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Twin Town High (vol. 8) |
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Ela: Reality bites
Wednesday 10 March @ 13:48:58 |
 by Rob van Alstyne
It’s a familiar story: college ends, relationships dissolve, people move back home to parentally abetted misery or stay in town and feel like they’re treading water. Almost everyone faces the same question—what the fuck do I do now? Bill Caperton started a band and made a record.
“Basically I graduated in May [of 2002 from the University of Pittsburgh] and moved back here, then broke up a six-year relationship and wrote a record from June to February—that’s pretty much what the record is,” admits Caperton, 23, reflecting on the inspiration for his band Ela’s debut album Stapled to Air.
 “It was definitely a result of finishing school looking around and being like, ‘what the fuck am I doing?’ Looking back on it now from a songwriting perspective I almost wish I could go through it again because it was just such a fertile time for me.”
Enlisting the aid of longtime buddies and fellow St. Paul Central High School alums Peter Leggett (drums) and Sean McPherson (bass)—best known for their work as the rhythm section in beloved local Hip-Hoppers Heiruspecs—Caperton set about putting his existential crisis down on tape. Assembled with the ace production aid of Knol Tate (Askeleton) Stapled to Air is an alluring musical hybrid, blending jagged electric guitar shards and occasional blood curdling yelps with limber bass lines and swinging drum fills. Long running times and unconventional musical passages keep Ela’s musical arsenal varied, just as likely to croon a pensive ballad (“Patient”) as sucker punch you with a raging rocker (“Worry, Worry”). Caperton’s voice is thin but pleasing, the perfect vehicle for tracks like the regret-laden epic “I Don’t Know if It’s Helping” in which Caperton quietly sets the scene of emotional turmoil in a detached voice not far removed from his speaking register (“we’re not out of time / but we are getting to be”) only to see it slowly escalate into a repeated scream of the song’s title over the course of the track’s rolling six-minute running time. The experience is exhilarating—the rock ’n’ roll equivalent of riding a turbulent old school roller coaster whose wooden hinges are perhaps just a little too rickety to ensure complete safety.
“We did the basic tracks live over two days,” says Caperton. “Then we sat on it for like four months and I listened to it a lot and wrote a bunch of extra parts at home. Then Knol and I went back in and added a lot of the little textures in the songs.” It’s these added textures (the distantly echoing piano at the rollicking close of “I Don’t Know if It’s Helping” and the sinewy second guitar parts overdubbed at key moments in cuts like “Halo Fire”) that elevate Stapled to Air from merely a solid rock record to a truly noteworthy achievement. At first blush a raw and engaging treatise in rough-and-tumble-relationship-woe-rock, Stapled to Air slowly reveals itself over repeated listens to be a highly nuanced affair with subtle melodic charms to spare.
Caperton is quick to agree that the magic of the songs lies in the details. “Those [little overdubbed] bits are a huge part of the record to me. That’s why you make a record—otherwise we would have just made a live album. The one band that put out a record this year that I was just blown away by and thought, ‘oh, that’s the record that I want to make’ was the Broken Social Scene’s [You Forgot it in People]. It’s easy to understand, it’s got a rocking base to it, but it has worlds of experimental sounds going on in it.
"Experimenting a lot is my goal, but while still having an accessible song skeleton. You can learn a lot just by getting the song built up and then tearing it down.”
Cuts like the wondrously adventurous “Razor Blade” bare Caperton’s words out. A Stapled to Air b-side released on the group’s recently unveiled 12” single, “Razor Blade” starts off with a seductive bass line and skittering drum pattern before Caperton comes in with jangly electric guitar accompaniment. The song continually morphs after that, beginning life as a Murmur-styled R.E.M. pop nugget and ending it as a free noise collage of music box tinkling and ambient sounds. The barrage of sounds (layered vocals, saxophone snippets, what sound like distorted keyboard samples) is kept locked down by the steady and insistent rhythms of Leggett and McPherson.
Although clearly a student of songwriting craft, Caperton credits his bandmates as central to the development of Ela’s sound. “They’re a huge part of the band,” he claims. “I basically come up with just a bare bones guitar part and some vocals and Sean and Peter just have huge talent as arrangers. They play together so much that we all just click. Having them be in Heiruspecs is kind of hard because we’d like to be playing more shows and they have other commitments, but the group is important enough to us and the idea of the band is important enough for us to make it work. It’s not a singer/songwriter with some guys just backing him.”
Recently augmented to quartet status with the addition of Tate on second guitar and keyboards, Ela is finally ready to unleash their sound in recorded format on an unsuspecting Twin Cities music scene—it’s been a long time coming. “We were actually completely finished with this record last April and didn’t know what we were going to do with it,” says Caperton. “Then things started happening and blah blah we get signed to a label and then finally we get the release date and I’m like, ‘holy shit it’s a year later!’ [the steet date for Stapled to Air is April 20th] I’m beyond anxious at this point. I was anxious last October, now I’m just kind of like ‘I don’t know, I think it’s going to come out sometime…’”
The label is NYC underground Hip-Hop imprint Third Earth Music, home to artists like Roosevelt Franklin, Jean Grae and Minnesota Transplants Odd Jobs—not exactly the home one would have anticipated finding a crackling rock unit like Ela. “Steve [Lewis aka DJ Anatomy from Oddjobs] and I have been kind of working together on a side project for like two years,” explains Caperton. “We make music every now and then and send each other tapes. I gave him a copy of the record just to listen to and then the next thing you know he was calling me up and was like ‘Hey has Kimani [Rogers, head of Third Earth Music] called you? He’s going to put your record out’ it was just the connection through Oddjobs that got us on the label.”
 Although seemingly an odd fit, Third Earth boasts a solid national distribution network for its releases and has already lined up some choice gigs for the band (including a slot opening up for the Wrens’ sold-out shows in Chicago this January during a short Midwestern tour jaunt). “I like to think of the fact that our record is going through the same plant as, like, Hail to the Thief, went through,” says Caperton audibly excited. “I don’t exactly know what that means, but people tell me it’s a good thing.”
Having channeled his post-collegiate crisis into an emotionally charged and achingly beautiful debut album Caperton is now faced with the prospect of bringing it to the people and re-living the dark days that fueled Stapled to Air’s creation. With cuts that range from detailing unfulfilling random hook-ups (“1:45 AM”) to dissecting substance fueled relationship combat (“Dead Medicine”), it’s hard to fault Caperton for being a little wary of having to go through it all again on stage. “Some of the songs for me are deeply personal and writing them was a huge purging,” admits Caperton. “Going out on tour now and playing those same songs every night in a different place with different feelings I feel a little bit false at times singing with so much passion about things that I’ve gotten some distance from now. I embrace it though, it’s a different feeling, but it’s still strong.”
Ela plays the 12” release show for their single “I Don’t Know if It’s Helping” on Sun., Mar. 14, at the Triple Rock Social Club with Tapes N Tapes. 10 p.m. $6. 21+. 629 Cedar Ave. S., Mpls. 612-333-7399. In addition, they will be appearing on Radio K 770 AM’s “Off the Record” program on Fri., Mar. 12., at 4 p.m.
Click to download an mp3 of Ela’s song I Don’t Know if it’s Helping.
You can find out more about Ela on their official website.
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