AEM098 The Orange Opera

“Some­times, the best of things come from the most unlikely of places. Who would have thought a well­spring of world-class pop-rock would gush forth from a ho-hum city in the Mid­west­ern U.S., not exactly renowned for its musi­cal output?”

So begins the biog­ra­phy of The Orange Opera, a band from Fort Wayne, Indi­ana.  And sure enough, when you hear their charm­ing, artic­u­late, and spot-on indie pop you might be sur­prised to learn that they hail from a city you prob­a­bly couldn’t locate on a map.  I’m not even con­fi­dent I could locate the state of Indi­ana on a map.  (I apol­o­gize in advance to any­body read­ing this review from Indi­ana for my geo­graph­i­cal igno­rance.  I’m sure it’s a lovely place.)  At any rate, The Orange Opera started off humbly enough.  It began as a stage name for song­writer Kevin Ham­brick (vocals, piano, gui­tar) who per­formed his orig­i­nal songs accom­pa­nied by an upright bassist.  Every­thing kicked into gear in 2002 when Ham­brick started jam­ming with Kevin Hock­a­day (drums) and Bryan Brubaker (elec­tric bass) and the band had its first gig as a three-piece just a week later.  Shortly after their first gig, the band swelled into a four-piece with the addi­tion of lead gui­tar.  The Orange Opera has remained a quar­tet ever since, although they ran through three gui­tarists before finally arriv­ing at Zach Smith, who joined the group in 2009.

The Orange Opera has earned a siz­able fol­low­ing in their eight years of exis­tence, embark­ing on sev­eral tours and per­form­ing along­side high pro­file indie acts such as The Teeth and Dr. Dog.   In 2007 they were awarded 1st place in Whatzup Magazine’s Bat­tle of the Bands.  Nev­er­the­less, they’ve yet to aban­don their home­town and the major­ity of their per­for­mances are in or around Fort Wayne.   “Here’s the excep­tion that proves the rule,” the biog­ra­phy con­tin­ues.  “Great music can emerge from the most hum­ble of locales.” And it’s true with­out a doubt.  Great music can indeed emerge from the most hum­ble of locales and The Orange Opera is a prime example.

But let’s back up a sec­ond and ask a very per­ti­nent ques­tion.  Who cares?  It’s not as if some Grand Guru of All-That-Is-Hip sat upon his mighty throne one day and decreed that every cool band has to be from Brook­lyn.  As for hum­ble begin­nings, isn’t that why indie music was cre­ated in the first place?  To be a rock star you need to be beau­ti­ful, well con­nected, and will­ing to sac­ri­fice artis­tic integrity in order to appeal to the main­stream.  To be an indie star, you sim­ply have to make good music.  Right?  The prob­lem is, in reject­ing the main­stream, indie embraces the obscure.  I fully sup­port the changes the music indus­try has under­gone in recent years which have enabled small bands to build enor­mous grass­roots fol­low­ings with­out the aide of a major label but the “you should like this band because they recorded their entire album in their base­ment through an inter­nal micro­phone using only a bro­ken ukulele and a Casio key­board” phi­los­o­phy is every bit as dis­gust­ing to me as, “you should like this band because they’re on MTV.”

That’s why I was some­what skep­ti­cal when I first read The Orange Opera’s biog­ra­phy which crafts a story out of their geo­graph­i­cal obscu­rity.  That’s why you should be some­what skep­ti­cal of this review which, albeit begrudg­ingly, is doing the same thing.  It’s almost too easy.  In addi­tion to being from Indi­ana, these guys met at a fuck­ing shoe store.  (I didn’t men­tion that  in the first para­graph because I was sav­ing that tasty bit of infor­ma­tion for this pre­cise moment.)  And yes, their two most recent albums, Ant Mus­cle and Year of the Beard, were recorded in a base­ment, albeit mas­tered by for­mer Wilco drum­mer Ken Coomer.  But that’s not why you should love this band.  You should love them because they make amaz­ing music that will catch your ear as soon as you hear it and after just a few lis­tens, may very well find its way into your heart.

