Tag Archives: Michael Franzino

Sianvar

At Arm’s Length • Post-hardcore Supergroup Sianvar Get Lost, Stay Lost on Debut LP

If existing as a band separated by state lines, conflicting tour schedules and regular old life hiccups were big hurdles to leap, no one told Sianvar. The post-hardcore supergroup—consisting of Will Swan (Dance Gavin Dance), Donovan Melero (Hail the Sun), Sergio Medina (Stolas), Joe Arrington and Michael Franzino (A Lot Like Birds)—are without a doubt one of the hardest-working musical entities currently making the rounds not just in the Sacramento area, but probably in much of North America.

When I catch up with Medina, he’s pulled over at a truck stop with about a two-day drive left to his home in Las Vegas from outside New York City, where his band Stolas has cut their sophomore record with producer Mike Watts. Medina is doing the long haul at a brisk pace in order to have enough time to relax and rehearse before Sianvar begins a month-long tour throughout the West Coast.

On top of the rush between his recording with Stolas across the country and the impending Sianvar record release and tour, vocalist Melero recently completed a run of dates with Hail the Sun after finishing up the band’s third full-length, Culture Scars. Swan and Dance Gavin Dance have plans for a new record, as does A Lot Like Birds, both of which will almost certainly call for touring. It’s a maddening-sounding schedule that necessitates a lot of long-distance decisions for Sianvar.

“I used to think ‘fuck, how would that work as a band?’” says Medina of Sianvar’s scattered members. “That didn’t seem like a way to function in my head. It’s been perfectly normal for us in Sianvar, though. For me it’s just something we gotta do to operate and continue, and to me it’s not very much a big deal.”

Stay Lost, Sianvar’s debut LP, assumes a frantic pace not unlike what you’d expect the sum of each member’s other bands might coalesce into. Heavy guitar effects add sonic flourishes to progressive technicality on songs like the album’s first single, “Omniphobia,” a paranormal meditation set to caterwauling emo aggression. Fans of Melero’s Hail the Sun will revel in his Anthony Green-like range, while fans of post-prog giants like The Mars Volta will hang on every chord change and phrase manipulated by the Swan-Medina tandem. It’s a relentless kind of racket best served repeatedly for its full effects to become absorbed, like any good progressive band.

The songwriting, according to Medina, and as you may well imagine, can be tedious.

“Sometimes something will stick and I’ll want to change it and put it under a microscope and say, ‘Why did we do this? Why don’t we do this?’ explains Medina. “Will will say, ‘Why do you want to change it? It already feels good.’ I think as a musician I want to think something cool shouldn’t have sprouted that quickly. There were a lot of times when we were writing the album with those kinds of moments where we’d do something cool and then Will would get out his phone and we’d record very quickly so we wouldn’t forget it.”

Adding to the disjointed nature of the record is the fact that by virtue of the band’s schedules, they went in weeks apart for the recording sessions that resulted in Stay Lost. Far be it for you to be able to tell, though. Songs as frantic and ruthless as “Anticoagulant” or “Psychosis Succumbing” are testaments to the band’s innate songwriting chemistry—a melodic maelstrom made explicitly for the sordid corners of your psyche.

Despite the extra effort obviously necessary for Sianvar to exist, Medina insists that the band member’s other groups are supportive.

“It was a little delicate at first for A Lot Like Birds because it was their whole rhythm section playing in Sianvar,” admits Medina. “That quickly blew over, though. Stolas is the newest band out of the four of us, so we’re at the bottom, but anything that’s come from Sianvar has only helped us. My bandmates have always been cool with that.”

It behooves Medina and the rest of Sianvar to strike out with their own identity, too. While the band can’t help but wear its incestuous influences on its sleeve, Sianvar is probably more concerned with being super good than being a supergroup.

“Nothing we’ve come up with has been deliberately trying to be this or that,” says Medina. “It’s bound to happen that some parts end up sounding like DGD or Hail the Sun. But we definitely strive to make sure this band, not only musically but with the way we present ourselves, goes with Sianvar’s vibe and makes it different and makes it standout as its own other band, not just a side project of a bunch of musicians.”

