The Arrivals/Photo: John Oakes
Once upon a time, the only meaning of the date January 6 was Epiphany, the day the three kings arrived to bestow gifts and bow down to the “newborn king,” as the Bible story goes. But someone else has crowned himself king more recently, and he incited his loyalists to storm the Capitol building on January 6, 2021, in an attempt to stop the certification of the election of his successor to the American presidency, Joe Biden. Hopefully most of us remember this story, despite the mob and their dear leader escaping any true consequences, along with the current revisionism afoot.
But never mind January 6, what should happen on January 7? One possible path to take on the metaphorical following day is suggested in the latest single from “Payload,” the first album in sixteen years from veteran Chicago punks The Arrivals. At the roaring start of the song “January 7th,” “Little Dave” Merriman sings that the “Next time the Capitol falls / It should be for the people / Not a person.”
When Merriman connects with me virtually from his home in Brookfield, he says the song is “about the feeling in the country right now—neighbors versus neighbors. They’re trying to divide us with identity politics. One of the lines is: ‘They’re pulling the bag and the rug out in tandem. It’s their nature.’ They are destabilizing us and running with the loot out the back door.” In response, he says that “January 7th” “is about coming together. The last two lines are: ‘Together against all their power, we’re stronger. We can’t live under their rule any longer.’”
There’s a whole lot more to learn about “Payload” and The Arrivals: the latest single is only ninety seconds long, there are eleven other songs on the record and there’s that whole “decade and a half without an album” to explain. But first, while we’re on the subject, The Arrivals have given Newcity the opportunity to share the exclusive debut of the video for “January 7th,” directed and edited by Merriman. He shares that the video is “built from images of ICE activity and the public response in Chicago and Minneapolis, captured by a photojournalist friend of ours, Dave Decker, who has been covering the political upheaval nationwide.” Decker inadvertently became part of the story when he was shot multiple times with pepper balls at the Broadview protests last September.
Merriman credits another friend of the band, Kyra Phee, for creating the “artwork for the lyric picket signs,”and he did some of that too. He tells us that the signage idea arose from “trying to put a lot of complex thoughts into a cohesive message with simple, easy-to-read stanzas.”
Check it out here:
And now, a step back in time. The Arrivals formed in 1996, at the height of what some sources call a mid-nineties “punk rock revival” in Chicago. Merriman and The Arrivals’ other guitarist and singer, Isaac Thotz, started playing together at Eisenhower High, and they soon became Fireside Bowl regulars. They self-produced their first EP, “Songs from the Cabal Headquarters,” which was released that same year, then put out “Goodbye New World” in 2000 and “Exsenator Orange” in 2003, via Thick. 2007’s “Marvels of Industry,” and their fourth album, 2010’s “Volatile Molotov,” were both released by Recess Records, a label run out of San Pedro California by former professional skateboarder and fellow punk rocker Todd Congelliere (of F.Y.P. and most recently, Toys That Kill, who just released the excellent “Triple Sabotage” album). The label’s motto is “Avoiding The Music Industry Since 1989.”
Toys That Kill and The Arrivals will be on the bill for the just announced fifth edition of Recess Romp, described as “a four-day celebration of punk, garage, and underground music” in San Pedro, between August 13 and 16.” Off With Their Heads, Alice Bag, Middle Aged Queers, Jumpstarted Plowhards and Scared of Chaka are only a few of the acts scheduled to perform. Playing host will be The Sardine, a club which was cofounded in 2019 by Congelliere and Isaac Thotz, the other frontman for The Arrivals (the two have also started a distribution arm called Recess Ops).
While all four of The Arrivals write their songs collaboratively, either Thotz or Merriman usually pen the lyrics, and the lyricist for any given song typically sings lead. While every song “sounds like The Arrivals,” Thotz’s measured (at times almost clinical) tenor on his songs can usually be distinguished from Merriman’s resigned or roaring baritone. If Isaac Thotz is a reboot of the 1982 version of Flash Gordon, then “Little Dave” Merriman is the Prince Vultan, leader of the Hawkmen.
