Features • Friday January 29th, 2010 • 12:00 am
The other side is finally here. A year after its intended release, Home Acres finally arrives to properly attach itself to its softer-speaking sibling, Light Works. Those confused by the previous release of Aloha need not worry that the band took its progressing sound and abandoned it for such delicate fare. In fact, Home Acres rocks out more than anything else the Polyvinyl act has ever released.
The songs for both albums were originally composed together and intended to be released as a “light” and “heavy” double take of sorts. Instead, various timing and planning issues got in the way, abandoning Light Works all by its lonesome and leaving Home Acres to wait until March 2010 for its proper reveal. Frustrating as it might be, vocalist Tony Cavallario hopes that fans grab onto this one with its heavier musicianship and subject matter.
It’s interesting watching Aloha develop a work like this several years in rather than move the other direction. After all, when a band settles into a rhythm, starts having children and the like, things tend toward a sound of settling, if you will. Instead, as Cavallario describes, Aloha’s ready to experiment in bold directions and maybe even find their “super-jam” along the way.
SSv: Light Works and Home Acres hold such different sounds – one more plaintive and airy, the other obviously more aggressive. Do you find yourself drawn to one more than the other? Does it depend on the mood?
Tony: Yeah, actually I find myself drawn to acoustic-based music and as a songwriter and singer, I like to take things easy and have a more obvious place for the melodies to go and be able to write something where people are listening to the lyrics. That’s really gratifying as a songwriter. At the same time, Aloha is all about having this confluence of sounds from everybody within the band and then shaping that into a pop song actually. So that’s the challenge for me to make a pop song out of the music that we make. That’s more gratifying than the other side when we actually pull that off.
But Light Works is really special to me. It represents a really interesting time in my life. It was right before I had a kid and it was a more introspective time in general. I was coming to grips with being in my thirties and it was a much more personal album.
SSv: It’s interesting to hear you say that because you’d think the trajectory overall would head the opposite way, that you would become more mellow as you settle down into family life and so forth.
Tony: [Laughs] Yeah, you would. But I feel like having a child is having a reconnection with the part of me that looks at the world and thinks about what is right and what is wrong. It just really affects your worldview because all of a sudden, it’s not just you that it’s affecting. As you get older, you can begin to just withdraw and receive from life and just think, ‘It’s just the way it is. I’m not punk rock anymore, but instead I’m just some guy living a normal life.’
But when that kid comes, you start building the fortress around that kid. You start thinking about the world and what kind of world you want him or her to grow up within. I think it was a reconnection for me and the world around me. It nicely dovetailed with a kind of turbulent time in the world with Obama and the recession and all of this stuff coming. Having a kid was a new awakening for me socially and politically and whatnot.
SSv: Thematically how does that play out on the album? I mean, how are you responding when those worlds collide, as you said?
Tony: I would say there’s nothing really prescriptive about Home Acres. It’s just me imagining what things would be like if they were to fall apart more and more. I’m trying to imagine if everything we take for granted in America, for example, that even though it seems we’re in decline, it’s still a very prosperous, Gilded Age sort of moment. When I’m writing, I’m stripping that away and thinking of what comes after that.
Maybe in a paranoid way, I went through a phase where I was reading about running out of fossil fuels, about peak-oil theory. Gene Cussler is this writer who definitely writes about life after this big moment. He basically sees the world and America as this boom that was created by this strange confluence of things including fossil fuels. That’s just a small blip on the map and then we go back to this other time. So there’s nothing directly associated with that, but it’s what lingers in the backdrop when I’m thinking about the themes on this record.
I guess when I write songs, especially for this album and due to the painstaking nature of finishing it, I can definitely go to a very dark place compared to my normal personality especially. I definitely think that songwriting is a way for me to exorcise some demons in that way, so even though I’m experiencing this domestic bliss situation with the new kid and stuff, I’m still going down to my studio at night and just thinking about what would happen for everything to be washed away.
SSv: What about musically? I know there are more aggressive tones and guitar-oriented sounds, but what’s informing that?
Tony: Maybe some of that was reactionary to Some Echoes, because that album was definitely trying to capture some vintage sounds. We were all listening to a lot of Kraut-rock and a lot of ’60s stuff. When I sat down to start writing new songs, I wanted more of a blank slate and not trying to create anything in particular. I wanted to go back to how things were in high school when I was a jazz master with all these pedals and stuff. I was just thinking of alternative rock and indie rock and classic tones and not trying to make any direct reference to anything.
There was also a conscious effort… Cale [Parks, drummer] talks about this with his own music too, but when you sit down in the studio to write a song, you get stuck in a few chord progressions and a few BPMs [Beats per minute] – 110 BPMs or something mid-tempo. So a lot of times I would sit down with something I was writing, set up a fake drum track, pump up the tempo a bit just to try to knock myself out of my element and find some different chord progressions. So there was definitely that effort to be more upbeat musically in that way.
A lot of times, I think it’s easy to make mid-tempo or slower songs that are pretty. A lot of times, the songwriter will fall in love with them. But a lot of times, those things are really subtle, the things you love, I mean. It’s like, ‘Here comes this synthesizer swell during the chorus and it’s so celestial and pretty.’ People who only listen to your music once, which is 90% of the people who will download your album, won’t think about those things until they listen to the music for the hundredth time.
SSv: Is that frustrating for you or do you realize it comes with the territory?
Tony: It’s not frustrating to me, because Aloha has a built-in fan base which will give it that chance. I also know that people who are music fans or those who are critics will know if there’s something there. They will then tell people about it and they will get the memo eventually. I feel like there’s very few bands who are great who somehow fly completely under the radar. I mean, it’s hard not to make great music and not have at least someone find out about it these days.
You do want to make something immediate every once in a while. People will say, ‘Oh, what’s your best song?’ And for Aloha, you just say, ‘Um, they’re all really good, but you do really have to listen to them.’ [Laughs] It’d be nice to have a super-jam that’s everyone’s favorite I guess. [Laughs]
SSv: [Laughs] You’re one of the few artists I’ve heard actually place a bit of faith in the critical side of things to reveal what is good.
Tony: For sure. But I think that’s only because it’s been thoroughly democratized. Anyone can send an album to their friends and they send it on to their other friends. Anybody can blog about a song they believe is great. It’s not like magazines anymore are only getting their information from well-funded parts of the music industry. It’s bubbling up from below more than usual.
SSv: So tell us what 2010 looks like for you guys around the album release?
Tony: Yeah, the release of Home Acres in is March. We’re definitely leaning towards playing South By Southwest, but that really depends. It’s a lot more fun for a newer band to play, but it still might be fun. Then we’re going to do a tour of half the U.S. in April and after that, who knows. Hopefully, we’ll make some kind of video for Home Acres as well. We’ve never finished a video that features all members of the band, so we’re a little late to that scene. But we’re going to do that and hopefully make some document of us playing live – us getting together somewhere.
The house on the cover of the album that Daniel Danger drew is actually a house that really exists. So one of the things we’re going to try to do is go there and film something that involves us playing there. So that should be cool. But Cale has his own thing going which is great. And T.J. is an engineer and I’m looking to do some other musical projects this year as well. I’m sure by the end of the year, we’ll be writing some new songs because some of the songs on Home Acres date back to 2006, I think, so it’s time to definitely see what is out there.
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