Run the Gamut

Dance Gavin Dance, whose quirky and genre-defying sound fits somewhere between post-hardcore, progressive rock and screamo, isn’t worried that fans might not like their new album. Right now, they’re just pumped that they’ve found their groove, both creatively and within the band’s dynamic itself.

Since the band’s formation in Sacramento in 2005, DGD has gone through its share of rough patches. Despite a constant flux in band members, DGD now has a solid group of core members with a shared goal: making music they love, and being open to whatever form that comes in. Today, DGD consists of Tilian Pearson (vocals), Jon Mess (vocals/screams), Will Swan (guitar/vocals), Tim Feerick (bass) and Matt Mingus (drums).

Their sixth studio album, Instant Gratification, showcases the energy, enthusiasm and eclectic influences that hooked fans from day one—with a good dose of sarcasm and some dirty rapping sprinkled throughout. The album blends elements from throughout their many eras, offering a little something for everybody—although pleasing such a diverse and divided fan base will be a difficult feat. It is slated for release through Rise Records on April 14, 2015, which is also the day they kick off their Instant Gratification Tour. Leading up to their big record release show, DGD is currently touring with Memphis May Fire, Crown the Empire and Palisades on the Take Action Tour, which wraps up in the beginning of April.

Submerge caught up with Tilian and Will at Kupros Craft House in Sacramento to chat about their upcoming album and tour, as well as what fans can expect to hear on their newest compilation.

What are you most excited about on the new album?
Will Swan: I really like the rap I laid down on it…it’s really sarcastic and dirty and messed up, but it’s funny in the DGD rap style that I created for myself.

You created a new persona for yourself?
WS: Every time I do a rap it’s from a new persona or perspective that’s not mine.

How would you describe this one?
WS: The song is kind of about being drunk and messed up, just a crazy night. My rap is from the “douchebag misogynist in the club” perspective.

What about you, Tilian? What are you excited about?
Tilian Pearson: It wasn’t necessarily as stressful as the last one, but there was more work involved. It’s definitely my favorite album that I’ve ever been a part of making.

Tell me about the writing and recording process on this one. It probably wasn’t actually “instant.”
WS: It was pretty instant…I don’t like to spend more than a day in practice getting the song down. I’ll usually come to practice with the skeleton and the parts and know what I want to do and then teach everyone and flush it out with Matt and Tim and by the end of the practice it’s done. And I don’t like revisiting my own shit.

How long do you think the whole process took?
WS: We didn’t spend more than a day on each song, so with all the practices together it was like 11 days.
TP: But that’s instrumentally.
WS: Once the music is down it goes to Tilian and Jon and they do their thing.
TP: The vocals take a little bit more time…the producer had a nice big backyard and it was raining the majority of the time. I could kind of pace around in the rain, listen to the stuff, and figure it out.

So all the instrumentals are ready and you’re just listening to it and writing over it?
TP: All the instrumentals are written first to a point where I think they’d be cool songs as-is and you would be able to just listen to the album as instrumentals and enjoy it. I feel like the vocals on this one—and I don’t think it was meant to be this way—wind up being more important than some of the past DGD stuff.
WS: Whatever it was instrumentally, once the vocals got put on it, the songs sounded completely different. It was like I was hearing it again for the first time. This record I felt even more of a transformation than usual from instrumental to vocals.

How have you guys managed to keep the same sound enough to keep a steady fan base when you’ve had, what, eight past members now?
WS: I have a very particular sound, and it comes out in what I write, and Matt has a very particular drumming style, and when he puts his drums to my guitar it makes a DGD sound. Everybody else adds their flavors too but the core of the song writing, of the instrumentals, still has that same sound and progression.

I’ve seen a lot of words used to describe your sound…hardcore, jazzy, progressive rock…how do you guys like being described?
WS: I don’t like having to confine things to genres…I have so many influences and listen to so much different music and like to try and put tidbits of it all into the songs. So of course it kind of has a heavier tinge to it but there’s all kinds of stuff going on.
TP: It also depends who you are talking to. If I’m talking to someone 60 years old, I’ll just say it’s punk rock. If I’m talking to a teenager, I’ll say it’s post-hardcore, funky, with a little bit of screamo influences.
WS: And if I’m talking to one of my religious aunts, it’s devil music.

