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Be Your Own Pet
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It’s taken thirty years, but Nashville’s rock underground, well…it ain’t exactly “subterranean” anymore, innit? No, the cat’s out of the bag now, and the dirt has been removed from the long dormant hopes-and-dreams™ of Nashville’s non-country music scene. Bands like the Kings of Leon, the Pink Spiders, and Paramore have attracted international attention while, shall we say, “artier” bands like Venus Hum have turned out well-respected records for major league labels.
‘twas not always so, my little babies – not so long ago, Nashville was a truly scary place to be in a rock band, or even write about people who were in rock bands. It was just back at the dawn of the ‘90s that the editor of a national music magazine asked the Reverend, in all seriousness, if we wore “shoes down there?” True, this was the pre-millennial dark ages, but even then I distinctly recall Dave Willie sporting a really nice pair of shoes on his feet. Think of what it was like for Jason & the Nashville Scorchers or Webb Wilder the first time they ventured into the big city to play…oh, the stories they could tell you.
Be Your Own Pet’s Get Awkward
But I digress…those days are safely behind us, and urban sophisticates have recently realized that not only do we mostly all wear “shoes for industry” these days, but that a Nashville band doesn’t have to wear Nudie suits and throw down with a fiddle to make good music (unless they want to, of course). Three distinctive Nashville bands – Be Your Own Pet, De Novo Dahl, and Umbrella Tree – recently released their sophomore efforts to no little praise and varying degrees of commercial success, helping firm up the Music City’s place on the proverbial map.
Be Your Own Pet has particularly been receiving a lot of love from out-of-towners these days for
Get Awkward, and the Reverend has seen the band mentioned favorably in publications from the British motherland to the mysterious Orient; even Tierra del Fuego seems to have joined in the chorus of praise for Nashville’s next big thing. Producer Steven McDonald (of psychedelic-punk pranksters Redd Kross) – perhaps the best possible human to capture the band’s shiny, guitar-heavy, noise-pop sound – returns to his seat behind the board for
Get Awkward.
Get Awkward jumps straight into the fire with the turbo-charged “Super Soaked,” an electric shake-and-bake sizzler that’s straight outta the Detroit rawk songbook. Jemina Pearl’s vocals are strident to a fault (as in earthquake) while Jonas Stein’s rambling guitar delivers aftershocks in waves alongside the song’s explosive rhythms. BYOP had to look deep in the racks at Phonoluxe for the vintage sound of “The Kelly Affair,” a band-on-the-run tale of fun and hijinx in Hollywood that evokes fuzz-drenched ‘60s-era garage-rock with its manic riffing, clever lyrics, and John Eatherley’s muscular drumming.
Although the band has matured in the year-and-a-half since its young, loud and snotty debut,
Get Awkward has plenty of moments where every emotion is overwhelming, every perceived snub an uppercut. “Heart Throb” benefits from whipsmart lyrics, syncopated rhythms led by Nathan Vasquez’s bold bass lines, washes of razor-sharp guitar, and Pearl’s manic, lovesick teen vocal gymnastics. The other side of the coin is “Bitches Leave,” a cold, cold piss-off song with a nifty signature riff and snarling, spiteful vocals. The tribal Bow Wow Wow rhythms of “Zombie Graveyard Party!” are matched by Stein’s sonic guitar-squawk and Pearl’s effusive vocals.
Get Awkward lives up to all the hype, perfectly capturing BYOP’s mix of youthful energy, cluttered instrumentation, and flailing vocals. Be Your Own Pet has been compared once too often to New York’s Yeah Yeah Yeahs, mainly because of the vocal similarities between that band’s Karen O and Pearl’s out-of-control yelp. Sorry, but YYY is soooo yesterday, treading water while looking for a lifesaver. BYOP is the sound of tomorrow, and if they make the same creative strides between
Get Awkward and whatever their third album ends up being as they did between their debut and this one, you’ll be seeing a lot more effusive comments in print and on the web about this band in the future.
De Novo Dahl’s Move Every Muscle, Make Every Sound
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| De Novo Dahl |
Compared to Be Your Own Pet,
De Novo Dahl has proved a bit more problematic for so-called “music journalists” outside of the critical zone (i.e. within 100 miles of Nashville, including Bowling Green and, of course, Murfreesboro). On one hand, the band delivers a lush, well-crafted brand of pop-influenced rock that is long on melody and short on the sort of attitude that bloggers and benchwarmers in the blue states eat up (and which the aforementioned BYOP delivers in spades).
On the other hand, however, the band dresses like refugees from ‘Olde Nashville,’ clad in fancy vines like the Countrypolitan song-pimps that one used to see traipsing from Music Row to Lower Broadway to hang out in Tootsies. The hipper-than-thou literati just can’t get a handle on De Novo Dahl, ‘though they’ve spilled a lot of ink-and-electrons in the attempt. Further complicating this critical confusion is the fact that the band’s
Move Every Muscle, Make Every Sound was released by Roadrunner Records – a label better known for Nickelback and the sort of extreme metal that would make the hair on your toes curl. Thus, De Novo Dahl’s commercial prospects seem questionable from the very beginning.
