From Paradigm Fall 2021, issue 6.3

Through the Looking Glass

Sometimes it’s the introverts who have the biggest mouths in the room. Case in point: L.A.’s The Paradoks. They’re coming out of 2020 with a new album and new energy. 

By KARI HAMANAKA

“He’ll start playing something ominous and then I’ll go,” Janet Diane Gutierrez finishes her sentence strumming a riff. 

“It’s like a dream, but more like a bad trip,” she says slowly but deliberately. “I think you should play something off. You know what? This song’s going to be about a bad trip. The drums should be something light like you’re on a cloud.”

Drummer Chex taps a few beats out. 

“Like this?” he asks. 

“Yeah, something airy,” she coaches. 

The doctor told me to kill you. 

The lyric lands like a thud to the unassuming visitor just sitting in one night on The Paradoks band practice, prompting a double take begging the question, “Did I hear that right?” 

Yeah, you did. 

“This is like running in the dark type shit,” the drummer says. 

That’s precisely the point singer and guitarist Gutierrez is going for as The Paradoks practice, on a recent night at SoundBite Studios in Los Angeles, winds down. They’re working on a new song that could be several more weeks or months in the process of being finalized. They’ve just released an album, but are already moving on to the next project. 

Their current release’s title, “Stuck In a Dream,” hits just right coming out of 2020. The three say they still feel very much like they’re in a state of haze, playing their first show coming out of the quarantine in August to celebrate the album’s release. 

The cover sleeve, a matte black-and-white design, is reminiscent of something Tim Burton-inspired, pushing one down a rabbit hole. It’s almost like a Rorschach test where the interpretation maybe says more about you than the band. 

After more than a year of living through a pandemic, catching COVID (in the case of Chex and bassist Juan Escalante) and hardly seeing one another for practices or shows, pushing “Stuck In a Dream” out offers some amount of relief. Another check in a box for what the band’s pushing to get done. 

The album, recorded by Miguel Conflict between October and December of last year, is 12 songs reflective of Gutierrez’s beliefs, experiences and feelings from the past several years beginning with high school, when the band started, and on.  

“It’s funny because it kind of reflects how a lot of people feel because of COVID,” Gutierrez said of the album name, “but it really is just about this age. We’re all in our 20s and I personally don’t really know what my future’s going to be. It’s like everyone’s stuck in a dream.” 

“I just hope that there are people that can relate, you know?” she went on to say of what people take away from it. “I’ve been a loner pretty much all my life, even as a child at school, kindergarten and shit, I was always by myself. Always been a loner. I think I have quite an imagination though and that’s what that song ‘Know Where?’ is about. People have blocked so much from their childhood. I feel like I’m still in touch with that part of my childhood where I still have a crazy imagination. I think most people I know don’t know how goofy I can actually be.” 

‘Know Where?’, the eighth track on the album, describes “a loner in a social world,” “a razor in pâte à choux.” 

“We’re all pretty introverted,” Chex said. “I feel like we suppress a lot of what we feel. We suppress it with the partying, at least for me. I feel like I’ve been partying for so long. It’s embedded. Me and this guy [Escalante] have a bunch of conversations about I want to stop drinking, want to stop doing this. Can’t keep doing this for so long. It’s all building up. Through the music, we find a channel of freedom.” 

As much as the band is a three-piece, it’s also Gutierrez’s baby and both Escalante and Chex reiterate on multiple occasions their desire to support her aspirations for The Paradoks. 

“I feel bad for all the people that have slept on us because, like Janet said, we’re one of the cleanest sounding bands in Los Angeles as far as punk goes,” Chex said. “We have a lot of balls in this band and I’m not just talking about me and him [Escalante]. Janet probably has the biggest balls in this band. She just makes it happen. And, like I said, we want nothing but to back her story up.” 

Gutierrez is the band’s lone original member. 

She started The Paradoks in 2015 when she was still in high school with her friend Jasmine, who came up with the band name. They were juniors or seniors in high school, and Jasmine liked the definition of the word paradox so much so that it ended up sticking. 

