To borrow a line from Joni Mitchell, I am staring a hole in my scrambled eggs.
Sitting in a diner on the far west side of Indianapolis, I am transfixed. And I don’t want to move. Any shift in the air, any change to my personal-space bubble, would be a distraction, and I don’t want to miss anything.
I’m listening to “Troubled Souls”, the new single from the Northern Indiana collective Von Strantz, and I am trying to imagine a world in which all musicians or those who call themselves musicians infuse their art with a tenth of the emotion that Jess Strantz and her vagabond band have put into this big sky of a four minute song.
The song begins innocently enough; a simple acoustic phrase gives way to the first verse, bathed in a thick vocal harmony. “We’ve entered in as troubled souls/we come and go unnoticed”. It’s the sound of a band waking up at their next destination and venturing out into unchartered territory, brave and crazy and rolling its rhythm across a vast prairie that seems to be theirs for the taking. It’s impossible to listen to “Troubled Souls” only once. It’s the anti-thesis to almost everything that’s wrong with music right now.
“Troubled Souls” leads off Narrative: Chapter 1, the first of three planned EPs the band will release in the coming year, with chapters 2 and 3 coming in summer and fall respectively.
Jess Strantz is on the horn from Mishawaka. “We’re hoping that people will figure out what we’re trying to do”, she says when I ask her about the intentional or accidental thematic linkages between the Narratives EPs. “There are multiple stories that intertwine with each other. I wish we could record the whole blasted thing in one sitting but I’m glad we’re taking time to put it out because it will take on more shape”. It is fitting that Strantz is approaching the Narrative project this way. Much like the band’s live performances, the audience’s interpretation of their music will be unique to the individual listener. Von Strantz’s music is a variable and the depth of its meaning all depends on your baseline.
One thing that is universal about Von Strantz is that they get their audience’s attention before they even start playing. At their Indianapolis gigs, where they’ve shared bills with bands like Veseria and Coup D’eTat, Von Strantz’ violins, cello and upright bass got people talking about them instead of the usual between-set banter. And once they start their set, and Jess’ voice breaks the ice, everyone – even the smoking-patio dwellers – stops what they’re doing.
“I am in love with that woman’s voice…Dear Lord”, says Veseria’s Jen Roberts. It’s a sentiment that gets repeated throughout our little music community quite often. When you see them, musician or not, you want to know when they’ll be back. Everyone knows Von Strantz and thinks of them as one of ours, not some out of town band that plays here occasionally. They are on that short list of bands we wish we could adopt.
It’s hard to mark a point of reference for this band. You can easily hear geographic and cultural influences, but when someone asks “who do they sound like”, you’re stumped. They don’t sound like anyone, they sound more like…a place.
Jess Strantz’s place started in Houston, Texas. Her dad’s job saw him taking positions all over the country, and the family went with him. Her mom home-schooled and eventually she found herself in the South Bend area. It was there that Von Strantz came together and still calls it home base. During a “dry season” in which she was recovering from an injury, Jess started writing songs that tilted away from the piano-based pop-rock she had been doing. “I wanted to write music that would sound good all by itself, but also with multiple arrangements. The music just lends itself to whatever set-up we have.”
“We played our first gig in 2012. It was me with a string quartet and it went really well.” With the acceptance of the local music community quickly under their belt, they put out an EP in January 2013. Featuring cinematic style meditations like “Death…Or So You Think” and “1793”, the VON STRANTZ EP about as far from the typical freshman release as a band could hope to get. Already sounding like a band that knows its way around the stage and the studio, they “inherited a few more musicians…and from February (2013) until now we’ve been playing as many shows as possible”
Narrative Chapter 1 and its sister EPs were recorded as a seven piece. The goal is always to perform in that configuration, “but sometimes it’s a 6 piece, a 5 piece, a 4 piece….”.
The new material is a testament to the group’s road tan. The songs sound of a larger space. “Troubled Souls” and “Nothing Good In Me” come across as a new form of spiritual, and would have people testifying in a stifling rock club or a desert-blown tent revival. There is more of a stomp to the new songs, a slightly rockier vibe. But it doesn’t undermine the gentle beauty of the songs. There is some intricate electric guitar, mixed with prominent and lilting phrases from the string section. Strantz’s voice beckons and soars, delivering lyrics that convey both a curiosity and an understanding. It’s a complex world, and Strantz’s lyrics ask questions about what we might be if that complexity was stripped away, and life was simpler.