The other two guys are no less important, though I am successfully resisting the urge to cast them in this new punk version of Flash Gordon I seem to inadvertently be developing. Drummer Ronnie Dicola is another founding member, and he’s now a veteran session drummer who also plays with Local H, Heavy Seas and You Died. Patrick “Paddy” Costello has been playing bass with The Arrivals for over twenty years. Although he’s a Minneapolis resident, Costello was friends with the band before joining, given that he co-founded Dillinger Four in 1994. Singing and playing bass in Dillinger Four (who just released their first new song in eighteen years) is one reason The Arrivals weren’t able to schedule a record-release show in Chicago that closely aligned with “Payload”’s release. But they are working on it!
Now, why have we been waiting sixteen years for “Payload?” “Little Dave” Merriman—whose dad was also a David, and who played alongside their first bassist, Dave Kaktis, who was a bigger Dave when they first started playing together in high school—says that for one thing, he was offered a career. “I didn’t have a degree,” he explains, “I dropped out of college when we started getting more serious about the band. I don’t know how serious we ever were about the band in a careerist way, honestly. It’s always been our favorite thing to do because we’ve been friends since high school and we like making music together. It really is that simple. But after the last record,” he continues, “I was offered a career that kind of stalled our touring ability.”
Merriman has been working professionally in graphic design and advertising since then. “Literally working for the man, right?” I ask.
“It’s almost literally working for the man,” he responds. “Thankfully, I don’t work on any gross clients—there’s no wool being pulled over any eyes, it’s just making things look pretty.” These are skills Merriman acquired honestly, too, designing almost all of The Arrivals T-shirts, as well as “friends’ band shirts, album covers… It was the other thing I loved doing besides music.” He recalls being especially proud of his artwork for punk band The Matics, a short-lived band from Chicago’s South Side, who Dicola also drummed for. In addition, Merrimen points to the album cover of Vacation Bible School’s “Ruined the Scene” that he modeled after Easter Island statues after being asked to show a “stone-faced crowd” at a VBS show.
Around the same time Merriman was offered the “career opportunity,” he recalls that “everybody was growing up and scattering. Our bass player [Costello] already lived in Minnesota, so regular practicing, songwriting, jams and things like that were harder to do. We started expanding our families. Isaac then moved to California. All of those things happened in the span of maybe three years after the [last] record came out, and the confluence of all of that just slowed our momentum.”
“We never said we were going to stop. We never said we were going to take a hiatus. We just didn’t have anything to do for a while.” They played some festival dates and some winter shows at Reggies, and for Metro’s anniversary in 2013; they played a show with Chicago punk legends Naked Raygun, whose musical and political influence is clear in their recordings, including on “Payload” single “Just Like My Brother.” But booking live dates is clearly a bigger priority now that “Payload” is finally coming out.
In terms of new music since 2010’s “Volatile Molotov,” Merriman points to a split seven-inch they released with Welsh punks The Arteries. “I have a song on there called ‘Finding My Station.’ It was about reconciling going into working life—trying not to bite the hand that was going to be feeding me, even though I had all these misgivings about entering a corporate lifestyle as opposed to the lifestyle I was used to.”
While drummer Dicola is still a Chicagoan (his full-time gig is HVAC work), Thotz and his wife long ago decamped to the sunnier and warmer West Coast (“He didn’t like the weather here,” Merriman says, and he “likes being outdoors a lot”). But the four of them were never really disconnected, Merriman says, even during the pandemic, and most of the songs on “Payload” had at least germinated earlier. Pre-pandemic they had actually demoed most of the songs at Million Yen Studios, although Costello wasn’t able to join them. As Merriman tells it, “Isaac came into town, and we’d always had the band chat going. We were starting to get together for more shows, and we had a Dropbox folder and a Google Drive folder where we would throw demos throughout the years—even just phone recordings. So we realized we had enough songs. We demoed them with three of us, without Paddy, just to get the ideas out and have something to start building on.”
