Musical Charis’ band members discuss their penchant for collaboration and their mission to bring “real gold” back to the music scene
Two of the core members of local indie pop band Musical Charis are in separate rooms of the same apartment engaged in the same conversation. I am on the other end of the line. We’re speaking together on a conference call. It is a new experience for all of us.
I am talking to Blake Abbey and Jessica Brune, the band’s vocalists, and guitarist and keyboardist, respectively, about their upcoming Oct. 11, 2012 release of FOOL$ GOLD on JMB Records. Despite being miles away, I feel like I am dealing with a family.
They soon will be, I later find out. In addition to being band mates, they are engaged and live in the same apartment, along with the band’s bassist Colin Vieira, guitarist Bradley Abbey (Blake’s brother) and a bunny rabbit. It’s the apartment they are in now as they field my questions. Like family, they are talking over each other, and to make matters worse the reception is lousy. Despite the hiccups, we manage to carry out an engaging conversation as they fill me in on the album, touring and their musical values.
“It seems like a lot of things in music and art, fashion, and pop culture, a lot of it is like fool’s gold,” Abbey says, explaining how they came up with the album title. “It’s just shiny and bright, people want to hold it and touch it, but it doesn’t have the same value as gold.
“But the more that we grow in character and as a band, I think the closer we get to realizing how hard it is, how deep you have to dig for gold and the value of it when you get it,” he says.
Abbey, Brune, Bradley and Vieira spent about a week total, split before and after this year’s lengthy spring tour, recording with music engineer Joe Johnston at Pus Cavern. Now they have an album they hope will stand out against the bounty of overproduced, unoriginal material put forth in the music industry.
It was a collaborative process, a coast-to-coast exchange, Brune suggests. Others, including Jarrod Affonso on drums, Brian Brown on the keys and Shawn King, contributed. “Sunlight Stalker,” the last track on the album, was a joint effort between musician Chris King in Florida and Musical Charis. In a Postal Service-like exchange, King wrote the music, and the band wrote lyrics to accompany it.
The result was an album that Abbey says is quite unique, an attempt to produce “real gold.”
“I don’t think this CD is epic, but I think it’s one-of-a-kind, I haven’t heard anything like it,” he says.
Their fourth release following their 2011 album Ace of Space, FOOL$ GOLD is seven tracks of soothing indie pop and lush harmonies with progressive underpinnings.
It is somewhat more technical sonically than their previous albums, Abbey explains, and the rhythms are more intricate, adds Brune.
Since their formation in 2008, following the Abbey brothers’ and Vieira’s relocation from Florida to Sacramento, Musical Charis has been recognized for their folk appeal. In fact, they have been told on several occasions that they are living in the wrong generation. Brune and Abbey don’t dispute this.
“I think that musically we would be received better 30 years ago. Old people love our music, the folk stuff that we do,” Abbey says. “It’s dubstep nation now, dubstep is taking over the world.”
Whatever they have done musically, it seems to be working. They were nominated for Sammies in 2010 and 2012, for Best Album of the Year and Best Indie Band of the Year, respectively, and in 2011 they won the Best Indie Band of the Year Award.
While this album strays somewhat from that folk sound, Abbey and Brune agree that it is one they will likely revisit in the future. After all, it’s easy to switch up musical directions, Brune says, like whipping up a new batch of cupcakes.
“Some people might not like [the new album],” Abbey says. “But it was fun for me, which is the most important thing.”
If you want to produce something relevant in the art world, or bring back ‘the real gold,’ then you have to get your priorities straight, the way Brune and Blake see it.
Which simply means, “Do it because you love it,” Brune says, even if it means collecting pennies.
The drive, patience and desire all have to be there to move a band beyond the five-year mark, they say.
“The real dream is just living it,” Abbey adds.
The fourth track of the album, “The Gift,” is an ode to friends back in Kansas who are doing just this–living the “rock n’ roll” lifestyle of loving, having fun, being broke and not caring. It’s a fancy-free philosophy the members of Musical Charis put into practice as well.
They primarily work for themselves, sometimes working “under the table,” to make ends meet.
The same love of music inspired the band mates to open the Musical Charis Music School in 2009 in the building next to the Colonial Theatre. It started by just spotting the vacant building and asking the question, “What if?”
To this day, they teach music lessons out of Beatnik Studios, mentoring youth in playing guitar, piano, singing, songwriting and performing. Sometimes they will let their students open for the band.
Those who haven’t seen a Musical Charis show should know that no two performances are alike, partly because they are just as willing to share the stage with anyone who wants stage time. Thus they have become known for their high-energy, unpredictable performances.
“We never plan anything,” Brune says. “We’re not like, ‘Oh, it would be so epic if we did this and that.’ We just kind of roll with it and have fun.”
