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Article published May 4, 2007 Crabs Are Scavengers: No lice, just rock
By Steve Wildsmith of The Daily Times Staff
A few clarifications about Knoxville rock band Crabs Are Scavengers:
— The band's name does not have anything to do with body lice.
— Guitarist and vocalist Sean McDougle would rather you not associate the group with the crustacean with whom the band shares part of its name. No crab pictures, no crab posters, no crab claws, no trying to book them at your local Red Lobster.
"People all the time seem to want to relate us to those things, but that's not really what we're going for," McDougle told The Daily Times this week. The name is memorable because of the crab part, and it might help our promotion, but some people hear the name and don't seem to want to take us seriously. We picked it because I'm an English major at UT, so I'm really into literature and poetry and all of that.
"It's a mild derivative of a small section in the T.S. Eliot poem 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.' I kept thinking of that while I was going over that poem, and I really liked it. A lot of bands have blood or death in their name, and I look at it as us cleaning up after them, so it fits."
With a new album released in March ("Apple Tree Thief," recorded at Burning Tree Studio in Knoxville), the band has heightened its exposure in the local music scene. With a quirky approach to typical pop-rock, the band has crafted an album that sparkles with professional polish and belies the age of its members — 18, 19 and 20. All four members went to Halls High School (McDougle and bassist Chris Watson graduated in 2005, drummer Jacob Ducote in 2006 and guitarist Jeremy Melton this year) and grew up following local bands like Joey's Loss (which morphed into The Hotshot Freight Train, the band with whom Crabs Are Scavengers shares a bill Saturday at Old City Java).
"Chris and I have been good friends since early on in high school, and we used to play in a band called Almost Yesterday," McDougle said. "When we sort of diffused, we both wanted to still play music, so we got in touch with Jacob and Jeremy. We knew they could play, but we had no clue about what level at which they could play their instruments. I had some songs written, and I invited them over to my house to jam. They really liked the music, and it sort of played itself out from there."
A gig at a church in Halls led to another at Fountain City Park. The band was well-received, and shortly thereafter, Crabs Are Scavengers found themselves on bills at Old City Java with bands they consider to be influential.
"To turn around and have the guys in a band like The Hotshot Freight Train, who we've looked up to since they were in Joey's Loss, complimenting our CD and saying it sounds great and truly meaning it — that made us think that we've got something here, like it's worth doing," McDougle said.
There's an off-kilter delivery to McDougle's vocals, delivered in a quavery, pleading monotone that sounds like a cross between the Violent Femmes and a spoken-word poet. With shifting time signatures and guitar work that treads lightly as far as solos and hooks go, it's a pulsing, shimmering mass of rock 'n' roll goo best consumed without asking too many questions. Like an exotic dish that tastes a lot more palatable than it looks on the surface, "Apple Tree Thief" goes down smoothly and flavorful, even if you're left with an indescribable aftertaste that has you scratching your head, wondering what it is, exactly, you just consumed.
"I think we're definitely influenced by quite a bit of other local bands, because we grew up going to local shows and hearing them," McDougle said. "I guess we just wanted to do something using our talents, pulling off different styles of music we listen to and doing something different. We don't claim we're anything original, but I don't think we sound like everything else out there."