Regardless,
Move Every Muscle, Make Every Sound is a simply delightful album, a wonderfully-constructed collection of throwback pop that would sound as equally at home in the early ‘70s as it does in the new millennium. There’s nothing that’s overtly retro here, or even remotely derivative, just a reckless appropriation of influences ranging from the Beatles and the Kinks to Bowie, the Move, even ELO…in short, all the right stuff at the right time.
The band has the chops to pull off such a hat trick, and De Novo Dahl covers a lot of stylistic ground with
Move Every Muscle, Make Every Sound. The whimsical “Shout” is a lofty shooting star featuring Joel Dahl’s slightly-accented Brit-punk vocals, delicious harmonies, and upbeat life-lesson lyrics. “Means to an End” mixes shoegazer sensibilities with a bit o’ feedback, lush backing vocals, and an odd melody that reminds of
Revolver-era Beatles. De Novo Dahl gets funky with “Shakedown,” revisiting ‘70s soul with Dahl’s best high falsetto, call-and-response harmonies, and a fat soundtrack of warbling synths, subtle drumwork and wa-wa guitar.
“The Sky Is Falling” revs things up with 100mph drumbeats, fast-paced vocals, roller-coaster keyboards, and an undeniable ‘80s new wave vibe. The somber “Not to Escape” is a melancholy dirge of many hues, Dahl’s sinewy leads bursting out of the clouds of chiming keys, crashing cymbals, and shuffling drumbeats. “Be Your Man” is a whirling dervish of a song, the band taking a fair-to-middlin’ White Stripes/Jet garage-rock concept and cranking up the intensity a notch or six. Dahl’s vocals careen off the sides like a spastic pinball while a steady barrage of sound assaults your senses.
De Novo Dahl does a fine job of melding the band’s disparate personalities into a single, creative whole. The band’s chemistry is such that they emphasis a song’s lyrics with combined efforts. Dahl’s vocals are up front on most songs, but only by default … Serai Zaffiro’s feminine wiles aren’t far behind in the mix, offering a fine counterpoint, followed by the rest of the guys. Matt Hungate’s keyboards provide color while bassist Keith Lowan and drummer Joey Andrews build a solid framework for each song.
Dahl’s six-string work is understated but often elegant, and somewhat underutilized as a punctuation mark within the songs. In those moments when Zaffiro cuts loose with her omnichord, the instrument adds an alien, antediluvian, and entirely unique sound to the band’s material. Add it all up, and
Move Every Muscle, Make Every Sound is the sort of album that, while maybe not lighting up the charts right this moment, will nevertheless be “rediscovered” over and over by rock ‘n’ roll archeologists for decades to come.
Umbrella Tree’s The Church & The Hospital
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| Umbrella Tree |
Coming fast down the stretch in their attempt to be Nashville’s next big thing,
Umbrella Tree is part of the same complex pop landscape as BYOP and De Novo Dahl, but it’s there that the resemblance ends. Umbrella Tree’s sophomore album,
The Church & The Hospital, was released on their own independent Cephalopod Records label. If this charming, sometimes difficult, and totally entertaining album doesn’t net the band a deal, then the Reverend will eat his large-ish, size-14 Reeboks.
The Church & The Hospital is a deceptively engaging album, the songs creeping into your consciousness like some sort of purple plague. Umbrella Tree – the trio of Jillian Leigh, Zachary Gresham, and Derek Pearson – mine the same sort of art-pop vein that the old 4AD label bands once ruled with, but with a distinctly American twist. Whereas many 4AD bands brought a certain level of proper Britannic noblesse to their sound, Umbrella Tree imbues their work with an anarchistic spirit and inherent weirdness that can only come from a people that once started a war with the symbolic act of throwing a few crates of tea in the Boston harbor.
Not that Umbrella Tree isn’t capable of creating songs of immense, shimmering beauty;
The Church & The Hospital offers many such moments across its sprawling soundtrack. Leigh and Gresham intertwine their voices beneath the instrumentation, which itself is fueled by Leigh’s delicate keyboards and Gresham’s ethereal fretwork. Drummer Pearson is an integral part of the Umbrella Tree sound, adding blasts of bass drum or clashing cymbals when needed to poke a hole in the thick wall of sound.
There’s a concept at work here, interlocking lyrical themes paired with scraps of recurring sound, sometimes operatic and other times slightly cabaret in nature. There’s no single song on
The Church & The Hospital that necessarily stands out as a radio track or quick fix for stardom. Instead the band has crafted an album as a unified entity. Taken out of context, songs like “Make Me A Priest” – an enchanting tale with lofty vocals and changing currents – or the confused, clever “Schizophrenia” would hit your ears like a hopeless hodge-podge of sound and chaos. In the company of their neighboring songs on
The Church & The Hospital, they fit like pieces in a somewhat surrealistic puzzle, showcasing a band of no little talent and musical ambition.
None of these bands may break-out and become Nashville’s “next big thing,” or even the city’s “first really big thing.” With Be Your Own Pet, De Novo Dahl and Umbrella Tree representing the city, however, I do believe that we’re in good hands...
Article originally posted by Alt.Culture.Guide™ zine, 2008