During a show, the stage is treated as a shared space. The band rotates auxiliary drummers and guitarists onstage or invites other bands to join in. Brune may take Abbey’s guitar mid-song, or Abbey might get on the drums. In any given performance, there might be a trumpet, saxophone, accordion, harmonica, congas or xylophone thrown in the mix. Additionally, just about anyone (with exception of belligerent drunks) from the audience is invited to come up and play an instrument.
“We consciously try to make it about everyone,” Abbey says. “It sucks being in a band playing the same show every night, especially in a small town.”
“I want people to go to [our] shows and be like, ‘We’re going to go have fun tonight and we’ll get to play an instrument,’” he says.
The invitation to participate is an intentional attempt to encourage local community-building, they explain, though they never force their audience members to participate.
So during any given show, 12 bodies might end up on stage. On one occasion an audience member was so engrossed in performing he fell off the back of the stage, Brune recalls.
“Sometimes it’s a train wreck, but [it’s] a beautiful train wreck,” Abbey says.
It’s worth mentioning that this band plays a lot of shows, as many as 150 per year. This includes a 65-day national spring tour they plan annually, in addition to smaller tours throughout the year.
Playing so many shows and tours, including SxSW, it’s no surprise that the band has grown a distaste for the predictable party-goers looking to get blitzed. It’s a common pattern the band has noticed, and it inspired one of the tracks on the album. Against a dreamy, circus-y tune, “Fortune Teller” takes a stab at the molly kids, who equate their live music experience with popping pills.
“It became about a culture of just partying, waking up the next day and starting all over,” Brune says.
No doubt they’ll run into more of that during their West Coast tour following the Oct. 11, 2012 album release at the Townhouse Lounge.
Pill poppers aside, right now the four are contemplating house sitters to look out for the apartment and the rabbit while they are gone. The last tour they went on, their turtle died.
Hop on stage and have a blast at The Townhouse Lounge on Oct. 11, 2012 at 9 p.m. when Musical Charis celebrate the release of FOOL$ GOLD. Also performing will be Autumn Sky, Hey Zeus and James Cavern… And maybe you? Pre-order your copy of the album at http://musicalcharis.com/, and if you’d like to babysit a rabbit, drop them a line.
Musical Charis
People People
(JMB)
Musical Charis has teamed up with JMB Records to release their latest full length, People People. For fans of “the gift of grace,” what you expected is to be expected. Musical Charis storms through this disc with the troubling aspirations of a K-Billy’s Super Sounds of the ‘70s weekend. Tarantino wanted ‘70s music in a ‘50s-style film; Musical Charis is portraying 2010 with a late-‘60s/early-‘70’s feel. Except obviously the most glaring issue we have to wrestle with is that this isn’t the ‘70s; it’s 2010, which is both eerily different and similar, an issue we’ll revisit in a moment.
Musical Charis melds together many different instruments: keyboards, xylophones, piano, six-strings, acoustics, electrics, bass, tambourine, drums, female harmonies on the hook, it’s all there. They bring the opposite of Katy Perry’s “California Gurls” with a sense of location, something of the telecommuting agrarian commerce, a connection to the sort of emotive force of sound not Chunneled through Auto-Tune–creating a raw set of harmonies that acknowledges dissonance even when the individual melodies seem to be correctly aligned via analog. And that dissonance, that tension, is where Musical Charis is directing itself in a significant way.
 In Blake Abbey’s words: “Let time run round until we dizzy ourselves /…/ A new age is calling and I am stalling again.” Which brings us back to the eerie differences of today and the ‘70s. The different part is easy–time has changed, obviously we don’t live in the ‘70s anymore, or you likely wouldn’t be born. Abbey says as much; the similar is where things get weird. The ‘70s had the failing Vietnam War, economic stagflation and later a banking crisis created out of intentional federal manipulation of interest rates (we almost bankrupted Mexico. No biggie). Flip to today and we’re waging two multi-front wars operating, economic fears of stagflation and a banking crisis that was created by the finance industry out-manoeuvring the last round of spectral banking regulations (better yet, because of inflation fears, we’re asked to tighten up even further through government austerity). But what’s eerie is that this similar past is somehow accounted for as a better time. It was a time as all times are, in and of itself–each moment its own minute crisis. Things happened that made a difference then; things are happening today that have an equal force.
Musical Charis characterizes the opposite of this, as a form of nihilism, quite neatly in “Forward.” The critique of action stands out as the accumulation of the song ascending, a rising tension, a failing perspective, “And though we all stand up/In the end…/And though we all stand up/What are we fighting for.” Musical Charis suggests that these words need some further contemplation. As they end the track we can say, indeed they do.
