Words by Brendan Sullivan

Kudos to Opus One and the Brillobox for getting these two awesome bands to come to Pittsburgh twice in the last year. I caught both Lower Dens and Bear In Heaven when they were here back in March and January, respectively, and when I saw them on the same bill for this one, I knew I couldn’t miss it. The beautiful, guitar-heavy drone rock of Lower Dens and the upbeat, synth/percussion/bass-driven pop of Bear In Heaven made a surprisingly perfect match for the night, and both bands were playing really well. I was lucky enough to sit down and chat over a few beers with guitarist Will Adams from Lower Dens before the show, too. Read on for some thoughts on the show and a transcription of the interview.

Lower Dens – Rosie
Lower Dens – I Get Nervous
Bear In Heaven – Lovesick Teenagers

I arrived at the Brillobox early in the evening, just as a light rain was starting up, and settled at a table downstairs to have a brew and read the City Paper. A little while later, I heard some pounding drums and loud guitars coming from upstairs, and when it stopped a few minutes later and guitarist Will walked into the room, I knew I had just experienced Lower Dens‘ sound check, one floor removed. We enjoyed some fine local brews and talked for about forty minutes on the record and another half an hour or so off the record. It was pretty darn noisy down there with the jukebox blaring and some chatty folks at adjacent tables, and that didn’t make my transcription job any easier, but thanks go out to Will for spending his pre-show down time chatting with this fan while his bandmates relaxed and/or napped. Also, I wasn’t paying close enough attention to the time and we ended up missing most of opener Sun Airway‘s set. I caught their final song: it sounded like some pretty solid, poppy guitar rock with a heavy keyboard sound.

Lower Dens played next and sounded really tight (as Will had hoped). I was stationed front-right and had a perfect vantage point to see their playing styles mesh together and form the deliciously noisy sonic soup that their music embodies. In this case, soup is a good thing, trust me. Drummer Abe Sanders seemed to have his eyes closed the whole time but never missed a beat, rolling his head back and forth as he switched from tom to cymbal, all the while giving the songs a steady foundation to build on. Bassist Geoff Graham laid down some thick grooves, sliding notes under and around the double-guitar melodies of Will Adams and Jana Hunter, and he sang some backup vocals with Jana on a few songs, too. Jana’s voice is a big part of my fascination with their sound; on their noisier rock songs, like “Rosie”, it feels like a shiny machete cutting through a thick jungle of guitars, and on their softer, prettier songs, like “I Get Nervous”, it feels like a defiant flower growing from the littered wreckage of a machete-hacked thicket. And all the while, there’s a whole atmosphere of swirling guitars and effects, stirring my brain around like a druggy amusement park ride, so that when a song ends it still feels like it only just started. I get that feeling at home sitting in front of my speakers, and that sensation is only more compelling when they’re standing right in front of me. You need to see them live, you hear?

Bear In Heaven rounded out the night with some seriously upbeat dance pop/rock, although I guess there wasn’t much dancing going on in the Brillo attic. And maybe their sound is a little too weirdly mellow and sinister-sounding around the edges to be truly dance music, so scratch that. It’s definitely mood-inducing music, though, and it put me in the mood to hang out in my corner by the front of the stage and shut my eyes and bob my head. Hey, it works for me, and drummer Joe Stickney’s beats are totally hypnotic. I think the only things keeping me from falling into a crazy trance were their fog machine and strobe light, interesting live show additions that I’ve never seen employed at this venue, either. I definitely liked their set a lot more than the last time I saw them, and although their music isn’t perfect for every time or mood, on this particular night, their bass- and drums-heavy sound was just right for following Lower Dens‘ guitar-laden display.

If you don’t know these bands now, you’ll know them soon, “truss me”. I give this show 5 heady Big Hops and one lost and found ring.

– — –

Interview with Will Adams of Lower Dens:

I just happened to see you guys last time you were here. I was a big Wye Oak fan so I went to the show and was really surprised to see you guys, I really liked it.

That was a fun night. I don’t recall a lot of people being there.

Yeah, which is sad. I brought three of my friends and none of them knew either of you. I think I remember you saying that the tour was like a rehearsal for recording and you had the album coming eventually. How did that work out?

Well, we had recorded the record at that point.

Already? Oh ok.

Yes . . .

This was back in March.

Yeah, right, the record was recorded and supposed to be out shortly after then but the release date got pushed back. So, I might have been talking about the past, because before we went and recorded the record we wrote the songs and toured for about three weeks, tightening them up before we got into the studio. That’s what we try to do because it sort of gets you in the studio when you’re playing at your best. We went in and did a single the same way last summer. We toured for six or seven weeks with another Baltimore band called Future Islands and then just went and recorded a song or two the next day.