Strantz says the songs are the result of a communal effort. “We meet in my home, an old school building in the middle of nowhere,” she says with a laugh. “A lot of time they bring their influences with them and everybody is so different. Josiah (Gaut, guitar) loves progressive rock and metal, Nick (Leatherman, bass) likes Motown and surf rock, and the string section….I am not even on their level…its another world. Kelsey (Arntzen, violin) loves alternative rock and metal, Kristen (McDonald, violin) and Isiah (Brock, cello)– a lot of the music they tell me about I don’t know anything about. Alyssa (Neece, violin) loves modern contemporary classical arrangements.”
The classical elements seem to suit the bands overall charter. “Me and Nick and Josiah are the ‘rock and roll’ half of the band, and the string players are used to working together and want to make a piece of music sound as beautiful as possible together. So it’s a perfect marriage where both aspects of the band are looking to make our music sound as beautiful as possible and that’s why it works.”
To put Von Strantz into any kind of bucket right now would be stifling to the listener. The dividends are greater if you listen to this band with a mind as open as their music. It’s deep, yes, but also very likeable. You don’t find yourself singing along right away, but eventually. This is music that has to seep, like a fine tea, into your soul. Before you know it, you’ve disengaged from the regular distractions and the even the ones that nag you at the periphery…and your lost in Von Strantz. And you don’t want to be found.
And, your eggs are cold.
Narratives Chapter 1 and the Von Strantz EP are both available via bandcamp (vonstrantz.bandcamp.com) and are highly recommended.
Support independent music live and local.
Originally published by DoitIndy
Friday, April 18, 2014
Thursday, February 06, 2014
Album Review: VESERIA, "VOYAGER" (2/6/2014)
“It’s been a long time since I’ve written. My shovel was buried in the snow and
I had to dig it out.”
By the end of this album, you’re gonna know their name.
When Music Notes last spoke to Veseria’s Patrick Roberts, he was tracking his vocals for the band’s then in-the-works second album. Usually at that point in the recording process, bands have already rehearsed their self-aggrandizing bullshit. They say things like “this is the best album we’ve ever made”, “everything we’ve ever done has built up to this” and “it’s one for the fans”. Anything to get people excited about a project they already know ain’t that spectacular, and that they are most likely already bored with.
“We can’t wait for people to hear this record.” That’s what Patrick Roberts said when I asked him about the band’s approaching collective sigh over completing the album. It was about as sincere a statement as one could hear. They’d spent most of 2013 writing and recording VOYAGER, workshopping the songs live, giving people small appetizers of what was to come. They released a single last fall called “Reach A Little Further”, a pleasing and hummable rock-folk number of instant likeability that was leaps and bounds from what they had done before. But based on that song, nobody could have predicted what they were about to do.
VOYAGER is a towering achievement. It is a mature and confident record of
well-crafted and near-perfectly executed songs. It shows a band in full bloom
and with a keen self-awareness. Ten minutes into it and you know why they
couldn’t wait for you to hear it. It’s a magnificent and very complete album of
monumental beauty. There are moments of teetering emotional depth that would
tear your heart out if they weren’t leveled by the band’s penchant for subtle
whimsy. Musically, VOYAGER is a two-act play split between Veseria’s love for
punked-up folk and its mastery of plaintive road songs. “It’s a marriage of the
two”, says Patrick now. Indeed, as the album progresses, it becomes impossible
to divorce the band’s two personalities from each other. And as they start to
meld at the middle of the album, Veseria’s rockier stomp and its “more sensitive
side” reveal more than just another young band in touch with itself. It’s not a
masterpiece, although you can be sure that’s coming. VOYAGER is an important
signpost. The point at which the band found its voice, opened up its mouth, and
roared.
