Despite the only tolerable weather this August awaiting us outside, we’re in Chris Wardlaw’s basement, avoiding the remaining summer heat for a history lesson.
“This is next level,” Chris declares as he holds up a Warbox demo tape before going into 20 other area hardcore bands worth noting. Crates of Worms, his band’s self-titled LP, prop up a teetering wall of tapes, CDs and 8-tracks as he zips from corner to corner, adding to the growing pile of music on his ironing board. The collection spans two generations of Wardlaws, both obsessed with documenting the Western Mass DIY scene ever since Chris’s dad was high school classmates with J Mascis. It’s Chris’s last day in Amherst before heading north to finish college, so the essential records he’s laid out from his days in the 413 (with some curation from his father) are as much a eulogy to his formative years as they are an education for me.
Between throwing on his favorite Neutral Fixation song and an “absolutely twisted” early track from his best friends in Taxidermists, a glossy flyer for Taylor Swift’s 1989 ends up on the floor. The pop star’s face is beaming on top of a 1.6 Band CD, encouraging a meet and greet opportunity long since passed. I hold it up, a lone piece of mainstream in a sea of DIY bands come and gone, and, to my surprise, an unabashed grin forms on Wardlaw’s face. “Oh yeah, that album is fire. Had to get the deluxe edition at Target!” He seamlessly changes course and throws on one of the most blistering no wave bands I’ve ever heard while reminiscing on a local musician who played while “chewing an entire fuckin’ pack of Big League Chew.”
To say Wardlaw doesn’t shy away from poptimism or his esoteric mental catalog of bands would be a massive understatement, but it’s easy to sense after an afternoon with members of the Dark World collective that you’d have to be a little fearless to join their ranks.
After roughly five years, Dark World boasts a roster sandwiching noise rock bands alongside internet cultured rappers, leaving the grey area between genres to be filled with autotuned vocal experimentation, left-of-center slacker rock anthems and a love for VHS-recorded nostalgia. Upon its inception, Dark World originator and producer Lucas Kendall couldn’t have imagined any scene accepting their genre-crossing tastes, even one as open minded as Amherst’s.
“For a while, I was doing punk stuff always,” Kendall admitted in a phone interview. “I was like, ‘this is my field, I’m a white kid in Western Mass, playing punk is what you do.’” Kendall was years away from starting Worms with his younger brother Dana and Wardlaw when his catalyst to become a producer came. “Around sixth or seventh grade, I got really into Lil’ Wayne, Clipse, and a lot of early 2000’s hip hop. I felt more comfortable in myself and more comfortable seeing other people experimenting with different genres after that.”
- Morimoto (right) and Kendall (left)
Two of Kendall’s earliest partners were Dana, who aided in drums and production, and Sen Morimoto, a classmate with the same level of ambition to juggle rapping and playing in bands. “Dark World became a collective very quickly [after we met],” Morimoto recalled. “We pretty much immediately had each other’s back on shit and took all of the music very seriously. Even when we made stupid music, we all supported each other.” For Kendall though, Dark World’s inception came with the renewed interest in rap collectives around the late 2000’s. “Letter Racer in New York were big for us. Odd Future, for me, was like, ‘oh, kids are making their own music and videos and it’s not in the corporate way of doing things,” Kendall added. “We’d been doing that since sixth or seventh grade, but after both of them, we were like, ‘fuck, we need to put a name to our thing!’”
After a Yu Gi Oh!-referencing name stuck and their initial fear of treading into hip hop faded, the Dark World crew began amassing like-minded friends at a rapid fire pace. Adding to their appeal was the decision to include noise projects, poetry, and punk bands under the collective’s umbrella, which brought Wardlaw and his Pale Horses solo project into the fold. “I met Lucas and Dana my sophomore year of high school. When we had our first Whirl practice, we wrote “Throw Up” and “Red Balloons’,” Wardlaw recalled. “After that, I was like, ‘well shit, let’s fucking go.”
After a minor lawsuit forced them to cease using the name Whirl, the newly minted Worms went on a string of strong early shows, including opening spots for Titus Andronicus, Man Man, and Screaming Females. “Before we could do anything, before we had the resources to tour, we got all these fire gigs,” Wardlaw added. “The crazy part was that none of us were even legal yet.”
Our afternoon in Chris’s basement happens to be the precursor to the evening’s five year anniversary show for Worms, which also acts as the band’s last show in the area for the foreseeable future. He assures me that tonight wouldn’t be the end of Worms, although shows become incredibly scarce while he and Dana finish their studies. Wardlaw clicks into full promoter mode as we drive into town, hustling around Amherst to post MS Paint-inspired flyers on every bench and shopfront.
Between stops at his favorite high school hacky sack spot (in front of a Chinese restaurant), best pizza place in town (Antonio’s), and the park where Wardlaw’s first date and Salvia trip occurred (not simultaneously), we find Dark World rapper Eric the Ratt outside Mystery Train Records looking to bum a rollie. With a mane of curly hair and a hemp sweatshirt loosely hanging off his shoulder, Eric is pretty much how I imagined every twenty-something in Northampton looking like, but his sincerity is immediately disarming. As we scan the record racks at Mystery Train, Eric and I begin talking about the collective. He offers a few words regarding his teen years and young 20s with Dark World, but as we get to know each other at the show later, he opens up. “Dark World saved my life, man,” he states without hesitation. It could’ve sounded laconic coming from anyone else and he never elaborates further, but there’s no doubt in my mind he absolutely means it.