Although the pandemic was difficult for The Sardine in San Pedro and Costello in the Twin Cities, since his full-time job is as a bartender, they never stopped exchanging ideas for “Payload,” at least virtually. “In fact,” Merriman continues,”we were just as connected as we were prior.
“We’d always been spread apart physically anyway, so all we had was the text and the phone and the computers. And Paddy’s daughter was younger—that was occupying a lot of their time, home schooling her during that era. Isaac’s kids were in middle school, early high school, maybe. They’re both in college now. We were all preoccupied during that time, and then as soon as things broke open, we played a festival at Isaac’s club and it lifted our spirits and got our juices flowing.”
By the time that travel was less restricted, Merriman says that “the music was largely there. Some of the lyrics we wrote in the studio. A lot of what we write is music first. If it has a lyric, sometimes it’s just the chorus or one line that we stick to, and we build the rest of the lyric around that.” He cites the eerie and disturbing “Sound of Bombs” as an example of a song that was almost ready to go on a record; “though I think the lyrics changed on that. Isaac had demoed that for [his other band] Treasure Fleet” and he “thought it was more of an Arrivals thing.” Merriman says his song “Motivation” started as a phone recording, and originally, “the melody was completely different.”
Merriman describes creating the songs and finally releasing “Payload” as “a bit of a slow process,” and that may be an understatement. He says now that not only did a pandemic happen, but that he welcomed a new baby into their family “in between us starting to get the songs together and making the record.”
But finally, Merriman recounts, “Pegboy asked us to play with them at Metro. In preparation for that show, Isaac called our friend Joe Gac [of Meat Wave], who we’d talked about wanting to record with when we did record again. I had recorded a few times at Electrical Audio with The Mons, another band I’m in, and loved the experience and how everything sounded. I had suggested that to them—when we finally do this, let’s do it at Electrical. So Isaac talked to Joe, and we booked three days at Electrical: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, after that show.
“So we had the show Friday night, then the weekend together to bang everything out. Paddy hadn’t even heard some of the songs prior to that—or had kind of listened through but hadn’t really had a chance to work anything out. We ended up taking Saturday off because everybody was so beat from the show. We got together Sunday and played all day going through all the new stuff and trying to get it into shape. We went on Monday and banged out almost everything in the first two days. A few guitar overdubs and vocals on the third day—bada-bing, bada-boom, everything was done.”
How is it different from their last album, released sixteen years ago? “Part of me thinks, it’s The Arrivals. It’s us. Once we get together, it’s going to be an Arrivals thing. And I do believe that. We’ve used the word ‘magic’ several times to describe when we get together and start playing. We all feel it, it’s just an amazing feeling.”
But with “Volatile Molotov,” he details, “we had honed those songs and demoed them extensively, and we did a lot of pre-production. A lot of layers, auxiliary instrumentation. The song ‘Dilemma’ has claves and egg shakers and all kinds of stuff on it. This record is almost completely the opposite in terms of production. It was very bare bones. Afterwards I added a tambourine to a couple of songs, we added some layers beyond the four main parts, but we weren’t focused on that the way we were before. It was about getting the songs to be as good as they can be with as little adornment as possible. I think that’s very different from ‘Volatile Molotov,'” Merriman argues.
And clearly the political perspective of The Arrivals hasn’t changed. I ask Merriman if they were punks who rebelled against family life and the minivan, and if so, do they feel like hypocrites?
His short answer: no. “The messages in punk rock that influenced me the most were bigger than non-conformism for its own sake. I understood it—growing up, people don’t realize that being a punk rocker meant getting messed with. People with mohawks would get bullied, cops would hassle them for no reason. There was something that needed to be done about that kind of social hegemony.”
