From the Quad City Times -- October 23, 2002

MEET THE METROLITES: Former Kabalas, friends band together for new sound

By David Burke

Leave it to two former members of The Kabalas to create a band playing a sound that's beyond eclectic.

Xylophone player Scott Morschhauser and sax-violinist "Nervous Neal" Smith called in bandmates from various other groups, threw the styles in a blender and came up with The Metrolites, which makes its debut tonight at the Blackthorn Pub in Rock Island.

"We were kicking around the idea of putting something different together again," Morschhauser said. "The Kabalas was really different around here, and we tried to find that again. We knew we had the right people around us, fun people we could work with well, and this was kind of a supergroup of different people from different areas."

Drummer Josh Duffee worked with both Morschhauser and Smith in The Anachronistics (a band playing 1920s-'30s era jazz) and Duffee's eponymous orchestra. Lead guitarist Kathleen Gallagher plays with Morschhauser in the folk-punk band Catseye. And bass player Elaine Morschhauser began punk band The Scary Tweezers with her ex-husband.

The finished product of The Metrolites comes from several months of rehearsal, and combining sounds. A sample CD provided by the band includes a medley of Leonard Cohen's "Everybody Knows" segueing into Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall," then the instrumental "One Step Beyond."

"There was sort of a surf-spy-jazz-noir-lounge thing," Scott Morschhauser said. "The Kabalas kind of touched on that, but when we first started, we started looking at these kinds of songs. This band is what would have happened if we had gone down that other path.

"It works even in rock venues, because there's that kind of intensity there, but it's sometimes slow and soft. It's like the evil band in ‘Twin Peaks,' where there was a roadhouse, a tough bar, with a disjointed band in the background. That's what we are."

The Metrolites, Elaine Morschhauser said, capitalizes on "Neal's penchant for scouting every thrift store in town, and just finding weird records, and wanting to play the songs or writing the songs in that idiom."

Even though the music is different from the Kabalas — which combined polka, Jewish klezmer and punk music into a unique sound that ran from 1994-99 — the spirit is still there.

"The idea of The Kabalas was, let's take these different types of music and go into rock ‘n' roll clubs and play them. As if it were normal, as if it shouldn't be questioned that we're doing this," Smith said. "That's the approach with this."

Another way The Metrolites are zigging while other bands are zagging is its decision to be rather subdued in its volume.

"I think we're going to be the rebellious band," Gallagher said. "The one band in the area that doesn't play really, really loud."

Smith said he and other members of The Metrolites are looking to playing with the band as a refuge.

"I was looking for something out of the norm, because the norm is very norm. I don't like to eat toast for breakfast every morning, either," he said. "There's a lot of music I like, and every once in a while I'd approach a band and want to play something different. It doesn't go over. (It was like) ‘Nah, let's do ‘Mustang Sally.'"

Members of The Metrolites have written music that serves as a companion to the established songs they already cover in their style.

"We've got an album's worth of material already," Morschhauser said. "With some of you look at it and think, ‘These tunes don't belong together,' and then when it ends up, it all does."

After its debut tonight, the group is set for a first-Saturday-of-the-month standing date there, as well as future gigs at Reflections in Clinton, Iowa; and the Copia martini bar in Rock Island during Pub Crawl.

Members of The Metrolites say they're not worried about how well the new band might go over.

"It doesn't bother me, because we're going to play it anyway. It's not being represented around here," Morschhauser said. "With The Kabalas, I don't think there were all these people who were really into an alternative form of klezmer and polka in town. It was like, oh, god, something different."

David Burke can be contacted at  (563) 383-2400 or dburke@qctimes.com.


if you go

The Metrolites

When: 8:30 p.m. today

Where: Blackthorn Pub & Eatery, 425 15th St., Moline

How much: $3