I remember the show being a lot . . . I don’t know, certainly louder but also more . . . exciting than the record. Not that it’s unexciting, but the songs just felt more raw and jagged than on the record, where they felt more restrained. Is that something you tried to do?

I think it just comes from . . . We tour an awful a lot and I think that when you play live, you tend to play a little faster, a little bit louder, but I don’t know if it was intentional. I think that we wrote the songs in a real thoughtful way initially, so we tried to stick with that. But, I mean, live versus sitting in a padded room, you’re going to end up with more energy, yeah.

How does the songwriting go? Do you all contribute different parts? Is there some sort of skeleton you add to?

The way that it’s worked so far . . . I joined this band after the other three had been playing together for a while, so they had some songs that they were working with that had started out as songs that [lead singer] Jana [Hunter] was figuring out what to do with. But it was a real skeletal thing and we fleshed them out and did a lot of arranging and a lot of writing and rewriting. So it can be a pretty thorough process. We tried to make all the decisions where we write and arrange stuff to be thoughtful and purposeful and not just, like, “Heyyyy, we’re jammmiinnnng”.

I notice that the vocals are really low in the mix. I can’t even make out a lot of the words. Is that totally intentional?

Yeah.

I Googled a lot and couldn’t even find lyrics anywhere. Are you trying to hide them on purpose, or what?

No, not on purpose. The CD does have a couple of the lyrics printed but not all of them. I couldn’t speak with a lot of authority on the lyrics because I can’t take credit for any of those.

Certainly, it’s very different from a lot of Jana’s solo material, which is all vocals and guitar.

Yeah, well I think that’s the idea of the band. I don’t know, I don’t have a lot to add to that.

I noticed some differences between the demo CD that I got at the last show and the album. They sound a little different, and there were some songs there that didn’t make it onto the album. When were those songs recorded?

I think those were recorded after the record, in some cases, and partially out of necessity because . . . Well, some of the demos were recorded before the record and we did two volumes of demo CDs. We did the first one that I think we recorded before that tour where you saw us, or maybe earlier, I’m having trouble remembering. But I know that we did a second one because the album, we thought, had a certain release date and it got pushed back a couple months and we already had a tour booked and we said, “Well, we have to sell something”, so we did a little CD-R. So some of the demos were recorded actually after the record was tracked and finished. And to answer your question about stuff that didn’t end up on the record, we recorded more songs in that session than ended up on the record. I think we did 17 total. And one of those, we put out as a split single with some friends of ours from New York that we have up there. Some of the other songs will be coming out periodically. We have another 45 coming out, I think, at the end of the month, and then something else at the end of the year, both stuff from that session and newer stuff that we’ve done. We’re trying to get a lot of stuff out so we can start working on another album.

I did see some songs on your Daytrotter session and the NPR Tiny Desk concert that I didn’t recognize. Are those from that session, too?

Yeah, and actually the NPR song is a cover song from a singer called Cass McCombs. It’s on his second record.

How did that NPR show come about?

You know, someone sent one of us an email. They had done a program, a month or so before we ended up going there, featuring their favorite albums of the summer and we were on there. They wrote us to let us know that we were going to be featured on there, and we sort of kept in touch. And we live in Baltimore which is all of forty-five minutes from D.C. so we just went out there one day and did it. But it was pretty nice to get invited and to meet, you know, Bob Boilen and people you could recognize solely by their voice.

The songs sound pretty different because you were crammed into that tiny space with a bunch of equipment and such. What was it like, having to deal with that?

It was a little strange because, yeah, we’re used to playing kinda loud and the hardest part was having to play around the vocal levels, because they sing quietly anyway and in a club you can just sing quietly and turn up the microphones and balance everything, but . . .

Not gonna happen there.

Yeah, it was tough to try to have the big effects and the loud drone and not totally drown out the voice.

Between that show, and some feature articles on Stereogum and a good Pitchfork score, and all that, it seems like you guys are getting lots of good press. Do you follow any of that? Do you not care?

Um, I notice some of it, it’s nice. It’s always nice, you know, to make something and have people react favorably to it. But I try not to look at that stuff too much. Not because I think it will affect anything but, sort of . . . I just don’t care, to a point, you know? The NPR thing is cool because it’s a program that I listen to a lot anyway so it was like a . . . I don’t wannja say “an honor” but it was a unique feeling. You know, you’ve grown up listening to this and then they write to you to say they’re going to be playing your music on the program.

So you had that tour in the spring and now you’re back on the road again, yeah?

