You’ve heard them, this new barrage of bands paying homage to the late ’70s and early ’80s, playing their “wanna sport the keytar” synthesizer pop/rock.
Not naming any names (Empire of the Sun, Passion Pit), these bands are finding fresh fans even while their sound stays in the past. It’s as if Marty McFly took them back to 1981 and decided to ditch them there.
So it’s no wonder Ryan Schaefer, the singer/keyboardist/beatmaker of Knoxville, Tennessee’s Royal Bangs, sounds weary discussing those “influences” he keeps hearing about when others try to define his band. Even when, it turns out, some of those descriptions come from a familiar face.
“I know what the press says about us, with the ‘70s influence, and maybe that comes from me too, and maybe I misspoke,” Schafer says, laughing. “But I’m not interested in throwback rock. We want to make something new, especially right now, there’s a lot of music I can’t get behind. It’s music that sets itself square in the middle of a musical idiom that started and ended. I don’t know how you sustain a career making records that sound like records that have already been made.”
To combat this time warp, Schaefer and his four bandmates offer up “Let It Beep”, a crisp collection of up-tempo tunes and electronic flourishes you’d never hear in a 1980s musical movie montage.
Released in mid-September, “Let It Beep” is the Bangs’ sophomore album on Audio Eagle Records (the label run by Patrick Carney of The Black Keys) and is generating a steady level of enthusiasm.
“The way we did this album was always the way we wanted to do it, with all the extra pulses, extra instrumentation and
percussion,” Schaefer says. “This record, to me, is catching up on some ground. With the exception of one or two songs, all songs were recently written; they all go together. There were one or two older songs that were good songs, and the recording came out really well, but it just made the album drag. They didn’t seem to fit.”
Finding its place to fit has been one-part luck, one-part patience for Royal Bangs. Schaefer and drummer Chris Rusk formed the band while attending high school in suburban Knoxville under the name Suburban Urchins. The duo wrote “really shitty songs. It was a wreck,” Schafer remembers.
Guitarist Sam Stratton kicked around the same high school, but with other bands. Fast-forward a few years, and with a name change and the addition of Stratton, the genesis was set for the home-recorded “We Breed Champions” (2006). “Champions” is a collection of relentless drums, eclectic clicks and bouncy beats, but at first the trio never expected the album to go much beyond the Knoxville borders.
“The whole reason we recorded that album is because we thought the band wasn’t going to be around anymore,” Schaefer says. “I was moving, so a lot of that was just documenting those songs.”
Schaefer moved to France “soaking up 90 percent beer and writing new shit,” he says while Rusk was using the Bangs’ MySpace page to get anyone he could to listen to “Champions”. And then one day, while sitting in class at the University of Tennessee, Rusk got an e-mail response from Carney. He wanted the demo.
The 2008 re-release of “Champions”, an epic 2 a.m. Bonnaroo performance, and an added legion of critical acclaim later, the band sits atop a precipice of uncharted territory.
Embarking on a fall tour with Drummer (Carney’s side project), the Bangs’ roster (with the addition of bassist Henry Gibson and guitarist Brandon Biondo) has with it a new level of expectations. Expectations intends to sustain.
“We’re slowly making the transition into doing this full time, and it’s exciting, but nerve-racking,” Schaefer says. “All we want to do is work. The only thing we told our booking agent was we don’t want any days off. Every day we can play a show, we should. A lot of people I know like having days off every now and again, but we want to play music. Why spend another day in a city where we can spend money we don’t have? That doesn’t interest me. I’d rather play a show. I’d rather work.”
