support radical queer communities.

According to the Shondes, you can’t bake cake (or start a band) any other way. “The four of us were already in community together,” Fruchter says. “When the idea arose that the four of us make music together, it wasn’t even a question. It was like, oh. Here’s how we can channel all of this political passion, creative energy, and the drive to create and be a part of radical community.” Exhilaratingly, and sometimes also heartbreakingly, the band represents each person’s deepest, most passionate engagement and connection.

“At any given moment,” Oberman says, “we could be playing a song that started out as a conversation over dinner six months ago. Someone is singing words I wrote, and I’m playing a line that someone else heard in their head and thought I should play.” Compare this ethic to less communicative, if equally passionate, ones (“He dumped me,” “I dumped her,” or “Lick-lick-lick the mic”), then ask yourself why you weren’t shaking your tusche at a Shondes gig, like, yesterday-already.

The Shondes don’t have an album yet, but they gig regularly in their home base of Brooklyn, plan actions, and hold day jobs. Two Shondes are secretaries, three work with Jews Against the Occupation, and Oberman and Fruchter co-founded the Reverb Conspiracy, a monthly radical reading series. Everyone multitasks a lot, especially because the Shondes are fully DIY and do all the marketing and managing themselves. They’ve played with artists including Mecca Normal, Jason Trachtenburg, Nomi Lamm, and Fugazi’s Joe Lally.

In the summer of 2006 (along with Odd Bones and the Degenerettes), the Shondes booked their first tour: 10 weeks and nationwide, with actions planned at each stop. They played Camp Trans, the annual protest at the Michigan Womyn’s Festival, Las Vegas’ first-ever Ladyfest, and also supported organizations like No Lose and the Latino Health Outreach Project in New Orleans. So they sleep very little, but nobody’s tired. “We eat and breathe this band,” says Brannigan, who also works at the National Lawyers Guild. “It’s probably the first project that I’ve had that both takes up nearly all my time and totally fuels me to make it through the day.”

One fuels the other: passion and struggle, music and politics, sweet and sour at once. “I have a pretty long and fraught history with playing violin,” Oberman says, “a deep love for the instrument and using it in somewhat non-traditional ways, but it took me a very long time to find a way of playing that felt like, ‘This is really what I should be doing. This is right.’”