Oginalii’s Pendulum occupies a unique place inside 2020’s ever-expanding pantheon of quarantine releases. One-half pre-COVID recordings, one-half made remotely under lockdown, the EP is the heaviest, grooviest, eeriest manifestation to date of the local hard-rock outfit led by Atlanta native Emma Hoeflinger since 2013.
Hoeflinger “started out doing singer-songwriter stuff, like everyone coming to Belmont,” she tells the Scene. She’s retracing Oginalii’s origins on a video call with the whole band ahead of Pendulum’s Oct. 23 release. Drawing on her personal touchstones Queens of the Stone Age, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and the almighty Led Zeppelin, Hoeflinger spent the project’s early years honing her craft as a singer, writer and player. She majored in vocals at Belmont’s School of Music and later switched to guitar, graduating in 2015. Oginalii cycled through several lineups before Hoeflinger found an ideal six-string foil in Nashville local Ryan Quarles, freeing herself up to explore the art of the riff while he dove deep into the world of effects pedals. But the core duo still sought its other half.
Enter Emma Lambiase, a bassist who’d come from Texas to study at Belmont, and her friend Simon Knudtson, a drummer originally from Wisconsin. The pair was drafted into the band as a package deal in late 2017. Initially, the arrangement was just for one show, but they ended up sticking.
“Ryan asked Simon, and Emma asked me separately,” Lambiase remembers. “Then Simon and I were hanging out, and realized we were both filling in with the same band. We never stopped filling in.”
Says Hoeflinger, “It finally felt like what Oginalii was always supposed to be.”
The band issued its first full-length Cause & Affection in April 2019 and spent much of the year on tour. All Them Witches axman Ben McLeod produced the album, an appealingly grungy mix of desert-rock riffs, psych atmospherics and clever vocal melodies. But the bulk of the arrangements on C&A had been locked in before Knudtson and Lambiase joined up. Hoeflinger and Quarles were eager to move forward and discover what the retooled foursome could pull off when writing together.
So was Mexico City indie label Devil in the Woods, which inked Oginalii to a deal in early 2020. The group wrote and tracked a trio of new tunes — “Scapegoat,” “Pendulum” and “Pillars” — again with McLeod at the helm. But when the coronavirus reared its head and the calendar turned from March to April, they realized it might be a while before they could hit the studio again — and the label was still expecting another three songs.
The time crunch “forced us to creatively approach writing music over the internet,” Quarles says. Foreign as composing in isolation felt at first, the band came to embrace the opportunity to push outside its comfort zone. “The parts we wrote separately gave everyone more space to do something a little more out-there,” says Lambiase. She describes the nervous excitement of firing off a song snippet and awaiting a response as “kind of like when you send a risky text message.”
It also led to the acquisition of new skill sets. “Simon and I spent a lot of time learning more about home recording and experimenting with tape loops,” says Quarles. “The time we’d normally spend preparing for touring had been offset by energy we were now devoting to trying to get more creative, expand our knowledge.”
As EPs should, the multifaceted Pendulum makes every moment count. Each “quarantune” showcases a different strength. On the menacingly catchy opening salvo “Veils,” the band flexes its pop muscle, while the minimalist “Black Hole” makes for a ghostly interlude. The finale “Stripped the Screw” navigates a compositional gauntlet with hummingbird-like precision. From the McLeod sessions, “Scapegoat” thrashes with abandon, while the title track is part funereal dirge, part heavy-metal firestorm.
The cleaner guitars and slick rhythmic interplay of “Pillars,” in contrast, highlight Lambiase and Knudtson’s contributions — and nod to an unexpected common influence. “Steely Dan is the reason I play guitar,” Quarles says, recalling the night he and his parents saw the famed jazz-popsters co-headline at Nashville’s long-closed Starwood Amphitheatre with yacht-rock king Michael McDonald in 2006. Hoeflinger’s dad, meanwhile, “had Steely Dan playing every morning.” The soundtrack to Lambiase’s family’s road trips: “Steely Dan, Chicago, Supertramp and Rush.” Knudtson’s folks’ go-tos: “The Clash, jazz CDs, electronic stuff, improvisational music — oh, and also Steely Dan.”
You can take the kids out of music school, never vice versa. But putting in their work at Belmont did more for Oginalii’s members than just sharpen their musical acumen and instrumental proficiency. It also taught them what they don’t want out of music.
“Music school locks you into thinking things have to be a certain way, that bands are always going to have one person arranging everything, telling everyone what to do, and that’s just how it is,” Lambiase says. “This band jailbroke that. It was sick.”