For all of its youthful exuberance, VOYAGER is not a celebratory record. It is, at its heart, a treatise on Veseria’s generation. A generation who’s mainstream spokespersons have earned accolades for social media whining about their sense of entitlement and their dismay with a socio-economic system they only think they understand. Patrick Roberts, who wrote ten of VOYAGER’s thirteen songs, chooses to examine and expose his sometimes misunderstood generation, laying it’s foibles bare so that us oldsters can finally understand them. VOYAGER’s first proper track “Children of Houdini” wastes no time putting down some hard truths about Veseria’s “brothers and sisters”:
“For we are lost and we are frightened/Yet we claim to be enlightened alone in unending space”
With its pounding relentless rhythm, “Houdini” is also a call to arms, and to witness the dark magic we have created in which people burst into the light in an instant and fade to black just as swiftly:
“So light up the stages, come all ages/
We’re going to show you something you haven’t seen before/And won’t ever see again”
It is a perfect opener, for both the album and Veseria’s upcoming gigs. This song could light up the biggest arenas, with it’s exploding choruses thrust forward by drummer David Bailey’s snare drum flams, and lead singer Jen Roberts’ bewitching vocals – the song invites you in, embraces you, and then fires you out of a cannon into the rest of the album.
On “The Dastardly”, Jen Roberts gives Patrick’s (yes they are husband and wife) lyrics an after-hours torch song recitation. Jen Roberts doesn’t make a habit of purring or cooing. She is in an elite and unique class of twenty-something female lead singers in that she sings like a woman, not a girl. In her hands, lines like “my blood is made of whiskey and my bones were built to shake” and “by the end of this song you’re gonna know my name” are slithery tendrils crawling through your skin. And as “The Dastardly” evolves into a foot-stomping Sunday gospel breakdown (handled expertly by pianist Jake Strakis and bassist Corey Lusk) its main theme “I think we’re being lied to” becomes a sermon very few will have trouble relating to.
Jen Roberts takes some serious chances on “F=MA (All Your Forces)”, a dizzying and chaotic rush powered by “bottles of confidence“. She barely has time to breathe on this song, with it’s frantic pace and machine-gun vocals, it’s like a modern day “Shattered” in a Bret Easton Ellis novel – one of those blurred and wobbly memories of parties past. The band rocks at its hardest on “F=MA”. Bailey is breaking sticks, Patrick Roberts is going for fretboard noise, and the song has the kind of big hard rock ending that you wish would go on for a few more minutes…or hours.
On her self-penned songs, Jen Roberts plays it even less safe than she does on her husband’s songs. “I just can’t enough of you/My heart aches for your touch”, she sings on “Under The Influence”. Her ability to take a remarkably simple sentiment and make it sound like she was the first to think of it is at the heart of her ability as a singer. She twists lines like that around you throughout the record in swirls of blue smoke and chipped nails.
As the record reaches into it’s second, rootsier half, Patrick Robert’s again opens up his generations veins, but with lyrics that are at once universal and deeply insular. “Seminary Song II”, “Seminary Song III” and “Hendricks County” form a suite of personal contemplations that are instantly relatable, backed by versions of Americana that too have sewn their way into our musical bloodstream. On “Hendricks County”, “people send me letters as if I’m on the run/Sometimes I think I am.” These songs build from the earthen baselines of the psyche and ask questions about what we have built on top. Are we accepting untruths because they have become societal mantras? Are the honest and righteous forever banished to the wastelands? Can we at least agree that our experiences with love, heartbreak, joy and suffering can bind us? It’s heady stuff for a little indie band from the Midwest. I remember similar muso head-scratching about other “little bands” from Athens and Montreal.
As VOYAGER veers towards closure, the band hits the barroom stage with a mighty wallop in Jake Strakis’ “In The End” – a joyous Jerry Lee piano romp complete with tinkling glasses and closing time raucousness – because even a band that is questioning the stability of the human condition needs to let off some steam once in a while. And if there is a better way to close an album of VOYAGER’s ambition than “Maybe I’m Deaf Maybe I’m Blind” please clue me in. For the first time, a VOYAGER protagonist seems conciously distant – reluctant even to participate in the game of human interaction. Jen Roberts is back at the piano bar, its late, and the cigarettes and the whiskey have taken their toll. She uses that. She practically chokes forcing it to work for her. By the end, as the band erupts around her, she has knocked all the raw emotion of this song to the ground and she is throttling it, banging its head against the hardwood in an attempt to extricate herself from it. But it’s futile because emotion is an inescapable part of being human. She’s part of it. Veseria is part of it. And VOYAGER makes us all part of it.