Well, we pretty much hadn’t stopped since then with the exception of a little bit of time. Shortly after we finished up that tour we went out for seven weeks with Future Islands and then rested for under a month, had the record come out, and went out for another seven weeks, supporting the record. So since we were here last, we’ve donw fourteen weeks of touring, yeah.

And then there was CMJ

We just did CMJ, yeah. And we’re going to do a little while with these guys [Editor: points to Bear In Heaven sitting at an adjacent table] and then we’re going to Europe. So yeah, we’ll be touring throughout the rest of the year.

Do you enjoy all that touring? Or is it just something you have to do?

No, it’s great. I think we all really enjoy it. It’s all sorta second nature at this point. We get antsy if we’re sitting around at home and not in the van, not going somewhere. We’ve become accustomed to it.

Any places you really wanna go that you haven’t yet?

Oh, sure, I mean if I thought about it for a second I could think of some. We’ve pretty much hit up most places in the U.S., although you always get surprised by weird, small towns that you don’t associate with the music scene at all, so places like that we’re really excited to find. I couldn’t tell you a specific answer, but more of that would be cool. And we’ve always really wanted to go to South America. We’re going to Europe, but we’re just doing the regular Europe stuff. It would be cool to do some weird Eastern places, or something.

Any reason you’ve been here twice in such a short span? It’s just that a lot of bands don’t even bother to come here, let alone twice in one year.

You know, both times it wasn’t our call, we were touring with somebody else. The first time, that was Wye Oak‘s tour, and now we’re going with Bear In Heaven.

Anything you’ve done while you’ve been here in town?

I’m afraid we just went straight to the club, stopped at the grocery store beforehand, not that exciting. Last time we were here it was sorta the same thing. We drove up, played the show, and met the nicest people who took us back to their house. And to this day, it’s sorta set the bar for the hospitality of a stranger. There was this guy who was really tall and kinda looked like a mountain man, his overalls were dangling over. He was doing some kind of really intense advanced study, I wanna say it was medical. But in the morning he was like, “Sit tight, I’ll just make some breakfast really quick” and it was the most amazing shit we ever had. It was like chevre stuffed french toast with preserves that he made himself and then a quiche he just whipped up from nothing. It was unbelievable. That’s one thing we always associate this place with, the best eating on tour.

Of all the bands you’ve been touring with, are there any you particularly enjoy playing with or spending time with?

Oh, you know, Wye Oak are our absolute best friends from Baltimore. They’re just our favorite people to be around, so that would be one for sure. Um, who else? We’re touring with another Baltimore band, Beach House, in Europe, and they’re really good people, too.

Yeah, they’re really good. I saw them a few years ago at the Warhol Museum opening for Grizzly Bear. That was a great show.

Cool. Yeah, the first time I saw them was in [inaudible], where I lived before I moved to Baltimore, and they were opening for like, a really . . . I wanna say The Clientele, or a band like that. I was surprised to see them go from like . . . I always thought they were great, and they were just opening for whoever, and since then they’ve really gone uphill, and that’s awesome. Other bands that we like playing with . . . actually Talk Normal is a band from New York that we just put out a split with and we played with them up at CMJ and we played with them in New York a time or two, and they’re pretty incredible people. They’re a duo but just kinda branched out into being a part-time three-piece. But they’re really . . . they keep the weird, New York art-rock flame burning, like in an early 70s type of sense, really noisy and jarring, great songs as well. I like those guys a lot.

Anybody that you really want to tour with? Dead or alive, what’s your dream tour lineup?

Hmm . . .

That’s probably not something you have off the top of your head.

Well, not the dead part. We thought about what might be ideal tours for us, and there’s two different answers to that. I think one of them would be, you know, a band that’s around that we look up to and think is great, and then the other answer would be, like, get all of your friends’ bands on the same bill and go out and sort of have a big roving party. We’ve talked about a lot of bands from Baltimore, like Wye Oak and Crazy Dreams Band and, um, yeah, just having a traveling group of friends playing shows. I’m trying to think of what the other side of that would be, like, who’s the big band that we’d love to tour with. I don’t know, I’m sometimes bad about following trends. We met the guys from Deerhunter last time we played in Atlanta and they were really sweet, and we liked them a lot. That would be a fun tour.

Silly question, but something I try to ask everybody: your name, where does that come from?

The band name?

Yeah, and the album name. They both seem like combinations of two or three words that sorta make sense but nobody would have thought to put together before, something like that.