What do you think the fans will think of the new album?
WS: I feel like this album covers the most ground. It’s got probably the heaviest song we ever did, called “Shark Dad,” and some of the softest stuff, like “Death of the Strawberry,” and “Legend,” one of the catchiest songs we have ever done, and also the heavy, spook-style, epic screamo stuff. It goes all over the place in a way that none of our other records ever have.

Do you have very specific fan groups?
WS: There are definitely cliques. But as much shit as they talk, they’ll still like the new stuff…they’ll say things like, “this just doesn’t sound like my favorite album. But I’m still probably going to pre-order it.”
TP: It’s interesting when people say, “I miss a certain album. Don’t you have it? Can’t you play it?”

Are people hard to please, just in general?
WS: I don’t think too much about pleasing the people as much as I do utilizing the people in the band to make the best album we can.

What would you like to see as the next evolution of the band?
WS: We’re still waiting for this album to come out to see what people think of what we just did.

But you said you don’t care what they think anyway, right?
TP: I want to hear it, and read it, and be like, I don’t care.
WS: It’s like comedy for me. I’ll go through and just see some of the mean things people say and it’s so shocking it’s almost like hearing a joke.
TP: Like when people actually speak to you directly on Twitter, or write a message like, I hope you actually choke on your food tomorrow and die, because you’ve ruined my favorite band. [Laughs]

What is one thing you think your fans don’t know about the band?
WS: I would like to be in the Illuminati, and if any fans have any connections that could get me in…
TP: When we play live, I don’t actually sing. I’m actually only here for my looks. So I’m basically a pretty boy lip syncher for the band.

Sacramento fans can catch Dance Gavin Dance on April 3 and 4, 2015, at their back-to-back shows at the Boardwalk, with guests Hail The Sun and other local openers (all ages, $17). Visit Theboardwalkpresents.com for tickets. Find out more Facebook.com/DanceGavinDance, or follow them on Twitter: @DGDtheband

A Lot Like Birds Readies The Release of Conversation Piece

It’s a quiet Tuesday night in Midtown and local progressive/post-hardcore band A Lot Like Birds has 80 or so fans packed into Luigi’s Fungarden as they tear through songs off their upcoming Doghouse Records full-length debut Conversation Piece, set for release on Oct. 11, 2011. Songs like “Think Dirty Out Loud” and “Sesame Street Is No Place for Me,” the album’s first two singles, have the crowd feverishly swaying back and forth to their spastic and energetic rhythms and riffs. Co-vocalists Cory Lockwood and Kurt Travis bounce around the small stage, shaking their long locks, taking turns singing and screaming, fully taking advantage of having co-vocalists (think call and response, harmonizing, layering, etc).

“I’m not the singer and he’s not the screamer,” Travis makes known as the two vocalists and I share a pitcher of Pabst Blue Ribbon at a local watering hole the Friday following the show. It quickly becomes apparent that this is an important point for them to get across. “We’re both vocalists,” he says. “I scream and I sing. And he screams and he sings. And we yell and we talk and we do spoken word. We do everything, we do all of it.”

Lockwood agrees and thinks of it like this, “I feel like a lot of times with dual vocalist bands that have a singer and a screamer, you’re diverging your fans and you’re going to have people that go, ‘Well I listen to the singing,’ and then you’ve got the guys who want tough music and they’re like, ‘Well I like the screaming.’ So if you bleed both of them, you’re forcing people to like it as a whole.”

Couple the outrageous and entertaining vocal work from Travis and Lockwood with the equally impressive instrumental work of the rest of the band, which consists of guitarists Michael Franzino and Ben Wiacek, bassist Michael Littlefield and drummer Joe Arrington, and you’ve got yourself one interesting record in Conversation Piece. One that crosses genres, tears down boundaries, leaves the listener wondering, “What’s next?” after each track comes to a dramatic close, and one that will most likely take a few listens to grow on you. They are aware of this.

“I know that music like this has to grow on people. People are really slow at picking stuff like this up,” says Travis.

“It’s almost easier for us to do weirder stuff,” Lockwood admits.

