POWETAKEOFF

POWERTAKEOFF: THE LOUDEST BAND IN THE WORLD
By Brandon Lunsford

For the last two years, I have trekked up to Minnesota in late May to see the best music festival around. It’s called Caterwaul, and it’s not easy on the eardrums. The organizers would bristle if you called it a “noise rock festival”, although they freely admit on their website that many of the bands are noisy, and that they “definitely rock.” I have always been drawn to the catharsis of noise, and I like it as loud as possible. I’ve seen some of my favorite bands in the genre at Caterwaul, including Oxbow, Brainiac, Thrones, Part Chimp, Big’N, Buildings. I travel up to the Upper Midwest to see bands like this, but I also go because it’s the only chance I ever get to see my friend Gus Engstrom’s band powertakeOff. For the second consecutive year, the loudest band of all in a festival full of them was this three-piece from Concord, North Carolina. There are some seasoned veterans of listening to this kind of music at Caterwaul, and I watched many of them grope for their ear plugs or simply flee when ptO’s wall of sound commenced. Both years the bands played outside in residential neighborhoods, and people probably thought they were under siege from an invading army.

It’s really hard to describe what kind of music powertakeOff makes, and Gus likes it that way. They aren’t really “noise rock,” but they make a lot of noise. They aren’t metal or punk, but they draw a lot of inspiration and ethos from that world. They aren’t necessarily drone or doom or sludge, but they certainly utilize that crushing repetition and downtuned heaviness. Above all else, they are just LOUD. They are the loudest band I’ve ever seen live, and I’ve seen Swans at Tremont! The band has gone through myriad lineups, and the Caterwaul version of the band is the loudest one of all. Gus is the core member on bass, and Trevere Thomas (formerly of Hex Machine and currently playing in Today is the Day) is on guitar. The group is rounded out by drummer Travis Kuhlman of the aforementioned Buildings, whose brutally slow drumming is perfectly syncopated with the swirling noise. The deafening churn of Engstrom’s bass rumbles over everything in a repetitious roar, while the squalling feedback blistering from Thomas’ guitar is almost as loud. It is amazing to watch these guys prepare for their set, arranging various pedals and wires for maximum intensity. They have a fair amount of amplifiers, but they don’t come with a mountain of them. In fact this year they used the ones that were on the stage when they got there. “We just turned them up a lot,” Gus told me. For the second straight year, I spent this time grinning maniacally, because I not only knew what was coming, but I knew that no one else really did. There were all kinds of different bands at Caterwaul both years, but none of them sounded anything like powertakeOff.

I first saw ptO at the Milestone many years ago, but it is a rare sight indeed to see them now. Those consecutive Caterwaul appearances are the only two shows the band has performed in the last seven years, and it’s not certain when they will play again. Distance makes it a challenge, as Thomas is in Richmond, Kuhlman resides in Minneapolis, and Engstrom is here in Concord. The bigger challenge, however, is that Gus is emerging from a period of seclusion and slowly reinventing himself, much as powerTake-off is. His life and his music have always been defined by grief, pain, and loss, but the last couple of years since he brought ptO back have been unforgiving. “This past year, I put out three powertakeOff records, and it all came out of death and misery and despair and all of that,” Gus tells me. “It follows you around a little bit, and I’m ready to put that baggage down and move on. But I don’t think it’ll change the way I feel. I’m just tired of everywhere I turn, it’s like people are dying.”

The losses started coming in 2009 when his father Terry died. Terry Engstrom had worked for Pizza Hut since the 1960’s, and the family moved from Junction City, Kansas to Concord in 1979 so that he could run some franchises here. Gus later went back to Kansas for college, but he eventually returned to North Carolina to be close to his family. He saw tons of great shows in both places in the 1990s, and he’s probably seen most every band that I love in an intimate setting somewhere. This was a very different time in musical history; Nirvana had opened the door for major labels to sign lots of weird and noisy bands, and kids like me who grew up on Van Halen and Def Leppard suddenly had our eyes opened to underground rock music. A lot of these bands came from the Midwest or the Pacific Northwest in cities like Minneapolis and Seattle, places with cold or rainy weather and wide open spaces and not much to do but learn to get drunk or play guitar (or both). PowertakeOff feels like a weird loud band from Kansas more than it feels like a North Carolina band, or more specifically a Charlotte band.

Charlotte has never really been a magnet for weird music or weird people, although there was a time when these young noisy bands came through here. Clubs like the Milestone, 1313, the Park Elevator, and the Pterodactyl saw some incredible lineups in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, and even when I came to Charlotte in 1996 we had places like Tremont Music Hall and Fat City to see weird bands play. You might assume underground bands full of the rebellious sons and daughters of buttoned up banking executives might pop up everywhere, but Charlotte never grew its own scene of music like that. The most obvious exceptions are legendary sludge band Buzzov-en and punk icons Antiseen, but for the most part the city didn’t birth the same kind of bands and music labels that others did in the 1990’s. Outside of the Milestone, the rest of those aforementioned venues are all long gone, and there aren’t many places to nurture local weirdos or attract tours featuring this kind of music.

