By Jon Stone

Elsinore, one of our favorite bands from Champaign-Urbana, is celebrating the release of Yes Yes Yes with Parasol Records today and we couldn’t be more excited for them. Lead man Ryan Groff was nice enough to sit down and answer some questions for us about the band, his history and influences as a musician, and the music scene here in CU. We wish them all the luck we can muster!

A few weeks after I moved to C-U in the summer of 2007, I heard Elsinore play at the Urbana Corn festival. I immediately went home and hit up the internet for more info. Your MySpace page at the time had you guys listed as an alt-country band. The Elsinore I hear on Yes Yes Yes is not really what I think of when I think alt-country or Americana. Can you talk a bit about the history of the band and its sonic evolution?

Our first two years (2004-2006) we were very acoustic and very Americana/Alt-Country. This was how we started and what felt right. But, as we played in cities outside our small college town and started shaping a real vision and direction, we realized we were all ready to move into something new sonically and musically. We don’t look back and scoff at our first record, Nothing for Design, because we had a lot of fun making it (thank you, Mark Rubel!) and really love how it turned out. But, since it has been our only full-length out in the world, we’ve been overly antsy to get Yes Yes Yes out so people don’t get confused about just exactly what it is we do. We’ve dreaded the “Bob Dylan in ’66″ response. (Ha!) We loved Ryan Adams and the early Shins records, and that seemed to saturate the songwriting and arrangement processes. But, I started realizing that my lifelong love of The Beatles and new-found love of Radiohead were carving me into a different kind of songwriter. I wasn’t feeling acoustic guitars and shuffle beats anymore. Instead my pedal board grew and grew, and we just turned everything up until it crackled a little. We’d electrified our sound and that naturally took us in the direction we are now, which gets called “pop”, “space-rock”, “art rock”, etc. And this music is what feels right. When comparisons to Death Cab for Cutie or Queen or Radiohead or Arcade Fire happen we smile and nod in agreement.

Being from the Midwest is a theme that creeps into Elsinore’s music from time to time. What are the benefits and draw-backs of being from a place like Champaign-Urbana?

Champaign-Urbana is an ideal community to live in for what we’re doing. It’s not so small that you feel like there’s not enough happening musically or just culturally, but it’s not the gigantor that Chicago, L.A., & New York are. When we’re in New York I feel like we’d be so unhappy if we lived there. Sure, EVERY band seems to be from Brooklyn right now and we love most of them, so something is right in that creative next right now. But, I’d rather stop in and play a few times a year, see our friends, sleep on their couches and floors, and then talk about how good it was once we’re home in Illinois sitting in my giant backyard while paying an affordable mortgage on a house I love… a house with a full basement where we don’t pay rent to rehearse and record. And I don’t mean that as a negative to city-dwellers. I just love being in the Midwest and having a lot of space when I’m home. CU gives us everything we need, and we’re in the middle of the Midwest triangle of St. Louis, Chicago, and Indianapolis. It’s PERFECT!

What is the music community here like?

I’ve loved the feeling of Champaign-Urbana since I was a kid and would come up here from Charleston with my family. Maybe the Super Computer has laced the infrastructure of these cities with something magnetic and supernatural, or maybe it’s just the perfect combination of cornfields, a clean water supply, and a mini-metropolis that keeps things spinning here. Whatever’s happening is so good, especially for the music scene. There are always the student bands that come and go as U of I waxes and wanes, but there’s a permanent slice of the population that makes great music. And the people who live here go see, hear, and support original music, and when you put those two things together you have a flourishing music scene. Besides all of the hard-working bands, we have entities like Exile on Main St., Parasol Records, Pygmalion Music Festival, Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, Indi Go Gallery, Polyvinyl Records, Undertow Music Collective, The Shadowboxer Collective, Seth Fein, Ward Gollings, and a music-supporting press made up of SmilePolitely.com, Buzz (The Daily Illini), and The News-Gazette. And something small and seemingly inconsequential, but something that I think is the sign of any good music community: when you hang posters in this town they STAY UP! So, you’re not just wasting paper and time by flyering for your shows.

