Photos by Jaclyn Campanaro

It’s a 10-hour drive from Sacramento to Portland, Ore., though not a difficult one: take a right on I-5 and go straight for a while. Buy some olive oil in Corning, chuckle for a few minutes as you pass Weed, keep her steady over Grant’s Pass. Avoid Salem. You’re there.

For Portland’s BRAINSTORM, the former duo-now-trio of drummer Adam Baz, guitarist Patrick Phillips and bassist Dasha Shleyeva, who recently joined the group for a national tour, the distance between each city has proved inconsequential to the troupe’s appreciating of Sacramento music. Baz tells me that they’ve already circled their Sacramento show at Bows and Arrows on Nov. 3, highlighting the affair as a small reunion of sorts.

“For whatever reason we have kind of a sister community in Sacramento,” says Baz, calling from New York City before a week of CMJ’ing. “Part of it, for a while, was there were a lot of really talented Sacramento-based musicians living in Portland, and we got to know a lot of them. We hit it off.” Heat Waves, BRAINSTORM’s second album released earlier this month, was produced by Sacramentan Robby Moncrieff in Portland’s Type Foundry Studios. Baz recalls booking a show with Moncrieff and Zach Hill’s project What’s Up? a few years back, and Moncrieff’s production work on such albums as Dirty Projectors’ Bitte Orca and with locals Ganglians and Appetite grabbing the group’s attention early on.

“We’ve always respected his production, and his ear,” Baz says of Moncrieff. “I think he’s really good at recording pop albums in a way that yields a much more interesting product than some typical pop recording” (think Appetite’s Scattered Smothered Covered and Ganglians’ Still Living).

And if we’re categorizing BRAINSTORM’s brand of pop, we’d at the very least call it atypical. The band’s 2009 release, Battling Giants, blends riff-y, Math rock tempos stopping on a dime into squeaky clean, glee club-ish vocals over a tuba. The album should receive praise for its bold musicality–and it did–but Baz admits such a repertoire “can at times make it challenging for a listener.”

“Part of the challenge of the band is trying to sync together these different genres in a way that still is coherent and not too all over the place,” he says. “Some of our older material in particular is a little more scattered.”

Heat Waves can be seen as an extension of the BRAINSTORM’s debut in terms of incorporating a variety of influences, though the sophomore effort distills these influences with greater care, and, perhaps, works them in more seamlessly. “Flat Earth,” the album’s opener, is at its core a ‘60s homage: a reserved guitar melody over drums more concerned with keeping time than setting new polyrhythm, and lyrics looking back on a love gone bad. We then transition into an upbeat movement, more vocal harmonies with Phillips’ guitar returning to the forefront–and then back again to the song’s original thrust. If this sounds like hard work, I assure you it’s not. Transitions in and out of BRAINSTORM’s temperamental shifts are clear, no-stress progressions.

“Forms Without a Frame” could be the album’s flag bearer for the new clarity in approach–a guitar-centric pleaser, Baz’s more understated efficiency on drums driving beneath, and a tuba in the back heartily bridging each chorus. BRAINSTORM has succeeded in staying true to its eclectic roots while aging into something more refined.

From a songwriting perspective, however, BRAINSTORM has changed little since its inception: “It’s a pretty democratic, organic process. Patrick and I usually bring little sections of songs to the table. I’ll have an idea for a riff or a vocal part, or just a drum pattern, and kind of jam on that and see where it takes us.” Piecing often disparate elements together continues to be a challenge, though Heat Waves tones down the experimentation of BRAINSTORM’s debut, or at least that was a goal Baz and Phillips set out for themselves.

“I hope [Heat Waves] speaks to our ability to write coherent pop songs,” says Baz. “We’re trying to really come up with perfect and persuasive riffs and stick to them a little more closely. We’re actually trying to write simpler songs, I’d say, in general.”

BRAINSTORM began in 2009 after Baz and Phillips exchanged mixtapes with one another, trading such bands as Lightning Bolt, Dirty Projectors, Ponytail and, notably, guitars from all over Western and Eastern Africa. You could call the African guitar BRAINSTORM’s most pronounced influence, the most immediately obvious incorporation from a varied set of tastes, especially in conjunction with Baz’s inclusive and rhythmic style of drumming.

“It was definitely a kind of music that Pat and I talked about early on,” Baz says of the group’s African influence, pulling from both contemporary and older recordings. “We try to tastefully reference that kind of music in a way that puts it outside of some world music category. I really don’t like that term,” adding, “I think what it generally stands for is some sort of commercialized recording. Our goal is to make experimental pop songs that may or may not contain that style.”

This past February, BRAINSTORM released two covers of Mdou Moctar, a contemporary Nigerian musician, after Baz and Phillips got hooked on a compilation from Sahel Sounds Records, a label set on unearthing recordings from Western Africa’s Sahel region of Mauritania, Senegal, Mali and Niger. It’s easy to appreciate a band working with this sort of material as opposed to just using and discarding, and that sincerity bleeds into BRAINSTORM’s own body of work; BRAINSTORM has, in a way, internalized the music they’ve become so enamored with.

Heat Waves will be unveiled live on a hyperactive, coast-to-coast tour cutting across the South and Southwest, hitting such cities as Fayetteville, Ark.; Marfa, Texas; and Fresno, Calif. before ending up in Sacramento.

“This is definitely the longest tour we’ve done, almost six weeks. When we’re out we try to take advantage of reaching every market that we can,” Baz says.

BRAINSTORM’s live performances have received significant hype, and were described by Baz as “explosive, energetic experiences,” but performing live has always been their strength, he admits.

“Neither of us know much about recording, personally, and so one thing we’ve always been really good at is presenting our music in a live context. It wasn’t until recently, with Heat Waves, that we felt really good about the recorded product as well.”

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