Dance Dance Revolution
VHS or Beta’s latest reminds listeners that there’s a rock band behind the dance beats
And the metamorphosis has continued. Night on Fire—their ’80s dance-pop-drenched full-length debut—marked the addition of intelligible vocals (the only ones on Le Funk were heavily manipulated and looped), and its 10 tracks had a digital four-on-the-floor bounce that could almost have been mistaken for drum machine beats. Still, the Louisville band members have always played their own instruments and been careful not to embellish their recordings beyond what can easily be reproduced onstage.
“I think we’ve always just had a thing,” says Palgy, the group’s bass player. “When we finish a song, we always try to picture it being played live. I think a lot of bands can over-decorate things. I’m a huge fan of Dungen, that psych-rock band. I went to see them live and it didn’t really do it for me. There was so much stuff going on on that record [the fuzzy, meandering Stadsvandringar]. I mean they weren’t terrible [live], but it seemed like 50 percent of what they were [on the album]. At this age you can put 1,400 synthesizers on something and make it sound totally cracked out and probably pretty cool. We are always like, ‘Let’s not get too carried away.’ ”
As if to rub in the fact that VHS or Beta have never strayed from fairly standard guitar-bass-drum instrumentation (with keyboards added live) even at their most programmed-sounding, they’ve interspersed acoustic drums with digital percussion on their latest album, Bring On the Comets. “A lot of the criticism we got, maybe not necessarily in the press—well a little bit in the press—but just in general was the fact that the drums were kind of one-dimensional, even though [drummer] Mark [Guidry] always played everything in real-time,” says Palgy. “If you could look at him up close onstage you could see that he was playing everything. There were no sequences or anything. We’ve always been a rock band too. Having the drum kit back in the band seemed like a really obvious, natural progression.
“The only person who’s going to have trouble with it is the guy who runs sound for us,” continues Palgy. “He was so happy, because we had such little stage sound when all the drums were coming out of the monitors.”
A three-year gap between albums and the loss of a member prompted more than a change in drum sounds. “I think that [Zeke Buck] was wanting to branch out and do his own thing,” Palgy says. “The fact that he had a record done a couple months later was pretty much evidence of that.... We sort of had to reinvent what we were, and how we wrote. We used to write as a four-piece. We would get together in a room and jam and record it and then a couple of the guys would sing over it. This time around, we couldn’t really do that.”
While much of Bring On the Comets still maintains a kinetic pulse, it also breathes like a two-sided LP. An instrumental intro briefly fades into clarity before descending back into the lo-fi murk. The album seems to exhale halfway through with the serene, astral undulations of the under-a-minute interlude “Alpha Theta.” (“It doesn’t have anything to do with sororities or anything like that,” Palgy says of the song title. “It was a brainwave thing. I think it’s when you’re about to fall asleep.”) The spacious ebb and flow of “The Stars Where We Came From” completes the set, born aloft by empyrean strains of pedal steel from My Morning Jacket’s Carl Broemel.
“We grouped the songs like back in the day when you would listen to tapes or vinyl—one side could be one total experience and the other could be a completely different experience, but it all made sense,” says Palgy. “We’re really nostalgic for those days when people anticipated records and really listened to records. Now it’s just go to iTunes and get one song and go to a blog site and get another one.”
Though Broemel and his My Morning Jacket bandmates Jim James and Bo Koster (who contributed backing vocals, acoustic guitar and piano, respectively) are also based in Louisville, convening the two bands in the studio was a rare occasion. “We’re usually on opposite tour schedules—they’re usually gone when we’re home and when we’re gone they’re home,” Palgy says. “When you’re young you’re always jamming around with your friends. We started a band and it became, ‘We only play with our band members.’ Then we were like, ‘Gosh, remember the days when you used to play with your buddies?’ It felt like that.”
Hearing Pfunder—the band’s lead vocalist—deliver “doo doo doo”s in a reedy, falsetto during “She Says” and go from hushed to clenched-sounding on “Fall Down Lightly,” it’s evident that he’s expanded his range of expression a bit beyond the catch-in-the-throat, Robert Smith-like vocals of VHS or Beta’s previous album. “I think that it’s a matter of him having some breathing room,” says Palgy. “I know that he felt really rushed with Night on Fire. He was talking about how he felt like he needed to step into a role and present himself in a certain way. This time around he was just like, ‘I’m going to sing how I feel that day.’ ”
Even with VHS or Beta’s continuous reshaping, a strong current of danceable buoyancy remains. “The reason why we began to do dance music in the first place was because we liked the fact that people danced,” Palgy says. “In the indie rock scene in the late ’90s, it was like it was absurd to dance. It’s a primal sort of urge. I mean, people come together, they hear sounds, they like the sounds, and they move around. Maybe it sounds silly, but I think that it’s kind of amazing. We didn’t want to abandon the idea of people dancing. I think the record isn’t all dance tunes. You can take it any way you want.”
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