VOYAGER will be different things to a lot of people. It will be an album people turn to in hours of need and times of joy. It will be quoted by lovers in boozy late-night texts. It will be a source of anthems at gatherings for the disenfranchised. It will also be an album people gleefully share with their friends, at first chastising them for having not heard it, and then in hushed tones telling them “I can’t wait for you to hear this record.”
VOYAGER is released on March 1. Check Veseria’s Facebook book page for info on the albums official unveiling.
Spring Hopes Eternal
Luckily, VOYAGER is an early entry in a busy musical springtime for Indianapolis. I got a chance to hear the split-collaborative single from Minute Details and Square Social Circle and as impossible as its seems, that combination actually works. These two very different bands have recorded three songs, one of which is a big favorite of mine (MD’s live staple “I Am A Monster”). SSC’s contribution “Blood and Treasure” is a serious piece of country-rock. It’s a fun collaboration, and its no throw-away. The single sees its official release on March 28. There is so much more music coming down the road. In the studio right now readying spring/summer releases, Phunkbot, Coup D’etat, Audiodacity, Smoke Ring, Bizarre Noir, Verdant Vera, Minute Details, Dead Birds Adore Us, James Kramer (with Ryan Koch), Dead Ringers. Remember to “like” your favorite bands on Facebook, and that will lead you to all the bands they like, and that will lead you to treasures of which you could not possibly imagine.
Rest in peace, Daniel Jaffke.
Rest in peace, Paul Ash.
By the end of this album, you’re gonna know their name.
When Music Notes last spoke to Veseria’s Patrick Roberts, he was tracking his vocals for the band’s then in-the-works second album. Usually at that point in the recording process, bands have already rehearsed their self-aggrandizing bullshit. They say things like “this is the best album we’ve ever made”, “everything we’ve ever done has built up to this” and “it’s one for the fans”. Anything to get people excited about a project they already know ain’t that spectacular, and that they are most likely already bored with.
“We can’t wait for people to hear this record.” That’s what Patrick Roberts said when I asked him about the band’s approaching collective sigh over completing the album. It was about as sincere a statement as one could hear. They’d spent most of 2013 writing and recording VOYAGER, workshopping the songs live, giving people small appetizers of what was to come. They released a single last fall called “Reach A Little Further”, a pleasing and hummable rock-folk number of instant likeability that was leaps and bounds from what they had done before. But based on that song, nobody could have predicted what they were about to do.
For all of its youthful exuberance, VOYAGER is not a celebratory record. It is, at its heart, a treatise on Veseria’s generation. A generation who’s mainstream spokespersons have earned accolades for social media whining about their sense of entitlement and their dismay with a socio-economic system they only think they understand. Patrick Roberts, who wrote ten of VOYAGER’s thirteen songs, chooses to examine and expose his sometimes misunderstood generation, laying it’s foibles bare so that us oldsters can finally understand them. VOYAGER’s first proper track “Children of Houdini” wastes no time putting down some hard truths about Veseria’s “brothers and sisters”:
“For we are lost and we are frightened/Yet we claim to be enlightened alone in unending space”
With its pounding relentless rhythm, “Houdini” is also a call to arms, and to witness the dark magic we have created in which people burst into the light in an instant and fade to black just as swiftly:
“So light up the stages, come all ages/
We’re going to show you something you haven’t seen before/And won’t ever see again”
It is a perfect opener, for both the album and Veseria’s upcoming gigs. This song could light up the biggest arenas, with it’s exploding choruses thrust forward by drummer David Bailey’s snare drum flams, and lead singer Jen Roberts’ bewitching vocals – the song invites you in, embraces you, and then fires you out of a cannon into the rest of the album.
On “The Dastardly”, Jen Roberts gives Patrick’s (yes they are husband and wife) lyrics an after-hours torch song recitation. Jen Roberts doesn’t make a habit of purring or cooing. She is in an elite and unique class of twenty-something female lead singers in that she sings like a woman, not a girl. In her hands, lines like “my blood is made of whiskey and my bones were built to shake” and “by the end of this song you’re gonna know my name” are slithery tendrils crawling through your skin. And as “The Dastardly” evolves into a foot-stomping Sunday gospel breakdown (handled expertly by pianist Jake Strakis and bassist Corey Lusk) its main theme “I think we’re being lied to” becomes a sermon very few will have trouble relating to.