One of the most striking elements of Elsinore, Ryan, is your voice. The new record has some really amazing vocal layering and harmonies. Do you remember the first time you sang for an audience? What’s the legacy there? Who are your influences?

I remember being in fifth grade and being asked to sing in front of a gym full students and their parents. I was freaked out and didn’t let my family come, but I remember it going well. But, it obviously took its toll because I didn’t sing again until I was 17 and a junior in high school. That’s when I started singing and playing the guitar, and shortly after started songwriting. And that’s when it overtook me. I knew right away that I was supposed to sing and play in front of people. I feel like I’m physically and mentally built to do this because I have a huge mouth and a huge lung capacity, and I’m pretty obsessive compulsive. So, all the elements are there! Ha. Like I said earlier, I’ve listened to The Beatles my entire life, so I’ve always had great voices and great harmonies in my ears. (I can’t wait to put my future son or daughter to sleep with The White Album every night.) The singers who inspire & influence me the most are, like I said, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, & George Harrison (sorry Ringo…you’re a hack), but also Thom Yorke, Andrew Bird, Annie Clark, Feist, Ben Gibbard, Freddie Mercury, and David Bowie. These are the voices that feel real and unique. These are the ones that do it.

Elsinore’s songs—especially those on Yes Yes Yes—often unfold as a kind of fractured narratives. Sometimes we get intimate details without a ton of back-story and sometimes it seems to be the opposite. Tell us a little about your songwriting process. What elements need to be there before you think, yeah, this might just work?

I’m always battling with myself to write good lyrics. I constantly sing parodies of my songs and other people’s songs with horrible lyrics both to flush out the bad ideas and to remind my wife why she married me. Usually, a single phrase will pop its head out and I’ll run with it into the chord creating process. So, I guess you can say I let that tiny bit of lyrics push me in a musical direction. Then, I’ll struggle and fight and push to write the words that fit with what the music is doing. Chord progressions, harmonies, and arranging always come pretty quickly. I’ve always been able to find good hooks. It’s putting the right words to those hooks that hold me up. I can never, never-ever write a poem or chunk of lyics and then put the music to it. I try all the time, but I just don’t work that way. I write a lot about our bodies and what makes us keep living and how it all works (and doesn’t work). I’ve always been comfortable with talking about my family and our function/dysfunction. Alcoholism, tons of divorce, mental illness, and unconditional love give you a lot to write about.

It’s easy to feel the love for Elsinore at a show in C-U, but being a working band mean being a touring band. What’s it like out on the road? Do you have any favorite venues or towns to play in? What do you guys do to stay sane?

Being on the road sometimes feels like that bad dream you have about being naked at the grocery store in the fruit section. Some nights in some cities can be the best shows you have all year…or the worst. We’ve been touring outside of Illinois for three years and I still haven’t seen a pattern. St. Louis, Chicago, Indianapolis, Memphis, Jamestown, NY, Hamden, CT, New York City/Brooklyn, & New Orleans have given us the kind of nights that remind us that this is what we’re supposed to be doing. Sometimes it’s a Tuesday in February and we’re in Charleston, South Carolina and everything is hitting just right. The seventeen people who are there are loving every second and all on their phones texting their friends about this band they’re watching…and then twenty more people show up halfway through the set and they all buy something when we’re done with our set. And then sometimes it will be a Friday in Philadelphia or Boston and the show just ISN’T working. Maybe the local band didn’t promote or doesn’t draw well, or maybe the show promoter dropped the ball and six people are there and couldn’t care less about what bands are playing…but still paid the $8 cover. It’s weird. But, touring overall is what we love doing and we know we have to do it if we expect to “do something” in this business. So, we puff up our chests and go to work. And we always have stacks of good books and DVDs in the van to help glue it all together.

