Could G. Green Become Sacramento’s Most Loved Band?

G. Green was once the most unpopular band in Sacramento. Originally Andrew Henderson’s bedroom recordings moniker, his solo shows in Sacramento garnered anathema of clandestine ridicule and indifference. There was a time I loathed seeing the name listed on every Hub show and house party, and I wasn’t alone. It was fun to smear G. Green in 2009 and it was excruciating to see them on the verge of amateurish implosion in 2011. Most of you probably still assume G. Green is locked into a static identity as Midtown brats, drunk on youth, and too drunk to do much besides be obnoxiously loud. While we were laughing, when we stopped caring and stopped looking, G. Green quietly became a serviceable indie band, writing songs destined to shed the onus of snotnosed bush leaguers.

Before she became G. Green’s drummer, Liz Liles described the first G. Green show (a one-off lineup consisting of Henderson on guitar and promoter Rick Ele on drums) as horrible and a disservice to the former KDVS DJ’s sterling reputation.

“I thought ‘why is DJ Rick playing with this idiot,’” she said. “Me and whoever I was with, we watched one song and then went into the alley to smoke cigarettes.”

In the greenhorn years of the band, Henderson was the perpetual opener; the sort that would clear a venue, living room or DIY space except for his steadfast cheerleader, DJ Rick.

“I put him in front of audiences, and the awkwardness, the house slippers on his feet, and the most piercing moments of singing were initially a big turnoff to people,” Ele said. “But Andrew seemed totally impervious to disapproval.”

*****
They’re all laughing at you, aka the infamous Capital Bowl show

Mt. St. Mtn. founder and former Mayyors member Mark Kaiser put out G. Green’s first record, Crap Culture, in 2012, but it took time for him to become a backer. In gathering stories of infamous G. Green failures, Kaiser and Liles invoked the West Sacramento Capital Bowl show in 2008 without hesitation. In those days, bands would rent out the events room to play, and according to Kaiser, “trash.” The bill was geared toward trashing the place with Mayyors and Eat Skull (a notoriously self-destructive Portland band), while the G. Green solo set was the black sheep. Liles said she and her friends openly ridiculed the G. Green set. While Kaiser likened the clumsy solo performance as arriving “too late for that mid-’90s Olympia-wrought ‘any art is good art’ vibe.” Henderson was not going to be the next Calvin Johnson.

“Andrew was really young, and looked really drunk and really nervous,” Kaiser said. “He let loose, and I cringed. The show was fun, drunken chaos, all the bands on the bills were renowned for being a wasted mess, but this was excruciating.”

*****
Laughing: from ‘at’ to ‘with’

Liles might have mocked Henderson at first, but one evening he showed up at her Midtown home, then known as the Funcastle, expecting a Thee Oh Sees show. Liles had moved the show to another venue, but the encounter with Henderson sparked a quick friendship. At the time Liles was a—quote, unquote—drummer for experimental groups Sucks and Fatty Acid. Untrained and illiterate to tempo, she began telling Henderson she was G. Green’s new drummer.

Henderson obliged after booking a house show with Kurt Vile, Eat Skull and Ganglians. He had two months to put together an opening band; Liles was the first piece. The remaining guitar parts were filled out by Julian Elorduy (drummer for Mayyors in those days) and Dylan Craver. Two months proved enough and sustained the approval of scene-dad DJ Rick.

“I didn’t really know if the band would continue after that one show,” Henderson said. “Rick loved us and threw us on all these shows and put us on [Operation Restore Maximum Freedom]. Pretty much the reason Liz and I still play music together is because Rick threw us into the whirlwind of the Sacramento music scene at that time.”

Kaiser recalls being at the full lineup’s debut, despite purposely steering clear of solo sets since the bowling alley incident.

“The second time I saw Andrew play it was with this first incarnation of a live band and it was a world of difference,” he said. “It was sloppy and chaotic, but it was fun and there were lots of ‘whoa, if they keep doing that’ moments that had me intrigued.”