Produced by Dryw Owens at Roseville’s Little Russia Recordings, Sianvar embellished their lofty aural alchemy to huge heights, with Owens encouraging the copious use of pedals to propel the band’s strong rhythmic talents to wall-of-sound levels. Songs like “BedRoots” are practically void of dynamic shifts, approximating the kind of fantasy-prog decadence of Yes, Trans-Siberian Orchestra or the indulgent depths of black metal luminaries like Gorgoroth.

Interestingly, it’s probably safe to say that Sianvar’s muses were nowhere near any of the aforementioned artists, and it’s ironic that toward the end of “BedRoots,” some of the jazz fusion leanings of Swan’s DGD-compositions are finally unveiled a bit. The band’s fearless exploration of deafening squalls of sound is admirable, if only when it’s contrasted a bit by a spoonful of soulful sugar.

With so much on the horizon for each member of Sianvar’s other bands, it’s unsurprising that it will be difficult to maintain the momentum for the group beyond the upcoming tour and release, being facilitated by Swan’s label, Blue Swan.

“We don’t really think about it but kids at shows think it’s crazy that we’re all in a band together,” says Medina. “I don’t really think of it that much, but it is kind of a cool thing. It’s a very family-oriented work flow.”

Sianvar will be celebrating the release of their first full-length Stay Lost on Aug. 5, 2016 with a show at The Boardwalk, located at 9426 Greenback Lane in Orangevale. This all-ages show will get started at 6:30 p.m. with special guests My Iron Lung, Save Us from the Archon, Subtlety and A Foreign Affair. Tickets are $12 in advance, $14 the day of the show and are available online at Theboardwalkpresents.com.

Sianvar

SACRAMENTO POST-HARDCORE BAND A LOT LIKE BIRDS TO TOUR EUROPE

Sacramento post-hardcore band A Lot Like Birds are set to tour in Europe this February, and although the guys are beyond stoked for their first trip overseas, their routing schedule looks brutal. They’ve got 23 shows scheduled in as many days! They’re hitting the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Hungary, Ukraine and more.

“We have never done anything like it!” said Michael Franzino, the bands composer/guitarist.

“I feel for my vocalists and dread my ‘bang overs,’” he said, referring of course to the way one’s neck and body feel the morning after a gig full of head bangin’ and stage divin’.

It could be worse, though, they’ve hired a driver and the trips between shows will be relatively short. On top of that, they’re traveling in a Sprinter that has bunks, although co-vocalist Cory Lockwood doesn’t think they’ll need them much.

“It’s a little depressing that we won’t have any vacation time to scout around a new continent,” Lockwood said, “But we just don’t plan on sleeping much.”

He continued with, “Besides the obvious excitement of any trip overseas, I think we’re all really excited to explore a fan base that we’ve watched grow over time but have never really been able to experience firsthand. I want to see if they move more, how large the turnouts are and I want to hear how our music impacts them.”

To view the entire tour schedule and to hear some tunes from their past two albums (2009’s self-release Plan B and 2011’s Conversation Piece, out on Doghouse Records), visit http://www.facebook.com/ALotLikeBirds or http://alotlikebirdsband.tumblr.com/. The group plans on entering the studio this spring with engineer Kris Crummett at Interlace Audio in Portland, Ore. (he did Conversation Piece) to record a new album that will be released on Equal Vision Records, the band’s current home.

“This record is going to be banananuts,” Franzino said. “We are really expanding on the strengths of our past two records effectively, at least what I perceive those to be. We won’t know the beast completely until we make the journey home from Kris’ studio.”

Nothing Like You’d Expect

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.

Orchestrated Chaos

Sacramento music wunderkind Michael Franzino talks A Lot Like Birds
Words by Julie De La Torre
Photo by Daniel Dare

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A Lot Like Birds isn’t, well, a lot like anything else you’ve heard before. Starting out as a two-man project led by frontman Michael Franzino, the experimental group soon picked up five additional members and hasn’t looked back. Since winning the Jammies with former band She’s a Dead Man in 2007, the precocious 20-year-old has not only grown up mentally, but musically, as well.

Submerge had the chance to chat with Franzino about everything from his main sources of inspiration to what it was like recording an insanely sophisticated debut release in the confines of a suburban living room. With their ball-busting stage presence and new full-length album, Plan B, A Lot Like Birds is proving to be one of the most promising up-and-comers of 2010.