I have to ask about your name. I’m a big fan of the movie Strange Brew where the brewery/company Bob and Doug go to work at is called Elsinore. I’m guessing, however, that the story that Strange Brew is loosely based on is also where your name comes from [Hamlet]. What’s in a name?

The history of the name is simple. There’s a farm outside of Charleston where I grew up called Elsinore Farm. When I was in college and just starting to seriously write songs I put “Elsinore” into a song called “Vampire in My Town”, which was my first real poetically political song(it was about George W’s ridiculous rise to power). Then, we formed the band and the name made sense the way Wilco makes sense. It’s a name instead of sounding like a sports team or an obscure reference to some Hemingway novel. It fit six years ago and somehow has stuck the whole time. Plus, “Kathleen Turner Overdrive” was already taken.

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Pick up your copy of Yes Yes Yes today and be sure to stop to check out Elsinore sometime in the next week or so:

August 14th – Urbana: Canopy Club (w/ Common Loon & Canasta) – 9:00 pm

August 20th – Chicago: Lincoln Hall (w/ Canasta) – 9:00 pm

By Jon Stone | @jwstone

Champaign’s Elsinore is on the brink. Their album Yes Yes Yes arrives, finally, in August. Finally because it’s been a long time coming. The band has been sitting, patiently, on the finished material for at least a year: waiting for the right label, the right moment, and touring incessantly in the meantime. That label has been selected (Parasol) and that moment has almost arrived. Yes Yes Yes will be worth the wait. All the touring has conditioned the band into top form making each of their live shows an opportunity not to be missed.

Now is your chance.

They’re headed up to Milwaukee for Summerfest this week and will be playing in WMSE’s event (on the Cascio Interstate Music Groove Stage) in front of Collections of Collonies of Bees on Thursday night. I just can’t imagine a scenario where your making the effort to see them would end in disappointment. Elsinore is disappointment proof. Here, let me prove it: The good guys in the band have provided Muzzle of Bees readers with an exclusive remix of their song “Chemicals.”

My formula for good pop music isn’t very complicated. It’s gotta get me tapping my foot a bit; it has to be singable, and it has to be interesting enough to have at least one moment where I’m thinking: “Wow. How do they do that?” So with Elsinore, well, I guess I should just say that this is one of the most compelling examples of good pop music that I’ve heard in a while. Enjoy.

MP3: Elsinore – “Chemicals (Scarecrow Adams remix)”

By Jon Stone | @jwstone

Over the weekend I saw three shows in Champaign-Urbana. Each show was a good show–great even. But wow, were they different experiences. This disparateness is one of the things that makes thinking and writing about music appealing: parsing through the musical experience looking for clues and connections of their quality with our resulting affinity. My goal here is to review each of these shows but also make a larger argument (that includes some theorizing–sorry: academic alert) about why it is we like the music we do and what makes for large-scale success.

That argument, however, requires some set-up. (Skip down to the reviews if you have no patience for such things. No one will know!). My friend Cory and I see a lot of live music together and we frequently find ourselves in friendly though sometimes heated discussion about the bands we see. One of the things we’ve been kicking around lately is this question of what makes a band appealing on a large-scale. In development is a theory of musical archetypes. These archetypes are broader than genre classifications: As you’ll see below and probably already know, it’s becoming more and more difficult to map genre within popular music–and likely, the easier a band is to classify, the less interesting they are. Again, these archetypes are much bigger, more general “types” and are also, therefore, difficult to name.  For now, I’ll explore two–a pairing– and call one “sing” bands and the other “think” bands (corny, but I’m looking for simple terms that sum up the central tenants of the archetype). It is likely that you love bands that belong to either archetype, which I will now attempt to explain:

“Sing” (or “oral”) bands dominate the music industry. In fact, I might go so far as to say that the genre designation “pop” encompasses most “sing” bands, but surely not without numerous exceptions (and “pop” bleeds over profusely into the “think” bands [and vice-versa], as you will likely see). “Sing” bands are those that we, (duh) sing along to. We feel the music and the melody on our lips. We hum along. We whistle later. We sing in the car. We we walk down the street singing even though we have our earbuds in, and most of all, we SING at the shows. “Sing” bands are great–they actually have it a bit easier than “think” bands. It’s not that the singer is the only thing going on in the band, but those words and vocal melody is, perhaps, the most important element. We connect with the band though that voice and lyric. It’s the first point of contact.