Henderson and Liles cherish the times with that early incarnation, but also knew it could never last. Elorduy quit the band after Liles broke up with him for Hella drummer Zach Hill, and was replaced by Brittney Gray on bass. Henderson and Craver were the best of friends and also prone to volatile feuds. Every show and practice was a fun, drunken gathering that flirted with implosion.

“We were so close as friends that none of it mattered if people liked us,” Henderson said. “We were just getting drunk and having fun. Me and Dylan were good friends and then we’d hate each other. He probably quit the band infinity times.”

Before the final nail was put in the original lineup, G. Green enlisted Andy Morin, long before his stint in Death Grips, to record their debut, Crap Culture. A shambolic and lo-fi collection of mad-dash punk songs, Crap Culture captured G. Green at the time—unruly and unpolished, but beneath the caterwaul existed nuggets of pop punk gold. Kaiser compared the record to Superchunk’s No Pocky For Kitty, lauding G. Green for maintaining their live energy on record.

“‘Pool Of Blood’ was the song that made me offer them a record,” he said. “That song was a sign they had something and were capable of growing past the kiddish fun-punk into something bigger.”

Crap Culture arrived late to the cultural trend of low-budget to no-budget albums, home-recorded on junkable equipment. It was recorded in 2010, but did not see release until August 2012. By then contemporaries like Wavves had ditched the intelligible scuzz for pop-punk polished for MTV. Also, by the release of Crap Culture on Mt. St. Mtn., G. Green featured a lineup far superior to the rag-tag group that winged it through the debut.

With replacements Simi Sohota on bass and Mike Morales on guitar, G. Green returned to the studio, paying Robby Moncrieff to record a follow-up at the Hangar. Besides being a friend of the band, Moncrieff was a popular choice having recorded Dirty Projector’s critically praised Bitte Orca and fellow Sacramento band Ganglians’ Still Living. Unfortunately Henderson said the band made the mistake of requesting Moncrieff “make it sound like Woodhouse,” meaning Chris Woodhouse, the Hangar engineer responsible for seminal linchpins like all eight Thee Oh Sees records and the A Frames.

Henderson said, “We didn’t use Robby as he should be used as an engineer. He did the best he could, but it’s not the way Robby works. There was no unifying theme with it. It was just a smathering of shit and it didn’t sound very good.”

The record was scrapped, except for two songs which became the “Funny Insurance” b/w “Sounds Famous” 7-inch. Liles corroborated their poor performance, attributing it less to Moncrieff, and more to the band for it sucking. They entered the studio with songs written by all the members with no vision for the band’s identity.

Liles said, “we’ve had really bad luck recording full records… until now.”

*****
New lineup, new lease…

On June 10, 2013 I drove my then girlfriend’s Altima to Davis to see Parquet Courts, a burgeoning Brooklyn band, and Fine Steps, a new project by Julian Elorduy. G. Green was also on the bill, so I planned to arrive late, still pegging G. Green as the perpetual opener. To my surprise Fine Steps was on when I arrived at the Davis Bike Collective. I caught their last two songs. I grew despondent realizing a full G. Green set stood in the path to Parquet Courts. Who agreed to this bat shit order of operation?

With no beer to drink and no cigarettes to smoke outside, I remained inside conceding that despite my efforts I’d been hoodwinked into a G. Green set. Now, I don’t recall particular songs from the set in that blazing, claustrophobic bike shop, but I do know that’s the night I stopped laughing at G. Green. The additions of Sohota and Morales gave them chops previously lacking in the dynamic. Liles had become a force, and Henderson’s once pubescent screech had caked enough nicotine on his vocal cords for a second lease on his balls dropping. There’s plenty to love about a band bent on belligerence, but when that same band backs it up with the skills to earn that abandon, they stop being local brats and graduate into a menace worthy of unleashing on the country at large.

