Lazy Sundays

It’s a gray Sunday afternoon at the Florida Room, and none of my stock questions are generating anything substantial from The Whines. By 2 p.m. the band is already knee-deep into an early bender and things aren’t going so hot as far as engaging in conversation.

I decide to start with the basics, questions about musical influences and such.

“The guy that played with Marc Bolan, the hand drummer,” answers Jesse Gandy, the band’s guitar player. “I don’t know what his name is, but that guy for sure. And Danny Whitten. I’ve never heard any of his solo stuff, but I’m totally inspired by the idea of him.”

Sensing their evasive attitude toward these questions, I turn instead to a different approach, letting the conversation go where it may in the hopes of revealing more profound aspects of the band’s creative process.

Their self-titled 7″ turns out to be a good topic of conversation. It was recently released on Just For the Hell of it, a new micro-label inspired by the 1968 movie of the same name.

“It’s just about rabble-rousers,” Gandy says of the film, “people that think they’re teenagers; romping around and destroying things, defecating in the open.”

This conscious lack of self-control proves to be a good segue to the group’s description of their infectious garage pop debut. To hear The Whines tell it, their entire existence is informed by this ethos as it directs everything from their live show to bassist/lead singer Karianne Oudman’s description of their recording process.

“Recording is tedious and drunk,” he says.

Fair enough. The record’s best song, “Insane OK,” is a long, chunky piece of old-fashioned rock ‘n’ roll. It’s got a lackadaisical quality that sounds like The Velvet Underground on a really bad day (that’s meant, of course, as a really good thing), and Oudman’s mantra, “people are insane,” has a way of staying in one’s head until it makes more sense than it probably should.

Such a piece of recorded music must require an intense artistic effort.

“‘Insane OK’ was [recorded with] a mic in the middle of the room, like a fake SM58 or something,” Elam admits. “Somehow it turned out.”

What they were getting at, whether they meant to or not, was the futility of searching for something contextually relevant in music that clearly speaks for itself.

So again the conversation drifts back to its inherent whimsy. We discuss lesbian literature (“Dylan Thomas said Nightwood was one of the three most important pieces of prose written by a woman”), speak briefly about John Travolta in Urban Cowboy (“It’s like The Lord of the Rings of cowboy movies”) and damned if Two Girls, One Cup wasn’t mentioned, if only in passing.

The Whines are somewhat schizophrenic in their conversation but they clearly know what they want, and this lack of self-censorship helps inform their music. It’s something that is spontaneous, unrestrained and slapped together in the best of ways.

In short, it’s exactly what you’d expect from a group of people embarking on a Sunday afternoon bender: unpredictability and undeniable entertainment.