Jen Roberts takes some serious chances on “F=MA (All Your Forces)”, a dizzying and chaotic rush powered by “bottles of confidence“. She barely has time to breathe on this song, with it’s frantic pace and machine-gun vocals, it’s like a modern day “Shattered” in a Bret Easton Ellis novel – one of those blurred and wobbly memories of parties past. The band rocks at its hardest on “F=MA”. Bailey is breaking sticks, Patrick Roberts is going for fretboard noise, and the song has the kind of big hard rock ending that you wish would go on for a few more minutes…or hours.
On her self-penned songs, Jen Roberts plays it even less safe than she does on her husband’s songs. “I just can’t enough of you/My heart aches for your touch”, she sings on “Under The Influence”. Her ability to take a remarkably simple sentiment and make it sound like she was the first to think of it is at the heart of her ability as a singer. She twists lines like that around you throughout the record in swirls of blue smoke and chipped nails.
As the record reaches into it’s second, rootsier half, Patrick Robert’s again opens up his generations veins, but with lyrics that are at once universal and deeply insular. “Seminary Song II”, “Seminary Song III” and “Hendricks County” form a suite of personal contemplations that are instantly relatable, backed by versions of Americana that too have sewn their way into our musical bloodstream. On “Hendricks County”, “people send me letters as if I’m on the run/Sometimes I think I am.” These songs build from the earthen baselines of the psyche and ask questions about what we have built on top. Are we accepting untruths because they have become societal mantras? Are the honest and righteous forever banished to the wastelands? Can we at least agree that our experiences with love, heartbreak, joy and suffering can bind us? It’s heady stuff for a little indie band from the Midwest. I remember similar muso head-scratching about other “little bands” from Athens and Montreal.
As VOYAGER veers towards closure, the band hits the barroom stage with a mighty wallop in Jake Strakis’ “In The End” – a joyous Jerry Lee piano romp complete with tinkling glasses and closing time raucousness – because even a band that is questioning the stability of the human condition needs to let off some steam once in a while. And if there is a better way to close an album of VOYAGER’s ambition than “Maybe I’m Deaf Maybe I’m Blind” please clue me in. For the first time, a VOYAGER protagonist seems conciously distant – reluctant even to participate in the game of human interaction. Jen Roberts is back at the piano bar, its late, and the cigarettes and the whiskey have taken their toll. She uses that. She practically chokes forcing it to work for her. By the end, as the band erupts around her, she has knocked all the raw emotion of this song to the ground and she is throttling it, banging its head against the hardwood in an attempt to extricate herself from it. But it’s futile because emotion is an inescapable part of being human. She’s part of it. Veseria is part of it. And VOYAGER makes us all part of it.
VOYAGER will be different things to a lot of people. It will be an album people turn to in hours of need and times of joy. It will be quoted by lovers in boozy late-night texts. It will be a source of anthems at gatherings for the disenfranchised. It will also be an album people gleefully share with their friends, at first chastising them for having not heard it, and then in hushed tones telling them “I can’t wait for you to hear this record.”
VOYAGER is released on March 1. Check Veseria’s Facebook book page for info on the albums official unveiling.
Spring Hopes Eternal
Luckily, VOYAGER is an early entry in a busy musical springtime for Indianapolis. I got a chance to hear the split-collaborative single from Minute Details and Square Social Circle and as impossible as its seems, that combination actually works. These two very different bands have recorded three songs, one of which is a big favorite of mine (MD’s live staple “I Am A Monster”). SSC’s contribution “Blood and Treasure” is a serious piece of country-rock. It’s a fun collaboration, and its no throw-away. The single sees its official release on March 28. There is so much more music coming down the road. In the studio right now readying spring/summer releases, Phunkbot, Coup D’etat, Audiodacity, Smoke Ring, Bizarre Noir, Verdant Vera, Minute Details, Dead Birds Adore Us, James Kramer (with Ryan Koch), Dead Ringers. Remember to “like” your favorite bands on Facebook, and that will lead you to all the bands they like, and that will lead you to treasures of which you could not possibly imagine.
Rest in peace, Daniel Jaffke.
Rest in peace, Paul Ash.
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