Gus had seen some amazing bands, but he was never actually in one until the mid-2000s when he was in his early thirties. “I didn’t think I could do it,” he said. “And then I finally got tired of being on the sidelines and decided, well maybe I can do this.” His first outfit in Charlotte was Horse Thief, where he played guitar alongside Mike Earle on bass and vocals and Scott Wishart on drums. They played shows all over town but never managed to get anything recorded, and the band soon fizzled. After his father died in 2009, Gus was grieving when he was approached by Rob Davis, vocalist and guitarist for local noise band Grids, to play bass. Gus had only played guitar before, so this was new territory; it turned out to be the instrument he was made for. Grids had already put out a couple of EPs that year, but the grueling and pummeling bass he added to the mix really enhanced their sound. The 2010 album Kansas, named after Gus’ home state, is a masterpiece and one of the better records to come out of Charlotte in recent years. The band broke up right after it came out but in this album, especially the brutal final track “Drilling” and its nasty rumbling groove, Gus had found a blueprint for what would become powertakeOff.

What does the name mean, you ask? A power take-off is a method for taking power from a source, such as a running engine, and transmitting it to an application such as an attached implement. It is most commonly a splined drive shaft installed on a tractor or a truck, and it can be pretty dangerous. On the cover of the Cacophony record that ptO put out last year, there was an old pocket knife with a saw-blade on the other end. “That knife belonged to my grandfather,” Gus tells me. “My mother told me that he kept it around in case he ever had to free himself from a power take-off on a piece of equipment, he could cut his wrist off, he could cut his elbow off, or he could cut his arm off.”

Farm machinery and heavy equipment has always been one of the inspirations for Gus, which hummed all around him when he was a kid in Kansas being around his grandfather. Honestly, powertakeOff kind of sounds like something you might find blaring away in the corner of a barn so loudly that you have to yell to hear yourself over it. Gus admits that it leaves a lot of people feeling completely unsettled, which is by design. He mentions some of his biggest influences, one of which is Gluey Porch Treatments-era Melvins. That makes a lot of sense, as the trio from Washington state basically invented the genre of slow, heavy, and repetitive in the mid 1980’s. Dirgy, sludgy, whatever you want to call it; it originates from Black Sabbath melded with the second side of Black Flag’s My War, which the Melvins blended to inspire Kurt Cobain and tons of other musicians to this day. Gus also mentions Slint’s 1991 album Spiderland as a major influence, which surprised me more. It is a brooding and sinister and often beautiful record that many credit with inventing post-rock, but I never thought of it necessarily as heavy. PowertakeOff is more about creating an atmosphere than just being loud though, and that album definitely creates an atmosphere.

Rainer Fronz had founded the independent Learning Curve Records in Minneapolis in 2000, and he loved the Kansas album. He told Gus that if he ever had anything else to put out to let him know, and that resulted in the first powertakeOff track “Plow Share”, which ended up on the Butcher’s Waltz split with Seawhores, Gay Witch Abortion, and Skoal Kodiak in 2011. Gus has remained close to the Minnesota label ever since, and his band was a natural fit when Fronz helped create Caterwaul in 2022. The first incarnation of the band that recorded “Plow Share” was Gus on bass, guitar, and vocals and Rick Contes, a bandmate from Grids and a member of Young and In The Way, on drums. Gus’ vocals are more like hearing someone lecture you in a sneering tone than “singing,” and they fit perfectly over the pouding tempo he creates. More members would eventually cycle through the band over time. Adam Marx on guitar and Matt Culler on drums joined to record the first full-length powertakeOff album, This is Late, released in 2014 on Learning Curve with former Harvey Milk drummer Kyle Spence producing. My City Magazine did a profile of Gus that year, and it seemed like the band was on its way up.

Gus wrote and recorded that music while going through another family tragedy, however; his sister Tara was dying of terminal cancer. “The record came out while my sister was in the hospital dying. So that record, all these records, have been shrouded in a lot of bad, negative shit. It’s heavy and fucking weird and repetitive.” At this point it started to seem like his life was getting heavy and weird and repetitive. After playing some shows around town (including the one where I first encountered them at the Milestone) and recording a split single with Multicult in 2016, the band went into hiatus. Gus settled into a caretaker role for his mother Sandy Engstrom, and he wasn’t thinking as much about the future of powertakeOff.

The next phase of ptO would be kicked off by the person who wrote that article in 2014, Kathleen Johnson. Kathleen had been a music writer in Charlotte for years, and had gotten the urge to make some music herself. She decided that the band she wanted to join was powertakeOff. Gus had first met Kathleen when he was in high school at the Milestone, and back then she was the beat writer for the Charlotte Observer and was known as Ken Johnson. Ken had since transitioned to Kathleen, and she was known as one of the champions of independent music in the city. “I owe a lot to her,” Gus says. “She started in on me during COVID about wanting to hang out and do stuff, which turned into jamming, which turned into recording. She bugged the shit out of me before I started wanting to make music again.” With Kathleen on guitar and other contributors like Wishart and Stanley, the band recorded Cacophony with Scott Slagle and Spence in 2023. The album is full of covers of bands that influenced Gus like Black Flag and Drunks With Guns, but rendered in the powertakeOff style. It ends with a particularly haunting track called “TIWNKM,” which features Gus and Kathleen repeatedly stating “Today I Will Not Kill Myself” until their voices began to merge and swirl all around your ears. The intention was to make it sound like your inner mind was taking over to convince you, and it works. Unfortunately it also proved devastatingly prophetic, and Gus found his path once again shrouded in tragedy.

