It was a mesmerizing night at Russian Recording that featured three fundamentally different indie rock sounds by bands from all over the country last Friday. Local duo Stagnant Pools were the first to the stage and set a blistering pace, attacking songs with a certain style of generating as much noise, energy, and testosterone as possible from a single electric guitar and drum kit - a style that akin bands Japandroids and No Age are building successful careers around. From end to end, the name of their game was heavy guitar distortion and muffled vocals over the blazing drumming of IU sophomore Doug Enas, who was on another planet from behind his kit.
Next up was Dominant Legs, the San Francisco indie pop group fronted by ex-Girls guitarist Ryan Lynch, who isn't so much the Legs' singer/lead guitarist as their singer/rhythm guitarist who almost always takes the lead. His rapid-fire, punctuated electric guitar strumming imbued their jangly pop sound with strong vibes of funk and disco, evoking The Ohio Players to me more than any so-called surf-rock revivalism that apparently is supposed to be the only type of rock coming from San Fran in 2011. Additional props to synth player Hannah Hunt, whose backing vocals sounded absolutely gorgeous from Russian Recording's stage room.
The bar had clearly been set when Portland, Oregon psych-folk trio Nurses took the stage, and it was well high enough to challenge their delegation as rightful headliners. But when singer Aaron Chapman led off by belting the first few words of "Fever Dream," the opening track off their most recent LP, Dracula, he instantly sparked more energy within the audience than either opener was able to, all while sporting a retro Houston Rockets logo. So afterwards, it made more sense to me why our conversation had turned towards '90's professional basketball when I sat down with the band before their set.
Live Buzz: How did Nurses originally sign with Dead Oceans?
John Bowers: We were touring through Bloomington and for some reason, John Kunz came out to the show and was really into it. So he gave the record to Phil [Waldorf]. Phil was really into it and wanted to put it out. It seemed pretty natural and smooth.
Live Buzz: I thought Dracula was pretty clearly anchored by rhythm and various percussion. For you guys, would you say that when you're writing songs, is that where it starts? Or at least for this past record, did it always start with the rhythm, then building songs around that?
JB: It didn't really start with that but that's an element we focused on and felt a lot when we were making the record. Yeah, it wasn't something that started everything, but it was something that we were just into at the time, and I'm still into. So that element just ended up being super-present throughout the whole thing.
[Aaron Chapman enters]
Live Buzz: The other notable thing about the album, I thought, was Aaron's voice, which is obviously a very distinct voice. And there were really only 2 of your indie contemporaries that I could compare it to. One is the singer from The Low Anthem. And then the other is The Tallest Man on Earth, who you toured with. Do you hear it, and did you get that at all on tour?
Aaron Chapman: I don't think anyone's ever said that. I mean, I haven't thought that, but now that you say something, yeah.
JB: I think they both can sing really loud and really well, they have a really powerful, soulful voice, I'd say. But I think you're the first person to say it.
Live Buzz: As you said earlier, this isn't your first time in Bloomington. Do you have any good or bad memories of this place?
JB: Only good, really.
AC: Pretty much good. I think one time - I don't know if it was the last time I was here or the time before - I had a migraine the whole day. But that's nothing against Bloomington. But I remember we were hanging out with people from our label and everyone went out to dinner and I was sitting there like this the whole time [puts head in hands].
Live Buzz: Is it true you guys are big fans of Prince?
AC: Yeah.
JB: Yeah, for sure. We were really stoked on Prince. The most influence that he had on the record had more to do with the spirit of what he does than like, "let's do this Prince thing."
AC: Yeah. I think typically, when something inspires us, it's less like a musical idea or a specific sound and more like the spirit that we perceive the artist to be approaching things with. So Prince has a certain kind of swagger and style, just going for it, and it's not self-conscious at all. It's brilliant, but not in an over-thought, overwrought sort of way. It's just awesome.
Live Buzz: So in that sense then, in the sense of being inspired more by Prince's identity than, say, "When Doves Cry"...
JB: That song is awesome though [laughs].
Live Buzz: What other artists have influenced you in that way, off the top of your head?
AC: Another influence like that to me was Timbaland and a lot of '90's hip-hop stuff that we were into.
JB: There's a lot of the spirit of hip-hop that had a lot of influence. And not necessarily like direct hip-hop songs, although when you're into the spirit of something, you gravitate towards your favorite songs. But definitely just the spirit of hip-hop in general. And we're really into Timbaland stuff, Missy Elliot, Wu-Tang.
AC: Stuff that I kind of was peripherally interested in when I was young and it was happening, but it didn't really click until this point in my life. So it's kind of fresh and new to me.
