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Twin Town High (vol. 8) |
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The Alarmists: Rapid risers
Wednesday 28 June @ 14:16:38 |
 By Rob van Alstyne
In a little less than a years time, local five piece the Alarmists have gone from complete unknowns to drawing over 500 people to their all-ages CD release party earlier this month and receiving regular airplay on 89.3 the Current. In the Minneapolis music scene, that’s about as close to an overnight success as one can get. As I learned, however, the band’s year old age is slightly misleading. “The band’s only a year old, but the keyboardist [Joe Kuefler] and I have been playing together for about five years,” explains vocalist/guitarist Eric Lovold. “For awhile we just kind of played privately and weren’t really interested in making a record. We had a couple of recordings we didn’t like. Eventually we assembled a bunch of gear and recorded for ourselves.”
The highly refined sound on the groups self-released debut EP, A Detail of Soldiers, speaks to the long standing musical relationship between Keufler and Lovold with a mixed musical vibe equal parts classic British pop and spiky American underground that is just as often built around Kuefler’s dynamic piano playing as Lovold’s compelling voice. Every piece of the Alarmists sonic arsenal feels essential and the recording is quite clearly the work of a band rather than a front person with indistinguishable supporting players. “We lost our bass player and drummer during the course of recording and it really became just my, [guitarist] Ryan [McMillian] and Joe’s project. We were all playing keyboards, guitars, bass. We had to step up together and really make a record. The lines really blurred in terms of who wrote what part for each song, who was playing what instrument.”
Most bands tend to wait until far along in their careers before branching off into terrain this stylistically diverse, seemingly scared to introduce themselves to the public with such a wide ranging sound for fear of being labeled “unfocused.” The Alarmists have no such qualms. Over the course of A Detail of Soldiers’ six songs the Alarmists are just as convincing with shiny faux-Oasis Brit-pop (the minor key acoustic strum and tambourine intro to “New Romans” is pure “Wonderwall”) as moodier and gritty material (the seductively hazy opener “Soldados”).
“There was definitely a conscious decision to never become a one-trick pony and do one thing,” says Lovold when questioned about his bands sonic diversity on record. “We all have a lot of different influences and backgrounds. I think there are some consistent Brit-pop elements throughout the EP, but I think it’s done in an American way. There’s a flow to it, the EP starts one way and ends another. Sequencing the record was really the hardest part, trying to make it all fit together.”
The record’s eventual track sequencing saved the best for last, with the final three songs on the EP serving as a tantalizing appetizer for a future full-length album; the vampish piano bop of “Some Things Never Stop” sounds like Spoon filtered through an appreciation for class rock guitar riffs and “Coming to Meet Me” with its killer slide guitar line and infectious synthesizer figure is the kind of direct-yet-layered-pop-craft Jeff Tweedy and company used to crank out prior to their current overly ponderous phase. Lovold’s voice works perfectly with the ambitious material, generally clean and tuneful, but with just the right dash of rasp to make him sound believable when he sings, “I know I’m not an outlaw, but I could be for today.” Both tracks serve as the ideal precursor to the grand finale, “She Will Love Again (Hey Kid),” a song whose simple lyrical optimism is pure ’60s flower power while its chugging rhythm section and stealthy guitar lines are welcome in any musical era.
The communal love echoed in some of the group’s songs is more than mere lyrical fancy, the Alarmists are a key part of an exciting new crop of pop-inclined bands (White Light Riot, The Debut) whose band members ages may hover in the early to mid twenties, but whose group politics and friendly openness stem from decades earlier. “Being a part of a larger musical community is something that’s really important to us,” says Lovold. “A band like White Light Riot is doing their thing and we’re doing ours, there such different animals that’s it not really like we’re competing. We try and play shows together when we can so that hopefully people will come out and enjoy both bands. That’s something we want to do a lot more.”
With A Detail of Soldiers fast becoming a local success, Lovold remains calmly optimistic about the Alarmists future. “In today’s world there are just so many thousands of bands out there making music so it’s pretty impossible to get recognized at times,” Lovold states in a matter of fact tone. “There’s no doubt that making and releasing records is a commercial thing, but it’s also something that we just love to do. We want to make another EP as soon as possible, just keep the momentum going. We’re not really thinking about making full-length records right now, hopefully that’s the kind of thing that we could work on with a label at some point. We want to have our music heard by as many people as we can. It’s music that we believe in. The reason I ended up making music - and this goes for everyone else in the band as well I think - is that I always thought a great record could change my life, change the way I felt about things. To be able to do that for someone else would be an amazing experience.”
The Alarmists play on Friday, June 30th at the Turf Club with Chariots, the Plagiarists and NYC instrumental post-rock outfit Zs. 9 p.m. $5. 21+. The corner of University and Snelling Ave., St. Paul. 651-647-0486. For more information check out their official website at http://www.thealarmistsband.com.
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