“Think” (or “aural”) bands are a little bit difficult to explain, but you’d know one if you saw/heard one. I’ll argue (and you may disagree) that we primarily experience these bands on an aural (non-speech)/cognitive level and because there isn’t a dominant oral cue to pull us in, the musicians have to get us there in some other way. Some do so in a display of technical skill, others with sonic experimentation, while still others figure some other non-oral ways of connecting with the audience. Whatever the case, these bands are usually best experienced live. Watching them do their thing seems important to the process (you frequently hear the description “I can’t believe they pulled that off live!”), but also, as I experienced with first band I’ll review below, there is something very corporeal to the experience. In other words, our minds and bodies respond.

Ok, on to the show reviews. Sorry to put you through that, but it seemed important to get off my chest for some reason.

Maps & Atlases:

I’m not really a math guy. Maybe that’s why I find the phrase “math rock” off-putting. I read somewhere that Maps & Atlases were math-rockers, and I was like, what, they play their set with TI-89 calculators or something? (ooh, bad joke.) Seriously, though–if math rock were the the term to describe the kind of intricate, syncopated (and wow! fast!) phrases that Maps & Atlases employ in their set, wouldn’t that make Les Claypool the father of math rock?  His imagined response to such a label is enough to again question its validity. And I don’t know that the guys in Maps & Atlases could (or would want to!) corroborate that genealogical shot in the dark.  Math-rock, indeed.

And man, Maps & Atlases are good! The show on Friday night at the Courtyard Cafe in the University of Illinois student student union was the first full set I’ve heard from the band, though  I saw them play as a part of our Pygmalion fest earlier in the year kind of on a whim. It left me wanting more. I think their first song at Pygmalion was the dizzy waltz titled “Ted Zancha” (see below) and I loved that drummer Chris Hainey was playing the glockenspiel and the drums at the same time. He really sets the pace in Maps & Atlases and he has to in a band so percussive. Dave Davison and Erin Elders play their guitars as if they were instruments of rhythm. Their dueling fret-tapping plays out on stage like an intricate dance–joined frequently in a trio by bassist Shiraz Dada.

It was during their Friday set that part of that above theory started to be formulated. Davison wasn’t knocking me out with his live vocals–which are unique to be sure, but get a bit buried in the other amazing stuff going on during the live set. But they got me dancing and thinking and counting (damn! math!–but seriously, I’ve never heard so many syncopated triplets [or whatever they were] inside an up-tempo, 4/4 measure). These guys have something really special going on and you can hear it on their latest EP You Me and the Mountain and you should, but you MUST see these guys to really understand. Take a little peek below to see what I mean, care of their MySpace page.

I got a chance to visit with Davison and Dada a bit before their set. I wondered about this hammered semi-acoustic, arch-top that Davison uses sometimes. He told me it’s a Harmony “Rocket” and was the first guitar he ever bought–$40 at a pawn shop. It had been his second-string guitar until he decided to take it on tour (rather than the beautiful 50′s era Gibson–his main axe–on a plane). Anyway, Davison knows the guitar tech who does work for fellow-Chicagoan Andrew Bird. “He took it and made it ring,” Davison said– and wow, did it ever.

Buy: Maps & Atlases – You, Me, and the Mountain
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Myspace: Maps & Atlases

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Elsinore:

When I first moved to Champaign a few years ago, I immediately tried to get a feeling for the local music scene. I didn’t know yet how amazing our little college town was at attracting interesting acts, and in Phoenix, AZ where I moved from there only seemed to be two options for live music: the unbearably huge arena shows and the small, under-appreciated local bands at semi-deserted Phoenix and Tempe clubs. I first saw and was impressed by our local band Elsinore at Urbana’s Corn Festival late in the summer of 2007, though they’ve been playing together for over five years now.