A-Side “Ruby” is a prime exam­ple.  The song begins with a play­ful 6/8 piano riff that’s later sup­ported by bass, drums, and taste­fully sparse elec­tric gui­tar.  Hambrik’s singing meshes per­fectly with the music, his phras­ing imply­ing a call and response between instru­men­tal and vocal pas­sages.  The lyri­cal motif of begin­ning each phrase by address­ing “Ruby” is a great hook, and gives the lis­tener the sat­is­fac­tion of being able to (almost) sing along on the first lis­ten.  The cho­rus shifts (so grace­fully you barely notice it) to a 4/4 feel and a com­pletely dif­fer­ent tempo, which gives it a heav­ier pulse.  How­ever the shim­mer­ing and spot-on vocal har­monies in the back­ground keep the music from get­ting too dreary and hold every­thing afloat.  The gui­tar inter­lude after the sec­ond cho­rus is a nice touch.  It’s charm­ingly out of tune and pro­vides a sim­ple but clear melody that in my mind evokes an amuse­ment park carousel.  It’s espe­cially per­fect­ing con­sid­er­ing the lyri­cal con­tent.  “Ruby, don’t you wanna play?   It’s been so long, you’re down and out, today’s your day. Alto­gether the song has a very, for lack of a more suit­able adjec­tive, Sgt. Pep­pers Lonely Hearts Club Band vibe, which is pretty high praise in my book.  And if that’s not good enough, it gets sig­nif­i­cantly more adorable once you learn the story behind it.  I real­ize that I may sound a lit­tle hyp­o­crit­i­cal after my cri­tique of the whole hum­ble begin­nings appeal, but this isn’t a bio­graph­i­cal trick as it per­tains directly to the music.  “Ruby” isn’t a song about a girl as I thought it was and as you’re prob­a­bly think­ing it is, but rather about Hambrick’s now deceased guinea pig.  “I just pic­tured a day in her life when she was get­ting older and stay­ing in her pigloo a lot…” he explains.  There are a mil­lion and one songs about girls and prob­a­bly only a hand­ful about guinea pigs, so in my mind that makes this one just a lit­tle more special.

B-Side “Fool For The Game” is sig­nif­i­cantly sparser, slower, and dreamier but it retains the same inter­est­ing hooks, impec­ca­ble pop sen­si­bil­ity, and decep­tive com­plex­ity that “Ruby” and, more accu­rately, all of Ham­brick’s songs seem to share.  Lack­ing bass and drums and sup­ported only by min­i­mal gui­tar, “Fool For The Game” is by default a vocal fea­ture which gives The Orange Opera’s vocal prowess time to shine.  Here the peppy 60’s style “shoo-wop” is at odds with dis­mal lyrics they echo, “What seemed so right for­ever is slowly fad­ing far away.” The song never really picks up but at its biggest moments, when the vocal har­monies swell and the vibrato gui­tar seem to evoke “Aloha Oe,” it approaches a drugged-out and uncan­nily happy tran­quil­ity.  The result is clev­erly ironic and com­pli­cates the mes­sage of the refrain, “it’s gonna feel so good.”

For those of you from Fort Wayne, you should feel lucky to have such a phe­nom­e­nal band in your midst.  They’re reg­u­lar per­form­ers, so take advan­tage of the oppor­tu­nity to see them play.  Also, you can thank them for putting your city on my map.  I’ve cur­rently got the Fort Wayne Wikipedia arti­cle open in another win­dow and see that it’s a charm­ing lit­tle city of roughly 250,000 in the north-eastern cor­ner of the state and has won the All-America city award in 1982, 1998, and 2009.  For the rest of you out there, The Orange Opera plans to embark on more tours in the future so stay tuned.  In the mean­time, keep an eye out in the com­ing weeks, as we’ll be adding their albums to our mod­est online store.

Nate Green­berg

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