The band’s initial recordings were at the Boys & Girls Club of Venice. When the original lineup dissolved, Gutierrez found herself at shows, scouring the crowds to enlist new band members, refusing to let The Paradoks fall to the wayside. 

“I saw these two in one of the first couple of shows I went to,” Gutierrez said of when she began looking for new members to fill out the band. “They’re both incredibly talented; I think they’re the most talented people in the scene and I just had to get them in my band.” 

Chex and Escalante officially joined in 2016. 

Drummer Chex has been in various bands and has also been in the local rap scene for the past decade now, going to backyard shows when he was 13 and then starting to play music a couple years later. 

“I ditched a shitload of school. I was more interested in just doing music, even if it didn’t really provide a life that I could live off of,” the drummer said. “It’s just something I’ve always been interested in. If anything, it’s something that made me feel pretty important.” 

Escalante, who started out wanting to play the drums but ended up on bass when he was 13, is also in a number of punk bands. 

“It’s been therapeutic. It’s helped me get through a lot of stuff,” Escalante said. “As soon as I started playing in bands and going to shows, something clicked.” 

In April 2016, the current lineup played their first show as The Paradoks. They were rarely active, largely in a state of hiatus until mid-2018 when the band, charged with a sense of reinvigoration, pushed the reset button. They’ve played as far as San Francisco, attracting a mix of fans with their rock and roll-inspired punk rock more reminiscent of a time past than the hardcore and street punk often wafting from most backyards these days. 

“2018 is when we really started to pick it back up again,” Gutierrez said. “I think that explains why we haven’t written that many songs either, and that’s something we’re going to do more of. We’re going to write as much music as possible in a short amount of time and hopefully release another album next year, because we really need to speed things up.” 

She says all this as they stand steps away from Alexander’s World Famous Tortas in Compton. It’s August and they have friends and other bands there to celebrate the album’s release. It’s also a bit of a reunion after hardly seeing one another for about a year-and-a-half. It’s only been a few months since the trio resumed practices again. 

“We’ve just been trying to hit the forefront of new sounds and a lot of the songs were written through the past five years,” Chex said of the new album. “Now that we’ve kind of rooted them into ‘Stuck In a Dream,’ we can push forward into new sounds.” 

The Paradoks on the spectrum of Southern California local punk and hardcore bands, leans more towards a more classic sound, to the point where they feel out of place among hardcore bands and street punk, but not exactly a perfect fit in the indie scene. 

“Sometimes, I don’t really know where we fit,” Gutierrez said. “I just feel like when we play the hardcore punk shows, people are too hard for us.”

“I don’t really worry about that. You know what I mean?” Chex said. 

“I know,” she said. “I just feel like there’s no scene where we really fit because the indie scene, I feel like we’re not edgy enough either.” 

“I feel like with the hardcore shows we display an aggressiveness that those punkers get it because I feel like we have fans that are metalheads or just straight punk rockers. They hear that aggressiveness. No doubt about that. We don’t sound like a hardcore punk band, but we still bring that energy,” Escalante said. 

The three go back and forth about the punk spectrum in defining subgenres before Chex ultimately puts a pin in it. 

“It’s about crossing boundaries though,” he said. “It’s about breaking through and shit. If you get the fucking indie person and a fucking metalhead and they both like the same band, that’s something.” 

It’s why Gutierrez says she loves when older people from the scene approach them with praise for the band’s more “old school” sound. 

She takes the compliments in stride. 

“I’m naturally a very reserved person a lot of times,” she said. “I can come off as shy, but I just actually don’t really want to talk to people. For me, being in the band is like an outlet. I know a lot of people misjudge me or misread me, but the band is just my way to express myself and it’s one of the only times where I’m very comfortable. Songwriting-wise, my life’s not fancy, so our songs aren’t fancy either. I think they’re very straight-forward and simple,  but I think we come up with some pretty catch tunes, too.” 

There’s something highly cerebral to The Paradoks. What may seem cut-and-dry is decidedly only that on a surface level. A lot of thought and care has gone into the songs, the lyrics and right on over to the presentation. 

Case in point, circling back to “Stuck In a Dream.” 

