= Bands Like Rush

This week I interview three members of the Philadelphia-based prog band The Tea Club, and we discuss their new album release Rabbit.

Like the last band I interviewed – The Mercury Tree -I’m really in love with their music. Its amazing how talented some of these new prog bands are.

Some striking characteristics of the bands sound are:

• All-analog sound production – no digital gizmos or ProTools involved
• Retro synths and organ – from veteran indie and prog rock producer (and Yes veteran) Tom Brislin
• Big harmonic and textural palette
• Prog-ish rhythmical complexity
• More Radiohead than Rush similarities – especially the Thom Yorke-ish vocal melismas of brothers Patrick and Dan McGowan, as well as the wandering song structures, much less crisp and definite than Rush
• Lyrics – very egg-heady and more poetic than Neil Peart’s

Ben Sommer: I am here with three members of the band, The Tea Club. They are relatively new, but not so new prog band. I’ll just go around the circle here. I have Dan McGowan who is a guitarist and vocalist, Becky Osenenko who plays the keyboards and Pat McGowan who is also a guitarist and vocalist. You guys are siblings, I gather, correct?

Dan McGowan: Yes.

Pat McGowan: Got it.

Ben: So Dan, why don’t you just tell me a little bit about the band how you came to, where you are now?

Dan: Yes, yes. Well, the band was formed in 2003, so that’s what? Seven years now.

Pat: We’re going to be seven years.

Dan: Yeah, seven years it’s been around, but we didn’t record our first album until 2008 and we just released our second album earlier this month, which is called ‘Rabbit’ and we have a bit of a new line up now. Becky plays bass on the album, but now she is playing keyboards. We have a new drummer whose name is Joe and a new bassist and a new guitarist. They couldn’t be here tonight. Our new bassist, unfortunately, has some kind of a horrible toothache. It sounded pretty bad. I think oral surgery is going to occur at some point, so poor guy. Yeah, the new album rather we’re really trying to push and we’re really proud of it. It has Tom Brislin who played keyboards on it and Tom has played with some pretty big prog bands like Yes and Renaissance, so we’re really excited to have him on there. That’s how we did it.

Ben: How did that come about?

Dan: Well, we met Tom through Red Cole from Echolyn, which we got in touch with Echolyn when we released our first album because we got a lot of comparisons to Echolyn, but we have never listened to them and then we took a listen and we’re like, “Oh yeah, these guys are really good.” So we kind of contacted them and kind of becoming friends and we mentioned to Brett that we’re recording our second album and that we were thinking about having keyboards on it and he suggested Tom, because Brett and Tom have played in some bands together before that.

Ben: Yeah, so Becky, what were you doing if this guy was playing keyboards in the album? Were you backing him up, or are you still on bass at the time?

Becky Osenenko: I was playing bass on the album, and then we decided that we definitely needed to feature keyboards in the band so I switched that and I’m also better on  keyboards than bass.

Ben: Perfect. You guys, your line up is pretty big, did I count three guitarists in there first of all.

Dan: Yeah, the guitarists.

Ben: Why the orgy of guitars?

Dan: Well, for one, which is right now the band has a lot of friends, but basically our closest friends altogether and Jim, the third guitarists, guitar concession, we just realized, “You know what? Let’s try it.” And it kind of freed me and Pat up a little bit, we’re singing more as opposed to have to concentrate on singing and playing the guitar at the same time, but we’ll see what happens since we stopped writing new materials because it’s going to be a lot bizarre, but I’m excited for it.

Ben: Now, as you were talking, I was thinking – “that’s a lot of people out on stage”. But when I think about it, it’s pretty much with any recorded products these days – with layers of guitars like plywood, so it’s certainly a good thing to be able to reproduce at least some of that layering live when you guys play in the band.

Dan: Absolutely, yeah. It gives us a little more of a safety net, I think, with having so many people on the bands playing and it is with some of the lot of the stages that we play are way too small for six people, especially considering Jim is like a pretty huge guy. He’s like 6 foot 4. He’s trim though. He is a trim guy.

Pat: He’s tall.

Dan: Yeah, he’s very, very tall. He barely makes sense, but, you know.