Well, our bass player, Geoff, he’s kind of a closet nerd and he was on a fantasy dragons message board and this phrase “Lower Den” was just in a sentence there and he was like, “That sounds cool”, and it’s also the place where their, I don’t know, D&D characters hang out or whatever. And of course we were like, “That sounds pretty stupid! I don’t know if we should take our name from there”, but then just pronouncing it a couple of times and hearing it come out of your mouth without the context, which no one necessarily has to know, we thought, “Yeah, that could work”. And the album name, I don’t even know. I think that was Geoff also.

I was reading this interview today that one of you did earlier this year, and it said something about [drummer] Abe [Sanders]‘s beats being heavily influenced by hip hop and your guitar work by AC/DC, something like that, I’m probably not quoting it right, but that seemed surprising to me.

Abe grew up listening to almost nothing but hip hop and so . . . I don’t know how much that influences his playing directly. I mean, obviously he doesn’t come to our songs and start playing hip hop beats, but a lot of the simplicity and repetition and a lot of, you know, really riding the high hat, like that. And the same also . . . I don’t know, I feel like it’s a real stretch to try to justify this, but I do love the band AC/DC, especially growing up as a budding musician. And outside of the rocker attitude and the solos, there is this sort of really good doubled guitar, real subtle thing that they do, that is probably not even the first or the third thing you pick up on when you listen to them, it’s all sort of about the sleazy cock rock energy and the guitar solos, and I might be completely wrong in thinking this, but I really do think there is something smart and thoughtful behind whatever it is that they do.

I never thought of it that way. Any other influences that maybe people wouldn’t have thought of?

When we were working on this record, I can’t speak for everyone, but I know that Jana was really influenced in taking a lot from the late 1970s post-punk scene, a lot of minimal stuff, like Wire. And I was really heavy into a lot of like Krautrock stuff, which is more repetition and layering rather than like linear song structures. And not even obscure Krautrock, but pretty much a lot of Kraftwerk, like the first three albums but then also the more famous pop ones, pretty extensively, and I think a lot of that came through.

I’ve only heard one or two of their albums so I’ll have to go back and check those out again.

Again, yeah, you kind of associate them with like . . . well, this is a real general statement, but I’ll say that it took me a long time to come to them because I grew up at the tail end of them being on MTV and it was their worst songs, really cheesy videos, and so they were just this hilarious German whatever . . . But yeah, their earlier music, before they signed to a major label, and then even their first couple of big albums were pretty . . .what’s the word I’m looking for . . . aside from being very well thought-out and intentional, which I love in anything . . they’re incredible records, it’s hard to describe.

Just out of personal interest, what do you guys do? What are your hobbies when you’re not playing music?

Ohhh, we’ve been touring so long I kinda forget what we do.

Or, what do you when you have down time on tour?

When we have down time on tour, this is kind of embarassing, but when we have a day off we’ll probably practice or write or rehearse, or sometimes we just like to veg in front of the worst movie on television possible. But we do try to keep a routine on tour. We always try to stay active, like we keep a soccer ball in the van so we can just run around for a bit instead of being cooped up all day. And we cook a lot on tour which is really nice, and I don’t think it’s something a lot of bands do.

How do you pull that off?

We have a little mini-kitchen that we travel with, we have a hot plate and some dishes and some knives and we started doing it to save money but it’s also turned to be a really great, fun thing to do. And it’s good if you have like three hours before a show you can sit at a bar and drink and read the local paper, or you can like find a market or a place to pick some food or a grocery store and chop stuff up and cook with your friends, and that’s really nice.

Any signature dishes you guys have come up with on tour?

Nah, not really, whatever’s cheap.

It’s too late for today, but you should stop by the Strip District some time.

Oh okay, yeah, we just hit Trader Joe’s on the way in.

That’s good, too.

It was quinoa and sauteed vegetables tonight, if you’re curious.

Excellent, sounds tasty! I heard that you worked with the producer for the latest Beach House album for your record.

Yes, his name’s Chris Coady.

Did you seek him out, or he found you, or . . .

No, well, um, when we made the record we had in mind who we wanted to work with and the album was recorded and engineered by Chris Freeland who has a studio in Baltimore, and then it was mixed by Chris Coady who did the Beach House record, and he had worked on Jana’s solo records so she knew him and so she wanted to do stuff with him again. But then the album was mastered at a placed called “The Lodge” by Sarah from Talk Normal who I keep talking about. But yeah, Chris Coady was kinda the biggest name but there were definitely three talented people who were really helping make the album sound good.

What if he hadn’t been there? I mean, what did he add or do to the sound?

Umm, honestly, I’m not the person to ask about that, I don’t know what goes into mixing a record. I hear that he has some nice stuff, though.

Oh yeah, I also read in that interview I mentioned earlier that you guys were all under 21 as of March. Is that really true?

