Not many bands take their name from the wacky world of statistics, but Amherst’s Missing Data is one of the few and the proud.
“I was using the social science statistics program STATA a lot in my first year of grad school,” explains drummer Donny Lessard. “When someone does not answer a question in the general social survey, their response becomes ‘missing data’ and is represented by this little dot. Social scientists sometimes drop these people from their data sets—take them out entirely. It really sort of spoke to my own critiques of the alienation of quantitative ways of knowing about people’s lives.”
“It kind of reminds me of Enron and the Bush Administration, for no good reason,” adds guitarist and singer J.M. Christmas.
The band—Lessard, Christmas and bassist Greg Niermeyer—has been together in various incarnations and under various names for half a decade, originating in the Lowell area in 2005. The current lineup has been together for the last two, when longtime friends Christmas and Niermeyer nabbed recent Minnesota transplant Lessard via Craigslist.
What ultimately spurred the group’s formation?
“I think we can all agree that the world needs another marginal punk band,” quips Christmas.
The three members bring their own unique influences to the group. Lessard cites NASCAR re-runs, Lifetime TV movies, Haribo gummi bears, too much coffee and drunk college kids on the bus on Friday night, while Niermeyer mentions artists like Talking Heads, Muse, Rush and The Jimi Hendrix Experience.
Christmas says he’s inspired by bands like The Jesus Lizard, Shellac, Sonic Youth, The Beatles, Mission of Burma, Black Flag, At the Drive-In, Drive Like Jehu, Sleater-Kinney—”anything that’s written in an eclectic way, in the spirit of a punk kind of ethos.”
“I would personally say that I’m not necessarily influenced by specific sounds of a band, but general philosophies of songwriting,” he adds. “The Beatles were totally unafraid to go anywhere musically, so I would say their influence is less a specific one in terms of playing style, but a more general one in terms of a philosophy of creativity.”
In terms of songwriting, Christmas says he usually brings half-finished ideas to practice, which the gang then fleshes out together with everyone writing his own parts. Less frequently, they write through jamming, but that’s a rarer occurrence mainly due to time constraints.
When asked for a genre for his band’s music, Christmas dubs it “datacore.”
“I am being slightly facetious,” he says, “but what I mean by that is that we’re just trying our best to make music that’s distinctive, and we don’t necessarily want to fit in one particular genre. That’s not to say I think we’re some god-like original gift from the heavens. I think philosophically, we approach music in terms of doing something we like, and that’s the primary motivation.”
Missing Data’s current mission is to keep playing shows and recording. The trio has a slew of unrecorded songs it plans on finishing up and recording this spring at Williamsburg’s Black Coffee Sound. The band’s recent demo, also recorded at Black Coffee, is available on its Myspace page. Christmas says CD-R copies are available “for free to anyone who wants one.”
For songs, shows and more information, visit www.myspace.com/missingdata.
