Rustic Overtones: Let’s Start a Cult

Sam

Cult of personalities

Rustic Overtones want you on their side

What’s the go-to motivational tactic used by every coach of an underdog team or demagogue looking to gain followers in a hurry? It’s us against them. Us against the world.

With Rustic Overtones’ eighth release, released in 2012, you’re either with them or against them. They don’t really care which. Let’s Start a Cult is everything their previous release, 2009’s New Way Out, wasn’t: All those string parts? Gone. The big and symphonic works that added up to an hour of music? This time they’ve stripped down to eight tunes and three minutes shy of a half hour. The guest players and revolving line up? With the addition of Gary Gemitti on drums and Mike Taylor on keyboards, they’re back to being the line-up you know and love: three horns, guitar, bass, drums, keyboard.

That doesn’t mean they’re back to hitting up-stroke ska songs and fire-breathing anthems, though. For this release, at least, they’ve gone much more organic, almost Edward Sharpe in their pop construction at times, and with a touch of lo-fi aesthetic that feels raw in a way they haven’t felt since before they were in the studio with Bowie.

It’s no mistake. “I like it gross,” Dave Gutter slinks on the devious “I Like it Low,” “I like the smell of cigarettes inside my clothes,” and there’s a baritone sax from Jason Ward that slithers through the weeds before being picked up by Ryan Zoidis’s tenor sax and a gritty trombone from Dave Noyes. The horns as a whole feel more part of this album than anything since before the hiatus – that you don’t really notice them is perhaps the best compliment I can pay to the arranging. They are wholly of the songs, rather than being ornaments.

“If there’s something you’re feeling inside, you should let yourself go.”

Oh, they’re tempting all right. “Let’s Start a Cult, Pt. 1” gets you right from the open with a poppy little flute line and digital hand claps and an “ooooh-oooh” bridge: “They can’t stop us all / How can they stop us all? / If we’re together.” They’ve embraced some new-school digital production here, too, integrating it so they manage to be space-age and ‘60s pop at the same time.

Just like they can combine old-time bluesy ballads with ‘80s sax lines in “Say Yes,” where Gutter knows how easy it can be to just join crowd: “It was hard to resist / They were pumping their fist / They were raising their flag in the distance.” His flittering guitar ain’t bad here either.

Gutter’s turned out some of his best lyrics in a while, too. The indie/big band “Solid” has this gem: “That’s not a halo, that’s a hole in your head / It’s not cold in the place that you go when you’re dead.” Ouch. It’s as mean as the low down Jon Roods bass that fuels the verse of “We’ll Get Right In” before it launched into melancholy pop for the chorus.

Remember? You’re with them, or you’re against them. And if you’re not with them? Well,  as the ultra-dynamic album closer says, “fuck it / Let’s go out with a bang.”

The Box Tiger: Set Fire

Sam

Nobody puts Tiger in a Box

Setting fire to your friends (and other social gaffes)

Sonia Sturino fronts the Box Tiger like she wants to grab you by the lapels and give you a good shake. Her Toronto brand of indie rock is more than welcome here in Portland, what with native and bandmate/guitarist Jordan Stowell (who fronts In the Audience) along for the ride. Well, that and her kinship with the slew of excellent and assertive gal vocalists who’ve established themselves in the last half decade in differing versions of the genre – from Lady Lamb to Hannah Tarkinson to Loretta Allen.

Sturino demands attention with big vocals and big presence.

For the video to the band’s most-recent single, the wickedly snide “Set Fire to Your Friends,” she imagines herself as serial killer of the khaki crowd, and it isn’t hard to believe her capable of taking a shovel to the back of your head. You know. In a good way. The song has the bass (also played by Stowell for the recording) and guitar taking runs like Spouse songs, bouncy and teasing: “Tell me again, I forget.” Sturino isn’t a yeller, but she’s certainly insistent and breathless, sometimes gasping on intake or cramming words into little spaces and swallowing syllables.

That might leave ambiguity in some lyrics, but you’ll forgive all when she stomps out of the opening “Bleeding Hart” on the band’s debut full-length, Set Fire. With bravado, she describes “all these kids just hanging out (hanging out),” and it’s definitely the music of youth, with passion and immediacy helped by Ron Harrity’s tight mix, Marcus Cipparrone’s drums often set up high so he can drive the pace. His tom fills here roll us into the chorus and support Sturino’s extended delivery.

He rattles into “Julian” to completely change its complexion after a western and moody opening and single-note guitar. These accelerations serve to grab your attention, but there’s some chance the band overuse that trope of starting songs simply and building as you go.

“Hospital Choir” is a good respite from the impact of the initial three-song set, with an acoustic strum and doubling vocal tracks, then building with the bass drum into a full-band arrangement that’s dialed back in pace. The real change-up here, though, comes with a Sturino vocal solo, touching on the falsetto, that same kind of chill-inducing turn as the Head and the Heart’s Charity Rose Thielen doing that part in “Rivers and Roads” that makes you sit bolt upright.

Sturino nearly spits the verse to “Taller than Trees,” supported by bass, woodblocks, and a shaker. With a pinging melody easing its way in later: “But how are you supposed to know? / How are you supposed to know?”

Likely because you’re hanging on her every word, that’s how. There are echoes of Metric in “The Hollows,” alongside that classic pinging back and forth between notes that helps define indie rock. “Knives” is squirming and restless until the fittingly sharp repetition in the chorus. The nine-note base of “Maker,” a rapping on the door like there’s someone chasing them, hangs on a central complaint that “no one’s sticking up for me,” which seems hardly possible.

Maybe there’s a tendency for the songs to run together, but that’s mostly cohesiveness and consistent emotional investment. The Box Tiger haven’t made an album to relax poolside with, that’s for sure. Even the slower paced tunes here have a forward lean to them.

By the late-album “See-Through Hole,” they’e just about done away with artifice. While it might be their version of playful, Cipparrone is as straightforward as you can get, pounding the snare on the quarter notes as Sturino purrs: “I can’t wait to be you.”

Truly, though, this doesn’t seem like a band with identity issues. Sturino knows where she’d like to go, and the rest would be fools not to follow.

Photo Credit: Dylan Verner