The album sleeve and lyric sheet use non-toxic, eco-friendly ink. There’s no coating in an effort to cut back on emissions. They used post-consumer recycled bags and other environmentally-minded materials. There’s also the hand-written lyrics and connect-the-dots drawing from artist Gutz (@gutztheartist). There’s nothing stereotypical. No pandering to make it easy for people “to get.” It’s just them; take it or leave it. 

There are layers to what they’re putting forth. A lot of that goes back to their assertion they’re all introverts. That can be a hard sell in a scene and a world where he or she who talks loudest, has the most Instagrammable moments or the more witty comebacks, nabs the most attention. 

They’re OK with all of that. 

“We’re uncomfortably comfortable, you know,” Chex said when talking specifically about the process of taking band pictures earlier that evening ahead of their band practice. Although, it’s a statement fitting of a lot more than just that. The end result of the pictures, by the way, is anything but uncomfortable. 

“I want people to understand we’re not trying to be people we’re not,” Gutierrez said. “Our music is very honest and I don’t like to pretend to be someone I’m not, and maybe that’s why we seem so comfortable in the pictures. I am who I am and when I write the lyrics it’s me.” 

The Paradoks practice is well over at this point and the three are standing on the sidewalk outside the studio as the occasional car zooms by. It’s nearing midnight. 

They start talking about the last song they were in the process of writing that night at the studio. It’s called “Euphoria.” 

Gutierrez starts talking about mushrooms and how therapeutic they’ve been since finding them and how the song stems from that.  

“In high school, I was mad all the time. I was pissed. It was a very dark time for me where I was just very angry at the stupid ass, fucking kids in my class and the adults,” she said. “Adulthood. I just hated everything. I hated the world; I couldn’t find anything good about it. I feel like I’m still that person, but I’ve grown to appreciate the things that aren’t tainted by humans. Like the natural world, for example, it brings me peace. The mushrooms, I feel like I can have total joy. I just want that song to basically feel like you’re having a good trip, but it gets pretty bad.” 

There’s something unapologetic about the three of them and their honesty.  

Chex is admittedly at a point in his life where music isn’t necessarily doing it for him in terms of his happiness anymore, but it’s all he knows, as he owns up to maybe needing to do some “adulting.” Gutierrez is the self-admitted loner who keeps mostly in her shell, side-stepping lame pleasantries and small talk for only in-depth, meaningful conversation. And then there’s Escalante, the history buff, who initially got off on just playing bass alone and practicing until the wee hours of the night, until he found others he could play in a band with and never looked back. 

The three together make up The Paradoks, which are in and of itself a bit of a paradox. The quiet ones who are anything but wallflowers. 

“I’m just focused on trying to figure out other shit I’m into besides the music and this party shit I’ve been into for the past 10 years. I’m very much in limbo; I’m at the brink,” Chex said. “It sounds super depressing, but I’m being really sincere. There’s no other option than to keep going. I love these guys to fucking death. We’ve been through a lot, played cities I never thought I’d play and done shit I never thought I would do. And no one can ever take that away from us. No one can tell me what the fuck I do or what I did, and we’ve done nothing but kick ass.” 

“The fact that we’ve been a band for six years, that puts us in an interesting spot,” Escalante said. “When we started out, it starts off as a hobby, but I realize it’s a lifestyle just doing music. We need to get our fix with this sound. I’m in other bands, but that doesn’t take away how I feel about each individual band I’m in.” 

For Gutierrez, her view on The Paradoks has always been something far more serious than a hobby from the band's inception. It’s what helped push her through the annoyances of high school. It’s what pushed her to go to shows alone to find the right new members for the band. And it’s what pushes her to write the kind of lyrics that are so clear in capturing the complexities of life. 

“For me, the band it’s all I have,” she said. “So, for me, I’m really trying to get somewhere with it. I’ll know it when it happens, but I want to be proud of myself. Right now, I’m not there yet. I want to try and do as much as I can. I want to travel the world and play. This is all I have because without music, I don’t know who the fuck I am and so I would love to do great things with this band. And this band is going to be with me until the day I die.” 

KEEP IN TOUCH

▶ INSTAGRAM: @theparadoks_band

▶ NEXT SHOW: Nov. 13; First Street Pool & Billiard, Boyle Heights

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