So, first off, what are you trying to accomplish with A Lot Like Birds that’s different from your other musical projects?
In my previous and first band, our appeal lied solely in our live shows, due to youthful inexperience and naiveté in musicianship and our wildly eccentric and strong stage presence. People came to our shows to dance or laugh at how silly we could be. A lot has changed in my life in the two years since the demise of She’s a Dead Man, and a hell of a lot has changed since the beginning of it four years ago, when the majority of that music was written. It’s kind of like being a senior laughing at your goofy freshman self in retrospect. I’d like to think (or hope, really) that A Lot Like Birds gives people something stimulating or moving to listen to, while we lose our fucking minds on stage night after night.

What were your biggest challenges while recording Plan B?
That would most definitely be the drum programming process, which took five of the nine total months in the studio with the great Jack O’Donnell’s Shattered Records. I basically had a big MIDI spreadsheet before me with every possible beat and every possible drum and cymbal where I had to dictate, as a guitarist, every single drum note and how hard it was to be hit. That, and we had all kinds of nail-biting computer troubles; Jack never expected to record songs with over 100 tracks.

What have you taken from this entire experience? What have you learned since your days of winning the Jammies in high school?
What I learned most from this experience was the recording process really, and how to utilize it as another dynamic in my music. There are all kinds of tricks [and] ways to change moods or make parts sound bigger or spacey or creepy. Utilizing effects and compression appropriately can really make a song or part something different. There’s so much more to making a record than people think; it gives me such a new love for the albums I revere.

It seems like the album has a lot of Mars Volta/At the Drive In inspiration behind it. If so, how does that come into play? What/who are your main influences? 
Omar Rodriguez-Lopez is certainly a hero of mine. If I take anything from the man, it’s a driving insistence upon challenging myself and an audience. Using chaos and discord to contrast gentle and beautiful or making tension and anxiety in a big build are some of my favorite dynamics, and Omar is a master of them among many other things. If the music I write is influenced by anything I can articulate, it’s moods or phases in my life. The past few years in which Plan B formed in my head were some of the darkest times I’ve seen. I think you can hear it in comparison to my embarrassing former work.

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What was it like to record with 10-plus musicians?
It’s absolutely amazing. I wouldn’t have it any other way; I like big compositions with all kinds of layers to tear apart and fall into. I’d be tragically bored in a typical three-piece rock band. The performances I witnessed in Jack’s studio were absolutely beautiful. Most of these guest musicians came in without hearing the music once and laid their parts down in one to two takes. I could not be more grateful to have such helpful and incredibly talented friends.

This album was very reminiscent of a rock opera—was that your intent?
It was not, but I had certainly hoped for the songs to flow well into each other and for it to be an album, not just a collection of songs. I think there is a difference; each song on the album is intentionally placed where it is.

Describe the live show of A Lot Like Birds… What do you think sets you guys apart from anyone else right now?
Our live show was an interesting entity to orchestrate, with the album consisting of so many musicians and all. Originally intended as guests on the album, Cory Lockwood, screamer; Ben Wiacek, guitarist [of post-hardcore project, Discovery of a Lifelong Error]; Athena Koumis, violinist [of folk-rock project, Life as Ghosts]; Juli Lydell, vocalist/keyboardist and Tyler Lydell, drummer [of experimental-folk project, The Dreaded Diamond] have all banded around myself and bassist Michael Litterfield. Making us seven strong, there’s rarely a time when you don’t have something to watch. We arrive to shows with every intent to walk off stage extremely sore, sweaty and out of breath.

What are your plans for 2010? Any ideas for a tour or additional albums?
We are going in to record an acoustic EP called Fuck Morrissey within the next two weeks and after that another full length, because if this took nine months to record, only God knows how long the next one will. As far as touring, we are most definitely going to tour at all costs this summer, hopefully with the backing of a label or management company, but DIY will suffice.

Any last words?
Yes, please listen to the bands whose musicians were guest on this album, including: The Dreaded Diamond, H. Letham, Life as Ghosts, Discovery of a Lifelong Error, Zuhg and our friends The Speed of Sound in Sea Water!

A Lot Like Birds

A Lot Like Birds headlined Jan. 16 at the Shire Road Club in Sacramento.
To find out when and where they’re playing next check out www.myspace.com/alotlikebirds