This year on the porch of Kupros I confess to the founding members the Parquet Courts show is when I started believing in G. Green. Henderson states it was his birthday that night, while Liles mentions that Parquet Courts opened for them when they played Brooklyn’s storied 285 Kent venue. Both are unphased that I once detested their band. I was never the only one and I wasn’t the only convert either.

Liles said, “A lot of people probably haven’t been taking the time to see us lately because they saw us so many times three years ago and have decided there’s no way we’ve actually progressed.”

Henderson added, “There’s an image that probably still exists in a lot of people’s minds of these weird shitty kids that are drunk all the time and looking for the next party. We’re convincing people who’ve seen it from the beginning that we’re a great band now.”

Liles and Henderson turned 25 this year. Neither member wanted to be pigeonholed to perceptions developed when they were still teenagers. The upcoming Area Codes album was honed on tour, the band delegating a set it would play nightly until the songs were ingrained in their muscle memory. The decision to be professional and treat their live set with care translates to the album, which was recorded by Woodhouse, whose specialty is live tracking, room sound and mic placement. Even a late night of binging on spirits and karaoke at the Distillery couldn’t sandbag their comfort with the songs.

“We finally developed a sound that cut any bullshit,” Henderson said. “We didn’t really know how to make a band sound. In recording with Chris, he just documents what we’re doing.”

But is their scene-dad Rick Ele a proud papa?

“So many Chris Woodhouse productions have that unmistakable Woodhouse touch,” Ele said. “He becomes the fifth Beatle to so many bands, but in the case of Area Codes, I think he really just used his magic to maximize the G. Greenness of this record.”

Kaiser was equally impressed, keeping the band on his Mt. St. Mtn. roster for a second go-round, calling their current incarnation a “quick progression.”

“The new lineup came about and they tightened up both their live presence and song writing. I kept telling Andrew to just pony up the money and record with Woodhouse. He’s the wizard, he knows their sound and knows how to make them sound more like themselves. That’s what they did and this new recording is a huge step forward.”

The night at Kupros we drank enough short-n-talls of Coors Light and Jameson to carry the festivities to the former Funcastle, now also the home of Henderson. I apparently needed to try “tangler,” a moonshine-like infusion engineered by Liz’s boyfriend. Once there it was filmed and failed beer shotguns for the tour promo video, messy blueberry pancakes, and Guided By Voices’ Alien Lanes on the record player. As both made more of a mess than a mouthful in shotgunning the PBRs, I wondered how they ever got the stigma of a party band. Earlier that night Liles insisted they were misunderstood. “We’re not a party punk band, we’re a weird band,” she said. “The record only mentions pizza once!”

“We’re a straight up indie rock band now,” she said.

Most importantly are these last words from Ele, their cheerleader since day one. Watching a solo project from an awkward kid from Folsom become a band after making friends with the girl who laughed at his sets.

“Andrew’s always the heart and soul of the band as voice and chief songwriter, but through these lineup issues, Liz really stepped up to become the band’s leading co-star. They could change lineups 100 more times, and from now on, I’ll always think of Andrew and Liz as G. Green.”

Celebrate the release of Area Codes Saturday, Aug. 30, 2014 at Witch Room (1815 19th St.) with G. Green, Rat Columns, Violent Change and more. The 18-and-over show starts at 8 p.m. and tickets are just $5. Check out
Facebook.com/ggreenband for more info.

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.”

For more info, go to Facebook.com/brainstormbrainstorm.

Appetite’s Teddy Briggs foregoes waiting for a label and releases his latest album on his own

In the least dramatic of interpretations possible, Teddy Briggs would rather devote his time to creative outlets over the necessary habit of satisfying his stomach. While all your friends are becoming foodies, getting off on the exhilarating release of flavor, Briggs is busy denying himself sustenance while writing songs about being over food.

