AEM052 Redbird Fever

Peo­ple form bands for all sorts of rea­sons.  Some bands begin with a con­cept or gim­mick, oth­ers are dri­ven by a thirst for self expres­sion, while oth­ers still are born from ego­tism, curios­ity, polit­i­cal motive, chance, or even bore­dom.  Red­bird Fever, a three-piece indie rock band based out of west­ern Wash­ing­ton state, was born from a chal­lenge.  In Feb­ru­ary of 2009 Ralph Hoga­boom (gui­tar, vocals, glock­en­spiel) decided to par­tic­i­pate in the Feb­ru­ary Album Writ­ing Month chal­lenge at www.fawm.org by writ­ing four­teen new songs.  It can’t be easy to write four­teen songs in twenty-eight days—I’ve never been able to write more than a cou­ple in a month—but Hoga­boom man­aged to pull it off and after the month was up, he took his songs to Jay Wain­man (vio­lin, vocals, melody­horn) with whom he’d been jam­ming for sev­eral months.  The pair entered the stu­dio in May and spent two full days pump­ing out as much as they could.  First Hoga­boom recorded drums, gui­tars, and vocals and then Wain­man lay­ered on vio­lin, addi­tional vocals, and a col­lec­tion of instru­ments she had brought with her.  Con­rad Uno (Pres­i­dents of The United States Amer­ica, Fresh Young Fel­lows) mixed it on the spot and, as Hoga­boom reflects, “we took it home dazed and con­fused and not really know­ing if we even liked it yet.” The prod­uct of these ses­sions was the six-track EP Come Away From Your Home (avail­able for down­load on this site).  Per­haps Hoga­boom and Wain­man couldn’t see it because they were stuck in the thick of it, but it only took me one lis­ten to tell that they had cre­ated some­thing special.

In July, Hoga­boom and Wain­man recruited  drum­mer Michael White to flush out their sound and enable them to per­form live.  White’s jazz and metal influ­ence made for an inter­est­ing addi­tion, com­plet­ing Red­bird Fever lineup.  But as I men­tioned pre­vi­ously, Red­bird Fever was born from a chal­lenge.  That’s not only a com­ment on Hogaboom’s  deci­sion to write an album’s worth of mate­r­ial in the short­est month of the year, but also a com­ment on the makeup of the band.  “It’s pretty easy to be in a band with three sweaty guys, yelling your way through power chords. When we decided not to have a bass player, much of that was dri­ven by the chal­lenge that presents. You have to work your way through a song idea dif­fer­ently when you can’t count on that thick bassline to bring it back in from a drum break, for exam­ple. So you wind up struc­tur­ing things in less com­mon ways, and we’re find­ing that much more inter­est­ing and sat­is­fy­ing right now. The same is true of melody, with our vio­lin. We use the vio­lin as a melody, on top of the music, which chal­lenges the vocal melodies to try to rival it if they’re going to get the atten­tion in your ear. It’s a ten­sion in the music, I think, and there’s a cer­tain appeal in that tension.”

Red­bird Fever com­bines quirky pop sen­si­bil­i­ties with a healthy exper­i­men­tal vibe.  Their songs are short and snappy (the longest track on their EP is only 2:47) and remark­ably unpre­ten­tious.  As they explain it, “spi­ral­ing vio­lin and vocal melodies off­set looped, angu­lar gui­tar riffs and dynamic lyrics about loss, heartache, and alien­ation.” That’s all true enough, but there’s a charm to Red­bird Fever that extends beyond that, some­thing that one can’t put a fin­ger on so eas­ily.  It might have some­thing to do with the inti­macy of the lyrics, which seem more like frag­ments of a bed­side con­ver­sa­tion or  a stream of con­scious­ness than some­thing pre­med­i­tated.  Or maybe, as Hoga­boom sug­gests, it has some­thing to do with the inter­play between vio­lin and vocals.  Or maybe it’s the sub­tle ten­sion between Wain­man’s and Hogaboom’s vocal melodies, usu­ally in uni­son but diverg­ing at key moments.  Or per­haps I’ve missed it entirely.  I’ll let you be the judge of that.  It’s time to press play on A-side “It’s a Metaphor, Dear!”

7… 6… 5… 4… 3… 2… 1…!!! Lately, Red­bird Fever has been open­ing their shows with this song and hav­ing the crowd help them count down.  Hoga­boom explains, “when we hit one and start the song, there’s a really nice shar­ing that hap­pens with us and every­one who was count­ing.” “It’s a Metaphor, Dear!” is the per­fect opener.  A per­cus­sive gui­tar riff and peppy vio­lin melody kick things off with gusto while the refrain takes on a more pen­sive air.  A heav­ier riff-based outro gives the band a chance to build.  As adver­tised, “It’s a Metaphor, Dear!” is an extended metaphor.  “I think that I would like to live in her heart it may sound stu­pid but i’d have to bring both my cats.  Maybe it’d be bet­ter if I were a red blood cell, flow through her aorta and down through her left ven­tri­cle.” But the mere act of declar­ing the song a metaphor adds a sar­cas­tic twist, as if to say it’s a metaphor for a metaphor.  Cer­tainly, it’s not to be taken at face value.  Hoga­boom explains, “it’s about love, but it’s got this insin­cer­ity wrap­ping it up”

As I keep assert­ing, Red­bird Fever is a band that likes to push itself, and nowhere is this more evi­dent than in B-side “Some­times Things Get Bro­ken.”  The band explains that  “[it] started out as an exper­i­ment, try­ing to chal­lenge our­selves to do a song with no musi­cally sep­a­rate cho­rus, and try to make it appar­ent using mostly vocals.” It’s a test they pass with fly­ing col­ors.  The beau­ti­ful vocal har­monies on the title line, “some­times things get bro­ken,” help it to rise above the mix but when Hogaboom’s and Wainman’s voices diverge on the word bro­ken, with Hoga­boom cut­ting it short and Wain­man con­tin­u­ing on, the sense of togeth­er­ness lit­er­ally gets bro­ken.  In another instance, Wain­man sings “don’t tell me 1 and 1 make 1 again” while Hoga­boom shouts bit­terly over her, “it’s sub­trac­tion, it’s addi­tion,” evok­ing a con­flict between lovers. Although “Some­times Things Get Bro­ken” lacks a dis­tinct verse/chorus struc­ture it’s musi­cally quite pro­gres­sive.  Unusual tex­tures like hand­claps and whis­pers help keep things inter­est­ing on this track.

Red­bird Fever plans to enter the stu­dio again in early 2010 to record a full length album.  In the mean time, they will be per­form­ing, the next show sched­uled at 4th Ave Tav in Olympia, WA on Jan­u­ary 23^rd.  And Feb­ru­ary is right around the cor­ner.  Would it be too much to hope for four­teen new songs?

Nate Green­berg

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