And weird it is, although we’re not talking about an un-listenable type of weird here; this isn’t just random noise after all. We’re talking about calculated time signature changes, non-traditional song structures, heavy-hitting breakdowns mixed with luscious reverb and delay-ridden clean parts, impressive and off-the-wall guitar riffs and interesting lyrical content to boot. Take the following lines from “Think Dirty Out Loud” for example, where Lockwood screams, “I spiked both our drinks with a gallon of ink / Now I’m writing a novel from your insides / We’re a spider with our limbs doing anything but walking / A conversation with our mouths doing anything but talking.” Or where Travis sings, “I eat emotional wrecks / And yours is the best.”

“I remember the instance in which we started writing the lyrics,” Travis says of the song. “I was totally enjoying myself, just laughing to myself, just thinking I’m the most clever fucking person ever.”

It is noteworthy to point out that in a number of ways, Conversation Piece is entirely different than A Lot Like Birds’ last offering, 2009’s Plan B. The latter was largely the work of guitarist and songwriting catalyst (as well as the band’s original vocalist) Michael Franzino, who invited a horde of local musicians to play everything from trumpet and trombone to cello and violin on the record. Plan B didn’t even feature a live drummer, as Franzino programmed the drums himself via computer. Conversation Piece is much more of a collaborative effort and consists of mostly the band’s core instruments (guitar, bass, drums, vocals), although it does contain some programmed stuff (“A Satire of a Satire of a Satire is Tiring”) and a little bit of horns (“Vanity’s Fair”) as to not depart completely from the band’s tendency to blend live instrumentation with orchestral and programmed elements. One of the most obvious differences between the two records is the solidified lineup, which includes the recent addition of Travis, who up until this summer had spent the last couple years co-fronting another Sacramento-based post-hardcore band, Dance Gavin Dance. “There’s four new members,” Lockwood says of the post-Plan B lineup. Travis interjects, “I’m not the new guy, you know what I mean? I’m the newest by all means. But Plan B was pretty much one or two guys, now this record is everybody giving their opinions and whatnot.”

For the recording of Conversation Piece, A Lot Like Birds turned to Portland, Ore.-based producer/engineer Kris Crummett, a familiar face to Travis, they have recorded two DGD albums together (2008’s self-titled record and 2009’s Happiness).

“As soon as I got kicked out of Dance Gavin Dance, Kris hit me up and was like, ‘Let me know what you’re doing, whatever you do, just let me know,’” Travis remembers. “It was kind of interesting because when I joined A Lot Like Birds, they were already talking about and thinking about going with Kris Crummett. I love that guy, we have a good history; we have a good thing going on.”

The band worked rigorously with Crummett for three weeks, focusing all of their creative energy on the record, which wasn’t even necessarily completely written yet, as Travis and Lockwood both had a fair share of lyrical work to do while in the studio.

“Everybody was hella trippin’, but that’s kind of how I like to work anyways,” Travis says of the high-pressure situation to complete basically half an album’s worth of lyrics on the fly. In the end, things worked out beautifully for the two vocalists, who found themselves locked in a room with Crummett for hours on end, pounding out vocal ideas together.

“I don’t think either of us had any idea how well we were going to work with each other,” Lockwood says of co-writing. “I’ve never worked with another vocalist before.” Travis pointed out that because the group was away from the everyday distractions that come with being home, they were able to channel everything they had into the record. “When you’re in your home town and you have all your stuff, you know, you have your job that you go to, you’ve got your girlfriend, you’ve got your parents and all this stuff. Sometimes it’s distracting,” Travis says. “I hella missed that when I was a full-time touring musician. You kind of just focus on music. So when I got to Portland, I was just kind of like, ‘Ah, I don’t have to think about anything other than just this record,’ and it got all of our attention.”

Even still, the band didn’t finish everything they needed to in their allotted time with Crummett, and they had to record one song in Sacramento with friend and sound engineer Chris Miller. Crummett was still producing even from hundreds of miles away, though, as the band Skyped him during the sessions with Miller.

“He was still there like being able to hear the takes,” Travis says with a chuckle at the thought of Crummett’s face on a computer screen in the room for hours on end.

“He was just like eating Chinese food and shit,” Lockwood says through a laugh while air shoveling a bite of imaginary food into his mouth.