It wasn’t, however, until I saw Ryan Groff (lead-singer & songwriter) play a solo show that I started to get excited about his band. For all Elsinore’s musical prowess, it’s Groff’s work as a vocalist that makes the band a standout. And for those of us who fancy ourselves musical, his voice is truly cause for envy: It’s BIG with dynamic range that reaches higher than you think it should into the falscetto stratosphere. But along with the voice, his song-writing is strong and there is some real technical skill in the craft that you can see on display both at Elsinore shows and when performing solo.

I saw Elsinore (which I so hope was inspired by Strange Brew–”I’m taking you to the loony bin, eh.” “Take off, eh! Take me to the brewery!”) on Saturday night back at the Courtyard Cafe. Elsinore is currently on tour warming up material from their as-yet unreleased new album “Yes Yes Yes”.  From the material I’ve heard online and at shows, it’s going to be fantastic. Elsinore works well as an example in the “sing” archetype. You just can’t help it.  Near the end of “Wooden Houses,” for example, Groff starts singing the refrain: “This is how hunger strikes begin.” I promise that you will be hard pressed not to be singing along by the end of the song. Groff frequently introduces the song, as he did Saturday night, as a song about getting married while George W. was president. He may have even dedicated it to those of us who got married in that era. Dedication accepted.

Here’s a great clip of the band singing my song on the streets of Boulder and a link to them playing it in a more traditional setting. Check this band out, folks. They’re not just for mid-westerners. I wish them all the luck I can muster and promise to write again here when the record comes out.

Buy: Elsinore – Nothing For Design
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Myspace: Elsinore

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The Walkmen

After the Elsinore set was over, I wandered over to the beautiful Krannert Center for the Performing Arts. Krannert hosted the incredible guitar festival Ellnora a few months ago where we were graced with the talent of (to name just a few) Jerry Douglas, Bill Frisell, The National and National side-project “The Long Count” (which featured Kim and Kelly Deal and Shara Worden) as well as hosting the headliners from our amazing Pygmalion Festival each year that I’ve lived here (Andrew Bird, Yo La Tengo, and Iron & Wine).

Krannert is piece of art on its own and the Walkmen added to it by playing an incredible (free!) show on Saturday night. They played every song you might have hoped to hear and tried out several new ones (see the set list below). I’d never seen them before and I was so impressed by their focus, their musicianship, their unique style, and Hamilton Leithauser’s voice. Wow. The Walkmen have that it that is easy to hear but so difficult to write about. And they have received praise and success relative to that it. This actually becomes the most important part of my argument that I started above: this “it” is created by just the right mixture of the above sing/think archetypes. The Walkmen do this. Their set had me rapt: vintage instruments, mid-set instrument switching, one guitarist that sounded like three, impossibly fast, intense drumming, songs that I have had in my head ever since. It was all there. Radiohead and Wilco are the best examples I can think of in our modern music sphere. But think any respected band where there is a fairly wide-spread consensus on their quality. These are the bands that make us sing and make us think. They change and mutate the boundaries of our tastes. They make us want to research and explore their influences. They become our favorites.

Granted, some folks will disagree. And others have tastes that hard-line on either side and just can’t see what the big deal is about bands that fall outside of their particular leanings. To be clear, also, all of the bands I have discussed above have a mix of attributes from either archetype. There were fans SINGING along at the Maps & Atlases show and if you’ve seen Groff operate a loop pedal or analyzed the complexities of his vocal melodies you’ll realize how smart his music is. But sometimes bands just play their one note and that’s it and they seem happy to do so. For me, that’s just not enough.

The Walkmen’s set:

On the Water / In the New Year / new song /Canadian Girl / Four Provinces /What’s in it For Me / Thinking of a Dream I Had / Postcards From Tiny Island / new song / The Rat / new song / Donde Esta la Playa / All Hands and the Cook / Little House of Savages

Buy: The Walkmen – You & Me