Ben: I’m curious, who sang vocals on this. You have a MySpace page, the first track up there is this song called ‘Simon Magus’. I don’t know if its a Bible reference?

Dan: Yeah, Pat, why don’t you go up for this one?

Pat: Simon Magus is a real Gnostic teacher back in the first and second century, at the end of the first century and into the second century AD and he does make an appearance in the Book of Acts, the 8th and 9th chapter of the book of Acts. He had an encounter with Peter, the apostle, and he was a real person and he was a real religious figure at the time. He kind of came in to odds with the emerging Christian church as Gnostic teacher. In the Bible he kind of gets slapped down by Peter who kinds of slaps him down, but there are other accounts of a duel between Peter and Simon.

Dan: A smack down, if you will

Pat: A smack down and he has rumors of smack downs, and we were just fascinated by the character and we kind of give a couple of different accounts throughout the song. With the lyrics, they kind of jump from one perspective to the next, and there are biblical encounters in there as well. There was Gnostic text that was called “The Revelation of Peter” in which Simon and Peter have their religious smack down. We included some of the lyrics in that as well. It was just a big kind of a nerdy lyrical content as far as revealing a kind of corny nerdy book that we all read when we’re not writing music.

Ben: You mean the Bible or the heretical alternatives.

Pat: I guess a little bit of all of it.

Dan: Yeah.

Ben: Cool, but definitely I wouldn’t call it nerdy, nerdy in the nicest sense. But yeah, that’s a pretty ambitious topic and the attempt to include not just your own text, but then the set facts from history, I mean, that’s downright, I don’t know, almost old school.

Pat: Yeah, certainly. There are enough songs about girls and drugs, so we’ve decided we will try maybe something else.

Dan: Some obscure biblical tract.

Pat: Yeah, break open the Bible and start bothering people with that.

Ben: No, it’s cool. Who’s singing it from that song?

Pat: We actually switch up. Dan sings the first half. He wrote the lyrics and contents in the first half of the song. I sing a little bit of back-up harmony, and then the song in the middle kind of breaks down and goes into a little guitar instrumental and then it changes the whole mood and pace of the tune, and then I pick up the lead vocals at the second half and finish it out until the end of the song and then Dan does the back-up vocals.

Ben: Is it just my bad ears today, or do you guys sound kind of similar when you’re singing?

Dan: Yeah, we have gotten that. I guess it’s the brotherly thing. We try and switch it up and we try and kind of like… I don’t know, I know I try to sound intentionally different sometimes and kind of try to differentiate myself from Pat, but I guess the way to kind of tell is that I wind up singing a lot of the quieter stuff and Pat kind of he’s the yeller. He’s the screamer.

Pat: Dan is just typical, really.

Ben: Cool, it’s pretty impressive. Now that I know that the kind of the back story is even more super prog nerdy, but really in a good way, and so I would like to put people on the spot and see what the react to. So when I listen to some of these key tracks, I make some notes to myself. The sound is kind of retro-analog, so I don’t know what kind of engineering you’re doing this. I like it and it doesn’t sound over-compressed in the modern style, so I like that.

Dan: Yeah, we intentionally did that. Everything, but the vocals was cut to analog. The vocals we wound up doing digital just kind of to save time. The producer that we worked with, Tim Gilles, he did the first album too and he’s the owner of Big Blue Meenie Studio where we recorded it and he is a big believer in that retro sound. He is a huge prog guy and he really drew a lot into us because it’s how we were like 20 years old and we’re looking into a Gentle Giant, and he was like, “Oh cool, these guy are freaks.” So he likes that kind of retro. We both like it. We got lucky.

Ben: Oh yeah, he did get lucky because, I mean, you can’t mistake a new sound. I guess you could mistake it for a historical relic that someone has pulled out from the 70s, but I like it, and of course, the retro synth…

Dan: That’s how I like to listen to music. I really don’t like the way a lot of new recordings sound. Yeah, it’s certainly like when you said the compression, over-compression, and I really don’t like the way a lot of vocals sound with newer bands and horrendous autotuning.

