“Chase the Dream” kicks off Faux Ferocious’ new Burger Records LP Pretty Groovy at a laid-back but confident pace. The chime of dual guitars is bathed in a light echo, and a head-nodding two-note bass line and traces of auxiliary hand percussion indicate we’re in for some heady prog-psych jams. It sounds more like the work of a German band from the ’70s — a lost Neu! track, maybe — than a gang of native Tennesseans in 2019. At least for its first 50 seconds.
Then, suddenly, a fluttery jazz-guitar figure reminiscent of Steely Dan shifts the groove, and within another 20 seconds, we’re boogeying along to some barroom piano. Guitarist-vocalist Terry Kane offers up a message to fellow working-class musicians, never to let the post-tour blues bring them down. “Keep your spirit pointed true north / And it’ll get you where you’re looking to be,” he sings, “And don’t be afraid to chase the dream.”
To hear this kind of earnestness in the context of krautrock-y psych, in which lyrics often feel like an afterthought (if they’re even discernible), is surprising. Incongruous as FF’s rapid-fire genre splicing on “Chase the Dream” may seem at first listen, you realize it works — you can’t get the tune out of your head.
“Thanks for noticing the lyrics,” says Kane, taking a seat beside guitarist Jonathan Stone Phillips. “They’re not accidental.” We’re at Mickey’s Tavern in East Nashville, the night before Faux Ferocious joins the caravan of bands descending on Austin, Texas, for SXSW. “Our favorite music is instrumental for the most part,” adds Phillips, “but we all agree there’s kind of a lack of [a message] in popular music in this vein, that speaks about anything of consequence.”
FF has existed for a decade, but its members go back further. Phillips, Kane and drummer Reid Cummings grew up together in Nashville, attending Hume-Fogg High School and later the University of Tennessee. There they picked up bassist Dylan Palmer and dove headfirst into Knoxville’s ever-eclectic underground. They’ve never had a lineup change.
While the band had more blues rock in its makeup back then, it also wasn’t shy about letting its freak flag fly. “We’d bang amplifiers down on the ground, reverb crashes, shit like that,” Kane says. He and Phillips credit lesser-known Midwestern sonic adventurers like Chicago outfit Cave as gateway bands. “We met them and were like, ‘What the fuck do you listen to?’ ” Kane says with a laugh, recalling FF’s introduction to the Cans and Kraftwerks of the world.
On returning to Music City from the Marble City after college, FF wisely resisted the urge to hit it too hard and risk burnout. By Kane’s recollection, they didn’t start touring extensively until 2014, the year their song “Striking Distance” was featured in a T-Mobile commercial. Performing in fits and starts partially explains how the band has lasted so long. It might also be why, despite having records on widely loved rock-centric labels Burger and Infinity Cat, the band still has a fairly modest profile in its hometown. Friday’s East Room gig, the record-release party for Pretty Groovy, is Faux Ferocious’ first Nashville show since September, when they turned in a transfixing opening set at the last of local pop-punk ensemble Diarrhea Planet’s farewell concerts at Exit/In.
Pretty Groovy may give the group a substantial boost in visibility. It delivers on both its apt title and the lofty precedent set by its opening track. Beyond “Chase the Dream,” highlights include the mellow yet propulsive “Solvency” and the subtly mathy album-closer “Me and Jonny.” A pair of songs, “Price of Progress” and “Drop Kick Heartache,” channel the too-relatable angst and frustration of being priced out of one’s city, creating gutsy, bracing psychedelic punk.
Crisply recorded in Athens, Ga., by Drew Vandenberg (whose work you’ve heard on records by Deerhunter and Of Montreal, among others), the 10-song LP is an unlikely marriage of sound and sentiment that stands out among its peers in the local rock scene. At the same time, by its songwriting-forward nature, it fits into a long-standing Nashville tradition.