After three weeks spent in Portland with Crummett and a couple more days’ worth of sessions with Miller in Sacramento, the record was finally done, or so Travis thought. “Knowing my luck, we do like two days with Chris and then we get everything done and we’re like, ‘Yes! Fuck yes, it’s done,’” Travis says. “And then I get a call from my guitar player and he’s like, ‘You’ve got to come back and do some more stuff,’ and I was just like, ‘Dude, when is this going to end? We’re not even in Portland anymore.’ But it was completely worth it and the song came out way better than I even thought it could.”

In between the Portland and Sacramento recording sessions, A Lot Like Birds even found time to embark on a week-and-a-half long West Coast tour. It proved a good opportunity to work out the brand new material in the live setting and to gauge people’s reactions to it as well. “It was really like a testing the waters sort of thing,” Travis says. “To see who gives a shit right from the get-go. It was a good response!”

Lockwood recalls one particular night in Anaheim when a girl came up to him at the merch table after the show and told him that she hadn’t heard music like theirs in years, since the early ‘00s. “That’s definitely when I started playing music, that’s when we both started getting really into it. So if anything, if we draw comparisons to stuff from back then, that’s all I’d love to hear.”

Unfortunately for A Lot Like Birds, references to the sounds of the early ‘00s aren’t the only comparisons they’re receiving, as a large number of people (mostly via the Internet) are saying they sound too much like Dance Gavin Dance. No doubt there will be comparisons: both bands are from Sacramento, both have two singers, both have ripping guitar players and rock-solid rhythm sections; heck, they even recorded with the same producer, so yeah, sonically speaking there are some similarities too. But what’s funniest to Travis and Lockwood about the whole situation is that these quick judgments are coming from the album’s two singles, because those are the only two songs off Conversation Piece that the general public has heard.

“People have been really quick to go, ‘Oh, this is what their whole album is going to sound like,’” Lockwood says.

“They don’t even know how versatile it is,” Travis contends. “You know how the Internet goes; people are very, very quick to judge. It’s funny, it’s almost tickling. They have no idea. It’s going to be cool, because they’ll realize it when it comes out.”

Travis also wanted to get off his chest how he feels for Lockwood, who seems to be receiving the brunt of the reviews. The problem? Apparently he screams too much like Jon Mess, DGD’s co-vocalist. “Dude, if you have ears, you would know that it’s completely different,” Travis demands. “Their screaming styles are completely different. It’s just kind of like Jon Mess is the only person they can reference. It’s so funny, like when people compare me to Jonny Craig [DGD’s original vocalist who replaced Travis when he re-joined the band this year], it’s like, ‘Are you fucking retarded? Do you actually have ears? Because I sound nothing like him.’ Not that I couldn’t sing Jonny’s stuff and not that Jonny couldn’t sing my stuff, it’s just, we don’t sound alike. It’s the same thing with Jon Mess and Cory, and I just feel for him.”

Travis has gotten his fair share of attention, too, ever since his departure with DGD. “It’s just something that you have to deal with,” Travis says of constantly being asked about his situation. “It’s like one of those things about your job that you hate but you have to do anyways. I kind of relate it to that, because no I’m not upset, no I’m not tired of it. It’s just one of those things that I know that I’m always going to have to address and that’s fine. If I didn’t have all of that then I wouldn’t have any of this amazing stuff that’s going on right now. So, I think of it that way. Not like, ‘Oh man, I don’t want to talk about the past.’ All of that shit needed to happen in order for this amazing stuff to happen. I look at it like that so I’m not upset when someone is like, ‘What was it like? You got kicked out! Blah blah.’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, I did, but things worked out.’” And if you’re wondering, everything is cool between all the members of DGD and A Lot Like Birds. So much so that the two bands will share the stage together on Thursday, Oct. 13, 2011 at Sacramento State’s University Union.

After weeks spent listening to an advanced copy of their new record, an hour spent over beers at a local pub and a killer live set witnessed, it’s apparent to Submerge that A Lot Like Birds are their own band with their own identity and their own sound. Conversation Piece is no doubt the record that will solidify that and as of right now, getting the album out and into the hands of people who care about it is the only thing on their minds. With a grin from ear to ear, Travis says, “I think things will pop off real fast once that happens.”

A Lot Like Birds’ Conversation Piece will be out on Oct. 11 via Doghouse Records. See them live at Sacramento State’s University Union Ballroom alongside Dance Gavin Dance on Oct. 13. Sacramento’s own Ten After Two will also perform. Tickets are available at the University Union Box Office.