Pat: We got together with Tim, and we all were really on the same page. Tim kind of got the mojo of the band that we kind of came from the old school, I guess. But we didn’t want to get stuck in the past and get labeled as a Genesis’ cover band, not that there is anything wrong with that, but he really understood where we were coming from and we didn’t set out to make an album that sounded like it was recorded in the 70s, but in some cases it did, it just drew the equipment that we use and just some of the techniques that we used wound up kind of being old throwback to the way the used to make records back when you actually have to play your music.

Ben: So the retro synth-organ as it synched voices et cetera, make a little bit more sense now that you described that you had an old hired hand on the recording.

Dan: Sure, that was a lot of Tim. The way that Tim and Tom worked, Tom would basically just play and Tim would kind of like, “Oh, why don’t you go for this sound?” Oftentimes, then Tom definitely had his contributions, don’t get me wrong, but there were a lot like, “Let’s go with Pendergrass, organ, you know what I mean with stuff like that. He’s very hands on with the production from the keyboard. For the most part, Tim isn’t very experienced with them. He’s not like a sit in the room, hands-on producer, but occasionally, when he sees it fit, he will sit in the room and he will play the producer role as the material is being cut to okay what’s being recorded and in that case with Tom, we only had two days with Tom, so everything you hear on the album, Tom recorded in two 10-hour days. It’s pretty amazing. The guy is just insanely sane when we got this when he began.

Ben: Wow! So Becky, how do you think you’re going to reproduce that live with all those big instruments? I mean, I’ve seen you guys had the analog version of those things, what are you going to do with live, Becky?

Becky: Well, I would pretty much have it figured out now. I took a lot with what Tom did and just kind of made it kind of my own style, so that I can still credit Tom, but have it do my own thing.

Ben: Are you going to be using just the synthesizer with various canned kind of emulated versions of what Tom played, or are you going to do the actual instruments there or what?

Becky: No, I’m just re-creating it on the keyboard.

Dan: Yeah, that’s pretty much all we have right now.

Becky: Yeah.

Dan: I mean all the Mellotron stuff was there, which is cool and like all of the main parts. There’s a part where you’re kind of like this is the real highlight that we try to re-create and the rest of it, Becky had a good time just kind of re-writing some stuff and like she said making it her own.

Ben: I always get to ask people this, do you guys do this full time for a living. And if not, what’s the back story of your lives? I’m always interested to hear that.

Dan: Damn you, Ben.

Ben: Sorry.

Dan: We’re trying to make illusions.

Ben: Yeah, I know but honestly sells. Trust me.

Dan: Music is the “thing” in our life. It’s just doesn’t really pay the bills yet. It’s a kind of a rough thought. I mean, we just work crappy jobs during the day, so that we can play, but it’s basically we do it all for music.

Ben: Well, that’s good. There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s a classic recipe for getting somewhere. If you got the talent and ambition, and you just then minimize all the other distractions in your lives, that’s the way to make it.

Dan: That’s what we’re trying to do. Really, we’re having a go at it. And so far we’ve gotten some pretty positive response in people. So it definitely keeps us going.

Ben: You may have to cut down on the number of guitarists in your band you need to support, though.

Dan: Yeah, we’ll be stringing in and getting them tuned up.

Pat: We have lots of tuners that we bring on stage, lots of tuners.

Ben: Human tuners?

Dan: That’s the next step because we have roadies who would come up and tune our guitars in between songs.

Ben: Cool. I only ask because it’s interesting. I wouldn’t feature a top band who didn’t need the help, and the fans don’t need to discover the band they’ve already heard. So I always ask that also because I’m in the same boat. I mean, I’m doing this because I love prog music and I’m a hopeful artist myself. This is for my own curiosity. I want to see what other blokes are doing.

Dan: Yeah, yeah, you know, thank you. It’s great to have that support.

Ben: You guys mentioned in your email you have this album, “Rabbit” was just released. Aside from that, and if you want to plug your website and Facebook, MySpace, whatever, please do, but do you have any events that are coming up people should know about as well?

Dan: Well, we’re playing in Chili’s once a month with bar show. Murph’s Bar is at Saturday November 6, next weekend and it’s sold out there.

Pat: Yeah, we’re trying to play in Philly a lot. It’s always a great place. We also have a show at the very trendy bar in Philadelphia called Kung Fu Necktie. It is home of many Hipsters and that’s coming up December 7th. Yeah, that’s sort of a big show that we’re trying to plug right now.