Um, two of the band members are. Yeah, there’s kind of a big age gap. I’m not sure, Abe might still be underage, Geoff and Jana are just over 21, and I’m gonna be 40 next year. [Editor: this all may or may not be true. I received multiple answers to this question over the course of the night, so I'll let you experience the same confusion that I did ]

Anything I can look forward to at this show? Any new stuff, any crazy ideas you’ll be throwing out there?

Well, hopefully we’ll be playing really good, because we just came from CMJ and we played 11 shows in 4 days, so with any luck we’ll be good and tight. We’re still playing stuff that’s not on the record, but it’s all stuff that will be coming out soon. So you could buy our new single. It’s on cassette only.

I did see that, I just wish I had a cassette player! How was that? Eleven shows in four days? That’s just unfathomable to me.

I mean it was exhausting by the end of it, but it was pretty fun, it was a fun thing to do. And we did it for no other reason than like cool stuff kept coming up, it wasn’t like we were intentionally trying to play every waking minute of CMJ. But once we booked some stuff and thought we had booked enough, something else would come up and we’d say, “Oh, we should do that”. And we had figured this was something we had never done before, CMJ, so we might as well go all out. Yeah, we managed to never miss a show or be late for a show. I don’t know, it was fun, it was a challenge that we did. For what purpose, I couldn’t say, other than just, “Let’s do this.”

I’m sure it was an experience you’ll talk about for a long time.

Yeah, and we got to see some really good bands, which is strange because I didn’t think I’d be able to see any bands at all.

You said before you don’t really keep up with the music scene these days, but are there any bands you really like or are excited about?

Well, there was some stuff that I saw at CMJ that was really good. There’s a woman who plays under the Tamaryn, she just put out a record. We played with her twice, she was incredible. And two groups from Oxford, Mississippi, one’s called FLIGHT and one is this guy named Dent May, both great. Oh, and there was this band from Australia, I’m going to have to remember their name . . . I think it was Crayon Fields. They were a great surprise. I have no idea what’s happening in Australia, let alone other places, but I really like Australian music made 20 or 25 years ago, and they definitely seem to come from that. It’s good to know that kind of music is still around somewhere.

You mentioned you’re older than the others. How did you all get connected?

Well, I knew Jana from a while ago, we’re both originally from Texas, and so I met her back there when she was making solo records and living down there, and I even played on her second solo album and did some shows with her. So we go way back. And then she met these guys when she moved up to Baltimore and started playing, and I was sort of traveling around not far from Baltimore and she asked me to join their project and I was doing nothing at the moment, so . . . Not that glamorous of a story I guess.

I’ve actually never been to Baltimore. What’s it like?

It’s actually a really cool town. It’s a little rough around the edges but it’s also got a lot of cool stuff happening there. It’s a good place for us to be, right now.

And how’s the music scene there?

It’s pretty happening, pretty diverse.

The thing is you’ve mentioned a handful of bands from there that I think are pretty well known in the national indie world, but unfortunately there aren’t really any Pittsburgh bands that have that kind of recognition.

Yeah . . . there’s a lot of little scenes that get along really well, like a pop or an indie rock scene, there’s tons of noise, and hip hop, and then there’s weird stuff . . . And outside of that, there’s a huge art scene, a bigger theatre and performance art, or like creative writing, like spoken word or poetry scenes, an indie underground scene that you see spreading in just about any city recently. And all these things mingle together, you know, like you’ll a show where someone’s doing a part from a play and a band’s playing, and then there’s a hardcore band playing some screeching noise. Everyone there seems to work really hard on their stuff and interact with the community really well. It’s a rad place to be for that reason. It’s a little run down and pretty cheap, so it’s easy to find an abandoned or condensed building that you can move all your stuff into and then you have a venue or a studio. So I think a lot of people that are living there are using the situation the city is in and turning it into a cool, thriving place to be.

So you have some recorded material coming out in the near future. Any plans beyond that for the band? Just keep playing and see how it goes?

Well we’re still touring this record that we put out. And then, like I said, we’ll have a single or an EP coming out very soon and then another at the end of this year or the beginning of next year. And then we’ll be working on a new record probably as soon as we get back from Europe. Just start writing then.

And you see this continuing for a while?

Oh sure, yeah, I love doing it. Yeah, for a while. It’s still fun, we don’t hate each other yet.

Cool. Anything you want to say or add? Any message for Pittsburgh?

Umm . . .

Like, “Thanks for the chevre” or something?

Yeah, thanks to that guy who made the best breakfast.

Filed under: Concert Reviews, Interviews, News from Us