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November 20-26, 2008
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Dub Dub Dub
Dub Trio redefines a genre that doesn’t exist
by Dave Kirby
Friend request
John Vesely created his own career on MySpace
by Alan Sculley
 Dub Dub Dub
Dub Trio redefines a genre that doesn’t exist
by Dave Kirby
No one lives forever, but some of us can lead multiple lives lives lives simultaneously. Dub Trio is a little like that, stepping into different identities, usually with a blade clenched between their teeth.
On the one hand, the Brooklyn-based trio has stood in as hired guns for artists as diverse as The Fugees, Mos Def and Macy Gray, even provided full-band backing for Faith No More’s Mike Patton on his 2006 Peeping Tom project, all gigs that came from
word-of-mouth recommendations while the group racked up skills points in New York as a tight and focused unit.
But the shape shifting doesn’t subside when they go into record as themselves. Their fourth CD, Another Sound is Dying, found its way into release earlier this year, and it is here, on their own terms, where the band truly runs circles around the identity-compliance police. Forging cranium-cracking guitar core, cascading waves of metallic funk, spacious interludes of delay-drenched chill, soaring cosmic anthemology and stutter-stepping time signatures, Dub Trio exhausts its supply paradigms to violate.
Driven by DP Holmes’ assaultive guitar lines, bits like the opening “Not For Nothing” hinge on heavy, low-register figures, framing Joe Tomino’s frantic, martial drumming, given to spits of jackhammer accents or half-bar 16th note schizophrenia. But even the heaviest of the tunes, like “Regression Line,” will suddenly drop into a suddenly spacious and languid chill, samples and keyboard noise drifting across the eerie and usually short-lived calm like the eye of a shrapnel storm. Or wrapping tentacles of unforgiving sonic agony around passages of thrash, as in the viciously deconstructive “Funishment,” heaving metallurgic dissonances around like the spasms of a warrior-bot witnessing the apocalypse.
This is a record that worships and creates and spawns noise, but hardly for its own sake. Even at their most compellingly aggressive, there’s a marksman-like tautness and singular focus at work — some have compared their approach to Red-era King Crimson — that belies the simple veneer of unleashing all hell for the sheer liberation of it. More craft than release… chaotic viscera for the mind, not just chaos.
Even as the record struck us as compositionally mature, drummer Tomino wouldn’t cop to over production, or over thinking. Whatever it is that goes down when these guys record, it happens quickly.
“I wouldn’t say that it was something that we spent a long time planning out or anything. It’s funny, because we really don’t even think about a record until a week or two before we actually go to the studio to record it. We’ll have songs, or bits of songs when we go in, but the way they get composed is really in the studio. We do very little pre-production or conceptual planning ahead of time.”
So the band treats the studio exercise as a point-in-time exercise.
“Yeah, exactly. That’s just the way it works for us. We like to use a lot of improvisation in how the songs evolve — it comes from listening. DP will just throw a certain effect in, or drop a delay or a sample, and we’ll hear it and respond. Sometimes it means stopping on a dime, or changing a tempo. ”
Jazz has traditionally relied on this, too. Everyone playing to a commonly perceived center.
“Exactly, yeah. It’s call and response, but that only works when everybody is listening to everybody else. As soon as one person goes off into his own world, you’re done.”
There’s an element of… risk, we suggested, even if that wasn’t the right word.
Tomino thought it was.
“It is risky. Every single night, we play like it’s on the very brink of just all falling apart… We don’t really do solos, as such. The noise and the dynamics are the soloing, the space they create. We love noise, we love playing with noise.”
So it occurred to us, there’s a lot here for a lot of people. The headbangers, the calculus-rockers, the ganjanauts… Dub Trio comes across as a bit of a Rorschach splat.
“One of the frustrations that I hear — and it’s not really a frustration I guess, just an observation — is people ask us if we’re really ‘dub.’ People don’t understand that dub is more a concept, a way of doing things, than a style of music. There isn’t really a defined genre. I mean, we all love Tubby and Lee Scratch and all the cool things they did back in the day, but they we were working with the music of their time. Dub is something you do — you can do a dub of Lionel Richie or Metallica or Bob Marley. It’s just taking a piece of music and changing it, altering it, adding sound effects, or echo, or delay, whatever.
“So yeah, in that respect we’re ‘dub’… we’re just not ‘rasta dub.’”
And as the band returns to Boulder, following up their appearance at the b.side last winter with a Fox billing, we asked jokingly how he felt about scaring the hippies.
Tomino laughed.
