POPPY PATICA

Peter Hartmann has seen enough.

Born and raised in Washington, D.C. - the capital of the “free” world, home to go-go, Fugazi, Bad Brains, Dischord records, basically the whole of modern hardcore - it’s hard not to be moved (even those of us who consider ourselves too jaded to say it publicly), by the sheer amount of legacy the city’s stewed in. Then - and you should’ve been there - in the late ‘10s, after the boom-and-bust cycle of the city’s home-grown genres, a new post-hardcore indie rock scene burst like a mushroom cloud. For those around for its scores of house venues and five-band show bills, it felt a little bit like mayhem, a little bit like a renaissance.

But D.C.’s also - famously - home to a load of deeply uncreative entropy, too. Remember the 2020 election? The Capitol swarming? Remember Pizzagate? D.C.’s a strangely spiky but otherwise par-for-the-course modern city, bludgeoned like any other metropolis by the politics and poison of gentrification, the slow erasure of anything that looks like local history, and higher powers talented at displacing artists and opportunities for good art to happen. Peter Hartmann’s Poppy Patica is D.C., through and through, but it’s almost more about what happens in them, to them, and the places and people that give them meaning while they still can. It’s why Black Cat Back Stage, Hartmann’s debut LP, lives on the up-and-down swing of emotions endemic to living in a changing city. 

Hartmann met producer Owen Wuerker (Flasher, Big Hush) in 2007, in the very same high school that Fugazi and Minor Threat got their start, though it wasn’t until after Hartmann got back from Oberlin College that he’d enlist Wuerker to join him in a solo project that he’d thought to name after a particularly unforgettable poppy seed pastry he’d had in a bakery in Ohio. After a rotating cast of characters, solo national tours by bus, some one-off bands in New York and Oakland, Hartmann tapped Wuerker to join him in as part of a 2018 lineup that led to Black Cat Back Stage. 

The cast for this record  started with a house-show encounter with drummer Nikhil Rao (Bottled Up) pinballing against a re-introduction to the Courtney Love-voiced Chloe M - another friend of Peter’s from high school - and D.C. punky mainstay Jeremy Ray (Dove Lady), all of whom were down and inspired to help Hartmann see his pet project through. The album breathes with the same vitality as a live show with the four of them – it was recorded in Wuerker’s now-kind-of-legendary studio, Lurch, in the District - in its zesty, boisterous group-dynamics that summon power-pop bands like Alvvays, but too like Apples in Stereo, or even the garage-pop progressions of the Kinks. 

Take a track like “Burnt to Bits.” Slow, almost gelatinous in its open - and here Hartmann sounds a little like Lilys frontman Kurt Heasley - there’re stakes built into the song through old tricks like loads of middle-8s and power drives and last-chorus swooning, but too in how he details a city lost to the hands of power and time. “It’s not what you wanted,” he laments, “but you get what you give.” It’s a song about care: community-keeping, union-making, the specific love that comes out of creating great art with those who happen to crash into your life at the right moment. When cities fall - when they lose their luster at the hands of big corporations or sprawl - it’s a little like love falling apart. “Sometimes good people don’t get what they give,” he closes.

Animal Collective’s squelchy squeeze lives in the first single, “Awful Sound,” alongside a jangle that soars through the track with an insouciant shrug that gets close to Stephen Malkmus’ lyric power. “What’re you gonna smoke about?” he asks, twisting terms and kicking proverbial rocks as he watches his city bittersweetly change alongside him. It’s strange, sometimes: Hartmann’s work can feel so often like he’s talking about heartbreak, or injustice writ large, but the city’s his chief muse. 

There’s a bit of a garage moment with “Sweetest Song,” his second single, which roars through tons of different tempos with his usually kooky ironic slant. “It’s not a secret service,” he sings, “it’s just protecting the capital.” It feels like the track - in a funny, affecting way - is about the bizarreness of policing, how higher powers can just decide to evict and raze whole parts of his city away. It’s also not without its humility – there’s plenty in “Sweetest Song” (and the album overall) that’s aware of the friction between being viewed as an outsider or gentrifier from longtime residents in his hometown. Importantly, there’s nothing didactic about his work, nor does it fall on its own sword. 

A uniquely key thing about Black Cat Back Stage is that there’s a sort of universality to it. Maybe it’s because we’re all familiar with loss, whether or not we grew up in cities – or maybe it’s because we all understand that the structures that undergird us can just give way sometimes. It’s why there’s a sort of protean quality to the songs and the band itself – Hartmann calls the band “amorphous,” and puts together new versions of Poppy Patica whether he’s in New York, Oakland, D.C., or wherever he might be on a tour stop. The slinky, bashy “Kiwi,” for instance, is recorded by Ross Farbe from New Orleans’ Video Age – out of a chance encounter that turned into a firm musical friendship. This is the serendipity that Poppy’s made of. 

The band performed on the very last live show at the Black Cat Backstage - a now-defunct D.C. venue - on December 27th, 2018, a few days before the space shuttered for good. Hartmann grew up seeing all-ages shows in the Black Cat’s main and Backstage space, Xs marking his hands when he first performed there as a high-schooler in 2008. Hartmann’s stuff has a sideways approach to nostalgia, filled with the longing that only time’s good at making sense of.  More like a mini-opera than it is an album, Black Cat Back Stage, is a paean to looking backward, and what we’ve got to hold onto while we can.