“Today is the Day”
from the album Apollo Sunshine
2005
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The jukebox is still playing when it comes time for the band to get its first set going. Led Zeppelin’s “Rock and Roll” has just started. And it’s loud.
The guys in Apollo Sunshine could be louder if they wanted to be. They’re young, they’re in a rock band, and they like to crank up the volume. They could rip through one of their new songs and bury the jukebox. Or they could ask the bartender to kill the music and start their show.
They don’t do either. They just sort of join in, playing along with Zeppelin. It’s not a serious cover — they don’t play it note for note, but neither do they do it ironically.
Playing along with the jukebox is a bar-band trick, sure. And it’d be unremarkable, except for what it illustrates.
Apollo Sunshine, a band that emerged out of Berklee College of Music two years ago with a debut album, Katonah, that swirled and roller-coastered its way through enough stylistic changes and avant meanderings to give Olivia Tremor Control fans vertigo, has become… well, sort of a bar band. Or not exactly. But certainly, the Apollo Sunshine that progresses from its jukebox karaoke show to tearing up the pool room at the Harp, a little roadside bar in Amherst, Massachusetts, is at least as much honest-to-God rock ‘n’ roll band as it is artsy, avant-pop ensemble.
The change hasn’t come about by accident. While touring in support of Katonah, Apollo Sunshine began evolving as a live act a band that records three-minute pop songs, then expands on them onstage rather than trying to re-create sprawling studio creations in live performance. And the band has spent the past eight months during which its new CD, Apollo Sunshine, was written and recorded completing the transformation. Having left Boston to move into an old farmhouse in Leverett late last year, the band took up a Thursday night residency at the Harp, playing weekly gigs from January through the first week in September. All the while, the band was learning to be a great live act.
“I feel like the Harp has made us such a better band, in terms of being able to play off each other,” says Jesse Gallagher, one of three band members (along with Sam Cohen and newcomer Sean Aylward) who trade guitar, bass, keys, pedal steel, and share vocal duties. “We could walk on a stage in front of 400 people and just look at the crowd and say, ‘What do you want to hear?’ and be able to break it down with the audience.”
Jeff Dorenfeld, faculty adviser to Berklee’s student-run Heavy Rotation Records (which co-released Apollo Sunshine this month with New York City-based indie label spin ART), says what he hears on the new disc is a group of musicians whose stage experience now matches their chops.
“They were always a great live band,” Dorenfeld says. “But I think they’re now a very mature band.”
On disc, Apollo Sunshine is now also an easier band to get your head around. Unlike the layered, stop-start sonic stew of Katonah, the tracks on Apollo Sunshine are, at their heart, straight-ahead guitar pop numbers.
Still, the new record is as smart and stylistically diverse as Katonah. Recorded live in the studio, Apollo Sunshine plays like a modern White Album, shifting gears dramatically from song to song and displaying elements of everyone from the Hollies to T-Rex, the Band to the Pixies.
It brings to the fore what careful listeners identified buried in Katonah: a young band that, for all its Flaming Lips-style experimental wont, knows how to rock ‘n’ roll.
“When we were making our first record, we were sort of coming to terms with who we were as a band,” Gallagher says.
“We just tried so many things, and came at it from so many angles,” adds drummer Jeremy Black.
“I remember us talking about how we could use samplers and things to re-create all that stuff live,” Cohen says. “And then when we started touring, we were like, we don’t need to use samplers. It’s better when we just go rock out. So that informed a new approach for the second record.”
The shift, Gallagher adds, also involved focusing the band’s creative impulses, which tend to wander. On the last album, he says, “We’d have one song that would maybe go into three or four different motifs. And on this one we were like, let’s just take each motif and make it a separate song.”
Apollo Sunshine has discovered it is a rock band with wide-ranging interests. “We listen to all kinds of music,” Gallagher says. “But we’ve never said we were any kind of genre but a rock band.”