“We enjoy scaring hippies. But I will say, we don’t do many hippie-type festivals, but we did do 10,000 Lakes this past summer, which kind of started as a hippie festival.
“And we learned that the big thing now is hula hoops. I mean, we’re up there doing the most brutal, heavy guitar, double-bass drum thing you can imagine, and there they were, doing their hula hoops and grooving to the music. It was definitely intriguing. But they seemed to like the music, so we’re glad. The thing about this band is that we like bringing different people and audiences together.”
On the Bill
Dub Trio performs with the Passage Project and Dirt Poor Kings at 9 p.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 26, at the Fox Theatre, 1135 13th St., Boulder,
303-443-3399.
Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
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 Friend request
John Vesely created his own career on MySpace
by Alan Sculley
If you post it, they will come.
In the new digital age of music, that statement is becoming a greater truth, as songwriters and bands learn how to use the Internet and sites such as MySpace, YouTube and Facebook to build audiences for their music, often long before they get on the radar of record companies.
And when it comes to building an online presence, few musicians have been more successful than John Vesely, who is better known by his band name, Secondhand Serenade. He recently released his second CD, A Twist In My Story.
Before getting signed by Glassnote Entertainment Group, one of the labels under the Warner Bros. Records independent label group, Vesely amassed 27 million plays and became the number one unsigned artist on MySpace. With numbers like that, it’s no surprise that eventually word got out about the grass roots popularity of Vesely and Secondhand Serenade, and a manager contacted him.
“He wanted to help me out with TV placements and stuff,” Vesely said. “He thought I was already represented by somebody, but I wasn’t. And we started talking and we eventually got to a point where we decided let’s try to shop this. So we contacted a bunch of labels, and a lot of labels already kind of had me on the radar, so to speak. So we just set up a lot of meetings.”
Before getting signed, Vesely, 26, had spent eight years in a succession of San Francisco-area bands, before starting an acoustic project, Sounds Like Life, with Ronnie Day. The two split up after a year, but Vesely carried the acoustic sound into Secondhand Serenade.
One of the first steps for Vesely as Secondhand Serenade was to record songs for his 2007 debut CD, Awake, a solo acoustic effort.
Then came his savvy Internet marketing campaign. Spending at least four hours a day for several months, Vesely judiciously scoured band pages, searching out those whose music was similar to his emotion-laden style of modern pop (think Dashboard Confessional as a reference point). He would then contact the top 50 “friends” on those pages, giving them the option to listen to his songs and post them on their own page.
“If a fan adds you onto his profile, and let’s say he has 200 friends on his network, I’m the first thing they hear when they visit that certain page,” he said. “So one person adding a song turned into 200 people knowing who I am. And then the player with the link to my site is right on their page. So that exponentially increased the fans coming in.”
Soon the plays of his songs on MySpace took off, and this also helped drive Internet sales of Awake. By the time he signed with Glassnote, Vesely had moved 15,000 copies of Awake, which was re-released by the label in 2007 with a pair of additional tracks.
When it came time to make A Twist In My Story, Vesely chose to record with additional musicians, a move that marks a major departure from Awake.
This presented a couple of major challenges for Vesely.
“Awake was a very simple album, but at that point it was established with my fan base as being something very, very special,” he said. “So the challenge for me was making an album that had that same feeling, that wasn’t a step down in that. I was wondering if I could do that. So that was constantly my concern.
“My other concern was how I was going to format the album, how I was going to mix the acoustic with the full band and how I was going to execute that,” Vesely said. “Was I going to do half the songs acoustic and half the songs full band? How would I mix it in without it sounding like it didn’t belong? I was struggling with that for a lot of the recording process, and sometimes I felt very lost going about it. But it eventually came to be what it is.”
Vesely indeed makes a nice transition to his full-band sound. He keeps his acoustic foundation in songs like “Fall For You” and “Stranger,” while using drums, bass, electric guitars and piano to fill out the melodies and add energy and heft to the arrangements. Meanwhile, a couple of tunes, including “Maybe” (a song that appeared on Awake) and “Suppose” get a full-on full-band treatment, with convincing results.
Vesely is now touring with a backing band, and he’s happy with how Secondhand Serenade sounds in this setting.
“Hearing it live every night, it’s so intense because I’m playing all these different songs, like from the most intimate acoustic songs to these huge, epic rock ballads,” Vesely said. “It’s a great thing for me to kind of experience that. And the dynamic is really intense. It’s such a wide array of sounds.”
On the Bill
Secondhand Serenade performs with Cute is What We Aim For at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 25, at the Gothic Theatre, 3263 S Broadway, Englewood, 303-788-0984.
Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
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