Appetite is the solo project of Teddy Briggs, drummer of What’s Up?. He totally understands the irony of his moniker, but it’s not deliberate. It just came together the way things do sometimes, much like the title of his new record, Scattered. Smothered. Covered. The inspiration for the title lies in Southern slang for how you like your hash brown potatoes. “I feel those words represent different ways I feel,” he said. “Covered, not meaning covered up, but meaning I’m covered, like, ‘You’re good.’ Feeling scattered and feeling smothered, but also feeling like you’ve got everything together is more or less the same thing. Those emotions are happening so often for me at the same time. It just spoke to me.”

Briggs discovered the slang while out to breakfast with a friend from the south in San Francisco. He told her during that meal his next album would bear the name. “Instead of trying to rethink it when the album was made, I stuck to that thought,” he said. “I think it’s very applicable to the record.”

One listen will confirm the applicability of the title, as Appetite drifts from the tropicalia vibes of “Warn Me, Right,” that might gather comparisons to the trend toward prep school-afrobeat, to the American-born indie stomp of “Tussy.” Appetite could get critical nod to contemporaries such as Sufjan Stevens, Vampire Weekend and Andrew Bird, but is by no means eating from their silver plates and sampling their wines. Scattered. Smothered. Covered. is far too mature and calculated for such novice missteps.

The first Appetite record, called The Ambiguous Garment, was released on Obstructive Vibrations, a local label run by Briggs’ band mate from What’s Up?, Robby Moncrieff. Unfortunately the label is in hibernation, as Moncrieff is engulfed in a multitude of projects, letting the website remain dormant. It’s excusable, considering Moncrieff recorded Briggs’ record, provided guidance in the studio and shopped it to a few labels who heard the record, but didn’t bite.

Briggs said he’s gotten positive feedback from people he said “don’t really owe me anything” and friends alike. He admitted to not pushing hard due to a lack of industry contacts, so for now it’s the DIY route. “I’m sick of not having anything at shows for people to take home,” he said, which is why Briggs is self-releasing Scattered. Smothered. Covered. on Bandcamp.com the day of his release show and bringing along CD-Rs to sell. “If someone wanted to do an actual release on a label, that’d be great,” he said. “But I’m not going to wait.”

Briggs considers Obstructive Vibrations more of a stepping stone for musicians than a label that is interested in career-building. It’s a fitting analogy, as his debut in comparison to Scattered. Smothered. Covered. is a weirdo introduction that garnered enough interest for Briggs to take the project seriously and tighten up the sound to a more mature level than freak-folk songs about crack for hippies. “All that old shit was pretty ambition-less,” he said. “It was just what I’d do for fun. At that point it was never a project that I really wanted to perform.”

Briggs is a drummer by trade, a trait that is denied in his work as Appetite. Briggs felt complimented when I expressed that the record did not sound as though it was made by a drummer–not trying to dis, but you won’t mistake Appetite for a Zach Hill side project. Briggs plays all the instruments on the record (recorded in five days at Hangar Studios), save for a few. “[Robby] was inspired by what I was doing live, which is super stripped-down,” Briggs said. “We left out the sound bytes and weird recordings. He was the one that kept me from putting in a fifth vocal track and said, ‘This is fine.’”

Now that Appetite is becoming a band meant for live interpretation, Briggs is coping with the adjustment of hearing someone else play his songs, kind of like a toned-down Brian Wilson mania. “Since I played everything, I have a very specific thought and sound I want it to be in my head,” he said. “That is just not going to happen with other people playing. I’m not saying they wouldn’t do their jobs and bring their own thing to the table, but it’s still an awkward feeling.” As serious as Briggs is taking Appetite, he’s not at a point of pressuring band mates to sign on in blood or even have the “are you in or are you out” conversation. “I think that’s better for everybody,” he said.

“Over Food” is the parting ballad on the album, which ties into the unplanned, yet undeniably heavy-handedness of Appetite’s food theme, a frustration that Briggs is quick to point out himself. “I have a weird relationship with food,” he said. “I enjoy food. I like the way it tastes. I also find eating to be a chore. You have to eat in order to continue being productive. Eating is fuel. I eat fast and get it done.”