JB: But James [drummer Mitchell] grew up listening to primarily hip-hop, which is funny.
Live Buzz: What about you guys?
AC: Classical music and a lot of rock.
JB: Same. I liked a lot of hip-hop as a guilty pleasure. In my family, hip-hop was a no-no. My dad was really into a lot of classic rock. So I would listen to hip-hop in secret with all my bad friends [laughs]. So there's a special place in my heart for those songs. I would sneak out of the house and drive around with my friend at 4 in the morning to some girl's house, and he'd be playing "Juicy" by Notorious B.I.G., and that song maintained itself in my life as one of the cooler hip-hop songs.
Live Buzz: Kind of a nostalgiac thing then.
JB: Kind of nostalgiac, but it's adopted a new life for me now. So it's a bit of both actually.
Live Buzz: So you guys listened to a lot of hip-hop when making the record. Does a lot of the beat-heavy stuff on Dracula come largely from that?
AC: It's one of those things where you're into it also because your kind of there personally and so you kind of run parallel with it. Like I remember when I got into [The Beach Boys'] Pet Sounds a few years ago. It's because I was kind of mentally there and creatively in a similar place. So then when you hear it, it resonates with you, so you feel kind of parallel with it. We were all just more into groove and beat-heavy stuff in our own way. So it's kind of like a chicken and the egg thing, where we'd gravitate toward hip-hop because we were sort of into that, and then it was also influencing what we were doing. I don't know which came first. I think we were just interested in making beat-heavy stuff. It wasn't so much a conscious decision.
JB: Yeah, you get into it yourself, and then maybe we're making a bunch of beat-heavy jams, and then it's, "you know what I want to hear? This Outkast record. Reminds me of that, let's do that."
AC: Personally, around the same time, I was approaching music in a more abstract, heady way. Then I got more interested in the physical body, dancing, and doing things with your body and wanted to make music that resonated more with the body and wasn't just heady and abstract.
JB: We also started playing and watching a lot of basketball.
AC: That influenced the beats and stuff a lot.
Live Buzz: On Kanye West's newest album, he got all his collaborators together to play basketball and started writing songs after that. That was his bonding method, I guess. Was that a bonding method for you guys?
JB: That's awesome. That's kind of something we do anyway, actually. We play basketball, then write music, then take a break and play basketball.
AC: Definitely. We'd make jams at night in the attic and then the next day want to get out of the house and do something kind of active and refreshing. We'd go play basketball, get that out of our system, and then go back and dive back into the songs. When we were working on the record on the coast, we were there for five weeks and I think we took one or two days off the whole time when we weren't working all day. I think that was one of the things we did, found a basketball court and played basketball, the three of us. Pretty fun.
Live Buzz: I can see that because you could say basketball is a rhythmic game and you guys made a rhythmic record.
AC: It's very rhythmic and it's also really style-laden, individually and collectively. Like a team will have a style, or a guy will be oozing style, sometimes too much for his own good or the team's good. It also has dance-like elements to me where these guys have really cool, really fluid styles and it seems really, really musical - both the rhythmic aspects and the fluid aspects.
Live Buzz: Do you guys see yourselves as a sort of [Michael] Jordan/[Scottie] Pippen/[Dennis] Rodman trio? In the sense that they all had their own style - Dennis Rodman was freaking crazy and Michael Jordan had finesse - but they worked together as a functioning machine.
JB: That's a good question [laughs].
AC: We definitely do have pretty different styles that we bring to the band and different strengths and things. I hadn't thought of that specific trio.
JB: Great trio. I think we all have strengths and we can in certain instances play each others' positions [laughs]. But we all have things we are good at and we also know what the other dudes are good at. And I think we use that well. You know, Aaron is clearly the best at singing, but James and I will come up with melodies that Aaron will sing and totally kill it that we could never do. Or Aaron and I will come up with beat ideas and James makes them totally rad. And in making the record, we learned a lot about each others' strengths a lot more so the next time we make a record, I think that it'll be better.
AC: We upped our game.
JB: Elevated our game. We are all our own Michael Jordan of whatever we do. You know Prince is really good at basketball too?
Live Buzz: I only heard that on "Chapelle's Show" a long time ago.
JB: Our friend used to work for the NBA and saw at an all-star game Prince and Kobe Bryant in a one-on-one and he said Prince was fucking awesome.
Live Buzz: So if you could play basketball against any one musical artist, would it be Prince?
AC: Yeah, probably.
JB: I would love to play Prince in basketball. He would definitely beat me. But maybe not.
Post by Steven Arroyo; Photography by Brad Sanders