“The Clash were a huge influence [which is clear throughout ‘Payload,’ but most obvious on Merriman’s song ‘This Is What It Feels Like’]— they [The Clash] had ‘Safe European Home,’ but they were also deeply political. Not every song we write is political, but I gravitated toward that direction, and then in hardcore as the Reagan era came in, there was a lot of great political hardcore. That’s where I think my punk perspective really came from. We had Naked Raygun and Pegboy as heroes, and the Pixies too. They seemed like regular people doing amazing things.”
In response to this philosophical question, Merriman concludes that “I feel like being a minivan parent can still be very punk rock if you’re coming at things from the right perspective, if you’re doing work to freak out squares in whatever way.” So there’s no conflict for The Arrivals.
The healthy dose of political commentary on “Payload” is not only salient, but now seems eerily prescient. That feature is not only exemplified by “January 7th” and the epic, very Clash-inspired conclusion, “The Wretched of the Earth—Guns, Germs, Steel,” but also by the record’s second single, the ironically entitled “Drill Baby Drill.” The song was originally released in 2009 on their Razorcake Sister Series 7″ split with Grabass Charlestons, but was rerecorded for “Payload.” Not only did they want a “nicely recorded version” of the song, but as Merriman says, “It’s sad, but it’s still pertinent.”
Although Merriman did a video for it when the song was originally released (“Literally the first half was just that underwater footage of plumes of oil shooting out from Deepwater Horizon,” he says now), Thotz directed and produced the new video, which might be best described as either psychically or historically appropriate, given that it debuted exactly four days before the United States attacked Iran. It’s also a great history lesson, although the history itself shouldn’t be worth repeating. The recommended re-envisioned version can be witnessed here.
It wasn’t the first time Thotz had put together a video; he made full-length movies of the last two Treasure Fleet albums, so “he already had those skills in his back pocket,” as Merriman indicates. About the new “Drill Baby Drill” video, which he calls “Tarantino-esque” he relates:
“Isaac likes going through Library of Congress footage and using rights-free, public-domain material to make videos. He’s done a few videos like that. I don’t know how much of the narrative he had ahead of time—Greenland, Iran, Venezuela being targets of operations by our government to seize their resources, it’s a tale as old as time. When I saw it for the first time, I couldn’t believe it. I was so happy that he was able to thread that needle with old footage to contextualize what the fossil fuel industry is doing in the world, and America’s colonizing, imperial reach that’s always been stretching out. I think that contextualization hit harder.”
Interestingly enough, Thotz’s son Cyric, who’s studying filmmaking in college, shot and directed the video for this album’s first single, “Just Like My Brother.” It’s an appropriately nostalgic framing, given the song’s vibe, done in a cinema verite fashion, and includes some skateboarding. This one also rates an A grade.
Merriman’s excitement at the prospect of finally releasing “Payload” is both palpable and contagious, and the album is worthy of repeated spins. The record is loaded with killer songs, so energetic that they seem to almost vibrate out of your speakers. “I kind of can’t wait. I’m very excited because I love it. I find myself listening to it a lot. At first it was throughout the mixing process and the creation, but now I throw it on in the car. We did a really good thing. I feel great about it.
“I hope that people listen to the record and it energizes them to do good things, whatever that is. I hope it inspires people to make their own things and do some good in the world. I hope this inspires somebody to make their own art, because that’s what the music that inspired me did. I guess I can’t say anything better than that.”
After talking to “Little Dave” Merriman at length and spinning the new album ad infinitum, I’ve had my own epiphany. The four wisemen in The Arrivals may not be delivering a “Payload” of frankincense and myrrh to their listeners, but this record is punk-rock gold. There are many lessons shared, but my biggest take home is this: Now is the time to wake up on “January 7th.”
“Payload” is being released by Recess Records on Friday April 17. It can be pre-ordered via Recess here. An official album release show in Chicago is to be announced.