Kathleen Johnson took her own life in May of 2023, and Charlotte lost an incredible writer and music lover. “She didn’t understand the world,” Gus reflects. “The world was, unfortunately at that time, kind of becoming weird.. She didn’t know where her place was….I don’t think she felt comfortable in her own skin.” Gus felt he owed it to her to finish the Cacophony record, and it came out in 2024 on Reptilian Records. That was the beginning of a prolific recording period for powertakeOff, with Cacophony followed in short order by the WILL EP and the Bethany single. The end of a long hibernation of 5 years from playing live music came that year at Caterwaul, and the band recorded and released their set later as Live in Minneapolis. The band seemed to have finally unlocked its ultimate potential for aural assault with the lineup of Thomas and Kuhlman, and Gus seemed like he was back in the saddle. Then came the heaviest blow of all; his mother Sandy passed away in January of this year.

This loss seemed to bring back the others in his life, and it all seemed to wash over him at once. Gus was very close to his mother, and she always supported his music. “I’m not sure how my Dad felt about it, I’m not really sure he cared for it,” he says. “But my mom took us to see Iron Maiden for the Powerslave tour at the Coliseum on Independence when I was a kid. I don’t think at that point I’d ever been to an arena show before. I mean, I had the last 10 years with my mom… I guess when it was time to let her go, I wasn’t ready to let her go. And that’s a hard lesson, I think, for anybody.” Since he had cared for his mother for the last decade and it seemed to have become his purpose, he wasn’t sure what to do anymore. What would the next phase of his life be? Would he ever outrun all these grim losses of people he cared about?

The grief has lessened a bit over the weeks, and the powertakeOff show at Caterwaul was a great release for Gus. It seemed almost louder and more intense than the year before, and I wasn’t sure that was possible. “Now it’s like trying to find it back like, who am I now, right? And, you know, sky’s the limit as far as that kind of stuff… I can pretty much do anything,” he tells me. There are plenty of great new ptO records to listen to, but hopefully the future will bring the chance for more people to see them live. I have been fortunate enough to see the only two powertakeOff shows in the last seven years, but I may have been the only one from Charlotte to have seen them both. The hope is that Kuhlman and Thomas can come down for a round of shows at some point, but it’s not the first priority. Gus used to want to get in front of as many people as he could, but now he would rather not just play to anyone; he wants it to be something special. Even though powertakeOff might not get back to the stage in Charlotte soon, Terminally Agitated just might. This is Gus’ new solo persona, and he’s trying to get a show scheduled in the near future. It won’t be ptO, but he promises it will be just as loud (maybe even louder he says, of which I still doubt the possibility).

The question is, will people in Charlotte be there to see it? I bring up the fact that there really aren’t any weird loud bands around here at the moment, and not just around here but anywhere. Were the 90’s and 2000’s the peak of the bands that weren’t afraid to be unsettling, that didn’t sound like everything else? Gus quickly responds, “Well this is the bullshit answer but, there ain’t no money or popularity in it. There were some actual attractive girls at our shows at Caterwaul, which was the first time we probably ever played in front of people that were like, attractive and actually not knuckle draggers or weirdos. But normally, that’s the kind of stuff that you get at this. There isn’t a scene for that here, and, you know, we’re all used to playing to nobody and clearing the room if there is somebody. All these younger bands, everybody’s trying to be popular. I mean, you go to any of these bars here on any given night, and that’s what they’re trying to do, is be popular…. I want to be, like, reluctantly popular, you know?”

Whenever those kinds of bands do occasionally come through Charlotte, it seems like no one turns out to see them, which lessens the possibility that they ever come through again. Outside of Snug Harbor and the Milestone there doesn’t seem to be any venues left to even book outsider bands. Gus says “it’s just different now, you know, and the scene’s different, and I’m 53 years old. We alway complain about shows never coming through Charlotte, but the people that would come out are old, like me. They’re like, well, I’ve gotta get up early in the morning.”

If any of you young kids or jaded old punks do feel like coming out to a show in Charlotte and seeing a band that doesn’t sound like anyone else, or if you just feel like getting your ears blown out, consider coming out to see powertakeOff or Terminally Agitated if you find them on a bill. Everyone in Charlotte should be doing their part to make sure that Gus Engstrom becomes as reluctantly popular as he wants to be.

You can find ptO in digital and analog format here:
https://power-take-off.bandcamp.com/
https://reptilianrecords.bandcamp.com/album/cacophony
https://learningcurverecords.bandcamp.com/album/this-is-late
https://learningcurverecords.bandcamp.com/album/multicult-power-take-off-split-7

Photo credit to: Diana Kolb, Kelley Marie Young & Nick Sakes

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