“…
hold on, Tristan’s really good at talking, he’s just arrived,”
The Vells’ keyboardist Mary Thinnes informs me over the phone with
a sigh as I hear her stretching. A classically trained pianist, Thinnes
is putting her education into action in a most unlikely manner by playing
in the Pacific Northwest’s greatest new indie rock band. We had
been talking for ten minutes about the intricacies of vintage-or-something
keyboards, midi-doo-hickeys, and laptop a-to-z-inter-watchamacallits.
I really had no idea what she was saying, and I’m sure she sensed
this and that’s where the sigh and the audible stretch came from;
“Get the songwriter on the phone the patronizing journalist hasn’t
got a clue.”
If you know anything about The Vells, and you don’t, this “Tristan”
who is “really good at talking” is Tristan Marcum, lead singer
(ahh what a sweet voice) and songwriter. He used to play in a band I have
never heard of called Fire Child. Marcum is the person responsible for
bringing together a group of four men and one woman from various other
outfits (The Blessed Light, Stagger Lee, Modest Mouse, and Red Stars Theory)
to form The Vells, an uber-indie sorta-supergroup ala fellow Pacific Northwesterns
via Canada, The New Pornographers. “Yeah it’s true, we’ve
all served our time in other things. Like Mary is classically trained.
Everybody else has been in some little bands or bigger bands,” informs
Marcum, “[We’re] just friends, it’s kind of a regional
thing. People we kind of grew up around. Like Jeremiah and Mary were two
people I always wanted to play with for sure. So that kind of came around
in a couple different phases.”
The Vells are making music for the masses, even though you haven’t
heard, or heard of, them. Way back in March 2003 they released a six-song
EP characterized by irresistible and baleful melodies, meaty hooks that
aren’t necessarily meet, and adroit poetically obscure lyrics. Pure
pop delight with substance beneath a sugary sheen, this is the stuff of
good records. This is magic music deliberately acknowledging paradox,
all in the context of the three-minute pop song.
Each of the six songs are finely crafted, but not easily categorized.
Marcum says it best: “I just think of it as pop music, yeah. We
definitely want it to be something that can reach a lot of different demographics,
like we aren’t trying to cater to some middle-of-the-road thing,
but we definitely want make something that has something for everybody.
By that definition, we are pop. We are definitely trying to tap in to
the heritage, the legacy of really great songs.” Indeed, you know
that The Beatles, The Beach Boys, The Byrds are influences (it goes without
saying), but like contemporary popsters The New Pornographers and The
Shins, their music transcends simple classification.
The songs dig into your ears, discerning music listeners: words and melody
cohabitate, one moment embraced in blissful love, the next locked in struggle
over implications and secrets. The instruments are tight yet subtly absurd:
there is push and pull, ying and yang, Dark and Light in the songs and
it moves you, makes you actually listen. This is not an easy task; it
took about a dozen listens for me to comprehend this juxtaposition in
pop songs. It’s this paradox, the sugary surface joined to elegiac
flesh, that can be disconcerting and enables easy dismissal (“another
twee-indie-pop sissy band”), but if you allow yourself to listen,
you find there is much more going on.
While the music bops along playfully flirting with the pneuma, the lyrics,
filled with dense rhyming couplets reminiscent of Shakespeare (that’s
a bit hyperbolic), or, to be current, Stephen Merritt, go straight to
it. “That’s one thing that I did get some ed-jew-ma-cation
for, was writing and words and stuff. That’s where I hope I can
be almost subversive. Where I can have these almost sugary songs, and
really accessible music, and have words that, on some level, seem to go
with that, but there’s a sense that it might have a different meaning
than the song itself. I like to play around with contrasts like that,”
explains Marcum.
His words are on another level. Obscure, for sure, but still coherent
enough to render meaning, although one may not be immediately apparent.
Marcum expects that the listener may not “get” the meanings,
but insists that they are there; it’s up to the individual to discern.
He also believes that the lyrics take the songs from “good”
to “great”. He explains, “I think that is the place
where some people really broke through in making pop music into high art,
you know. I think that’s really where it can be done, is where you
play with the tension between the lyrics and the music.”
Again, to review, the music and the lyrics in paradoxical tension make
The Vells what they are: great. Marcum is confident that once they get
out of the safe confines of the Seattle/Portland corridor (where they
have made somewhat of a name for themselves) to tour, they will dominate.
“I’ve got this real deep conviction that once we get out there
and start playing this music for people, it’s going to catch on.
I think we’re knockin’ on heaven’s door right now, so
to speak. Once we open that door, and just let it start pouring out, we
are going be a musical force that people will have to reckon with, in
a positive way,” he boasts, but in a nice way (natch!). “Success,
to me, is really something about how many people you reach, how many people
you get to share your pain with. Because I’ve been making music
long enough not making any money that crazy stuff like that [the profit
motive] is pretty much … ya know. It’s about something else.” |