Get down with the Panther sound

For all the talk about a global culture waiting to be born from the “Internet age,” the American pop zeitgeist has remained stubbornly insular, looking to its own artistic past for guidance rather than utilizing unprecedented access to foreign cultures as a stepping stone toward global artistry.

While this cultural cannibalism has certainly produced its fair share of self-referential insight, it has also meant that true innovation is a scarce commodity in popular mediums. In rebuttal to such insularism, Charlie Salas-Humara’s band, Panther, has developed a genre-spanning sound, which offers fearless rebuke to the notion that artistic idioms are separate or incompatible.

Calling on an upbringing split between the Latin dance music of Puerto Rico and the abrasive punk rock of the United States, Panther has managed to borrow the best of both musical traditions and create a fusion of elements both seamless and exciting in their duplicity.

“I have been obsessed with Cuban music ever since I was little,” Salas-Humara said. “I also lived in Puerto Rico when I was young as well. I really wanted to incorporate those sounds which I heard as a child … with punk.”

Songs such as “Puerto Rican Jukebox,” from the band’s forthcoming 14kt God LP, deal in a split of syncopated energy that would not be out of place coming from the speakers of a ghetto blaster or a night club sound system. The dance-inducing energy contained in Panther’s songs revels in this duality, mining it for a continuing succession of head-scratching sonic spasms that are the culmination of several musicians’ lifetimes of artistic experimentation.

Salas-Humara began working full time on Panther after the dissolution of his previous band, the oft-missed The Planet The.

“After [The Planet The] broke up, I was looking for other projects to fill my time,” Salas-Humara said. “When I started to get serious about Panther, that’s when I really focused on touring and recording all the time. It seemed like a good project to get into because I have allowed it to be immutable.”

Feeling he was “burnt out on noodling” after the demise of his prog-rock project, Salas-Humara decided Panther would be an experiment in minimalism, and set out on his own to give life to the dissonant rave that played in his head. This solo version of Panther soon took to fervent live performance, affording Salas-Humara live reviews such as “this man is the best fucking band I have ever heard” (Portland Mercury). Despite the success of this one-man-band approach, Salas-Humara was nonetheless compelled to soon double Panther’s membership.

“It became really tiresome playing by myself as well as listening to pre-recorded drums,” Salas-Humara said. “I was interested in bringing an organic vibe to the band.”

This organic vibe came in the form of Joe Kelly, who took up many of Panther’s percussive duties and added to what was becoming widely recognized as a jaw-dropping live act. Originally forgoing complicated production and arrangements, Salas-Humara and Kelly relied on their outlandish energy to drive songs. Minimalism mixed with relentless exuberance has become Panther’s patented franchise, and they’ve spent a good part of this decade perfecting that mix. The two are now in the process of pushing their sound in new directions as they add fuel to their relentless creative momentum.

Excepting a canceled European tour this past fall, Panther has been either on the road or in the studio for a hefty chunk of the past two years, and the results are apparent in their tighter performances and expanded musical aesthetic. Their album 14kt God, due out Feb. 19 on the Kill Rock Stars imprint, shows a band with a fully developed sound that is at last ready to expand on its well-established framework.

“This time I tried to layer a ton of guitars trying to get the ultimate amount of syncopation without it sounding overbearing,” Salas-Humara said. “I was also into layering tons of cellos … and delay, lots of delay.”

By adding instrumental weight to the angular skeletons of their songs, Panther has created an album that sounds more like the product of a band and less like the abrasive attack of a couple of skewed sonic entrepreneurs. With plans on the horizon to add more members and a possible horn section, Panther looks set to continue along the lines of expansion.

Both their lyrics and arrangements on 14kt God have pushed Panther closer to a global idea of pop.

With songs such as “Violence Diamonds” and “Glamorous War,” they strive toward artistic acknowledgment of the events that surround, but rarely penetrate, our entertainment culture. This creative coup is carried out at such a harried pace that it is never explicitly stated but rather underscores Panther’s genre-melding calisthenics. The most interesting aspect of the band’s music is its inability to fit neatly into any presupposed cultural space. It is a fortunate sign for all of us that this aversion to category is proving to be Panther’s most powerful uniting aspect.