The next track begins, “Can you, can you see the past/Looking forward on a map.” This is a revision of knowing the past in order to create a better future, but the next part matters just as much as the former: “Are you satisfied?”
A call to action if there ever was any. Yet, as noted, Musical Charis turn their thoughts inward, focusing on self, and the stylization therein, where tracks like “Jezebel” burrow down into the sort of Crossroads in each of us, making a deal with the devil so that we can represent the passing of freight trains on our guitars. That worked when Ralph Macchio could out-cast the real abilities of Steve Vai, but today the trains are barely moving freight and whoever Ralph Macchio became, in the world we know, Jaden Smith has now replaced him. Musical Charis reminds us of all the history we’re all part of, and the history we’re not; what we do with that good data is up to us.
Music & Games Night : In Leaves, Owltrain & Musical Charis
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Marilyn’s On K, Sacramento
Sometimes when bands break up and members go their separate ways to form new groups, their fans are treated to twice the amount of music. An obvious example would be The Mars Volta and Sparta rising from the ashes of At the Drive In’s breakup in 2001. Such was the case when Sacramento-based pop-rock band Self Against City imploded in late ’08, catapulting the members into two different groups that would later come to be known as Musical Charis and Owltrain. It wasn’t the nastiest of breakups, but it surely wasn’t the prettiest either. On Wednesday, March 18 the split factions of what was once Self Against City were brought together at Marilyn’s on K. Would there be fireworks?
Musical Charis took the stage first. The two core members of the group are Blake Abbey (formerly of Self Against City) and Jessie Brune (also a very prominent local singer/songwriter); throughout their set, different musicians joined them and played various instruments. After somewhat of a slow start, the band really started to pick things up when their drummer joined in on the third song, giving the audience something more to groove to.
Highlights of the set included Abbey talking a whole bunch of crap about his former bandmates in the room (awkward yet hilarious) and the performances of crowd favorites “The Life,” “Anatomy” and their set closer “Baby Blue.” All in all, it was a great musical performance that showcased the musicians’ many talents from Abbey and Brune’s beautiful vocal harmonies to their great songwriting skills. Their set surely proved to all in attendance that Musical Charis is a force to be reckoned with in the music scene today. Look for their late May release of Electra Church Bells via JMB Records.
Next up was Owltrain, who with their more typical rock-band setup (two guitars, bass, keys, drums), were able to really up the level of energy in the room, with a sound reminiscent of bands like Mute Math, Minus the Bear, Coldplay and Radiohead.
The band’s most notable feature was the incredible performance of Owltrain’s drummer, Justin Barnes. The guy was a machine, and he looked so at home behind his kit it would make any percussionist want to practice more. (Even then they still probably wouldn’t have the chops this guy does.)
Barnes may have been the standout member of the group, but that doesn’t mean the other members didn’t shine as well. Jeffery LaTour, who played primarily guitar and some keys but sang backup vocals as well, made great use of his effects pedals and looped samples. He also was singing through what I later learned was some type of old telephone, rigged up as a microphone, which served as a very unique, lo-fi filter for his soaring voice. Jack Matranga, the group’s lead singer who also switched between guitar and bass, played some rather technical parts on bass and guitar while maintaining his breath and pitch control quite well. Finally, Danny Cocke, who mostly played bass but wound up with a guitar in his hands for a few songs, rounded out their sound perfectly with his effortless playing. The biggest crowd pleasers were “Harmony Cannons,” “Green Key,” and the set closer, “1984,” which included an incredible buildup at the end where sounds were layered upon one another until it came to an abrupt end, leaving the crowd mesmerized.
Rounding out the night was In Leaves, a brand new band to hit the Sacramento scene. Considering this was only their second performance as a full band, In Leaves was quite impressive and loud—very loud. With their amps set to 11, In Leaves proceeded to make everyone in the room’s ears bleed, but in a good way. In between songs, lead singer JJ Dunlap’s voice sounded destroyed, but during the songs he was great, proving how much of a trooper he really is. The band really started to shine when Dunlap dropped his guitar (not literally) and became more of an energetic frontman with his long shaggy hair in his face, a hole in his jeans and tambourine in hand as he furiously danced around the stage. His vocal style is similar to that of Caleb Followill of the popular band Kings of Leon—so watch out KWOD, you might be spinning In Leaves soon.
At the end of their very rockin’ set, In Leaves walked off stage with the microphone swinging from the rafters and feedback from the bass amp permeating through the room. The sound guy had a “WTF?” look on his face and everyone else was making sure they weren’t deaf. Hearing is overrated anyways.
Luckily, the only fireworks all night were of the musical variety, Abbey’s comments notwithstanding. Breaking up can be hard to do.
