Although they are signed to two record labels—including Barsuk, home to Death Cab For Cutie—and they recently released a well-received single, Oakland-based quartet, Trails and Ways, won’t be leaving the comfort of the bedroom, their prefered recording space, any time soon. And why should they?

After all, they arranged and recorded their excellent debut LP—the glossy, yet intimate Pathology—mostly in the home of their drummer, Ian Quirk.

“We like to play with lots of different approaches when we’re writing a song,” says guitarist Keith Bower Brown “This lets us work in our own space, lets us be more creative, have more time and less pressure around the process. We feel like we’re getting closer to a formula that’s really good for us.”

The members met while living in the cooperative houses surrounding UC Berkeley, but they didn’t start jamming together until after a bit of post-grad wandering around the world. Alongside Quirk and Brown, Hannah von Loon tickles lead guitar and Emma Oppen keeps everyone grounded with her dubby bass lines. In the spirit of their former residences, the band collaborates on lyrics, composition, and singing for each track, creating exuberant pop filled with thick harmonies and genre-melding melodies. “This is a creative journey for all of us,” Brown says. “We want to do it in a shared way.”

Their breakout single, “Nunca,” has the tinny guitar riff, galloping drums and infectious hook of a pop song, but the lyrics testify to the melancholy resilience of street life in Sao Paulo, a city that inspired Brown during a trip through Brazil.

“We have this idea of our music as always having an environment, a context,” says Brown. “It takes you on a journey to a real space. For ‘Nunca,’ I wanted this noisy, lively, very life-saturated space, like being in Sao Paolo, and wanting that noise to be an integral part of that song.”

“Nunca” caught a buzz in the blogosphere, and the band racked up 70,000 plays in a single day. With heavy emotional and political statements enmeshed within their dreamy, organic grooves, they seek to make popular tunes with a shiny surface that invites deeper digging.

“It feel dishonest to me to make music that strips out the trouble that you’re in.” Brown says. “And I feel like I live in a world where a lot is not going well, for a lot of people, in a lot of places. How that hits me personally and how that can be the root of a great pop song is something I’ll be trying to find out as long as I’m making music.”

Trails and Ways play San Pedro Square Market on July 25 at 7pm.

Back in the mid-’90s, 17-year-old punk-rocker Nathen Maxwell was on the prowl for a new band after his angry, sloppy punk-rock band PBS had broken up. At the suggestion of his musician father, he snuck into the bar Molly Malone’s to watch a Celtic rock band called the Dave King Thing, which would eventually change its name to Flogging Molly.

Maxwell was blown away by the talent and passion of the musicians. “It was the real deal,” he recalls. “It just struck a chord in my heart.”

Maxwell continued to show up every Monday night to catch Flogging Molly. Despite having virtually no experience with Irish music, Maxwell wanted to be in this band. Surprised, King actually asked Maxwell to be their bass player after their original bassist quit.

“He never heard me play or anything,” Maxwell says. “We just hit it off. I started practicing my ass off.”

Shortly thereafter, the band changed its name and re-emerged with a heavier sound, but without losing either its rock or traditional Irish influence.

By the 2000s, Flogging Molly became a well-established, drawing Celtic-punk band, performing as many as 200 shows a year. While playing music for a living fulfilled a dream for Maxwell, he still had a desire to write music—which he did, but the only people that heard his songs were his bandmates after shows, when they’d gather and hang out backstage.

That changed in 2009, when Maxwell decided to take songs that he’d written over the past decade and record a solo album under the moniker Nathen Maxwell and the Original Bunny Gang. The band stops in San Jose for a free Daydream Nation concert at San Pedro Square Market headlined by the Phenomenauts on April 27.

“I’ve been a songwriter since before I joined Flogging Molly,” he says. “There are songs and stories that I need to get off my chest that don’t necessarily fit into the Flogging Molly vision. Instead of trying to force my songs into Flogging Molly, I realized, along with David King, whose advice was for me to do my own thing, that I should record an album.”

To help him do that, he called the best drummer he knew, his dad, who has played drums in bands his whole life. He is most known for his surf band in the ’90s called the Blue Hawaiians.

One thing Maxwell knew when recording was that he didn’t want to write a punk album. He’d already done that. Instead he came up with White Rabbit, a mellow, acoustic folk-rock album with a heavy reggae influence.

“Playing in Flogging Molly, I was really able to get that punk side of music out and get that off my chest. I did that for many, many years,” Maxwell says.

This was only a temporary sensation. “I started touring that record. What I realized from touring it is that I still have a hell of a lot of energy. I still am very much a punk-rocker. It’s difficult for to me to go up onstage and play a full set of mellow songs,” Maxwell says.

What was also temporary was the project remaining a solo venture. Touring gelled the foursome into a band. Maxwell even changed the name of the project to simply “The Bunny Gang.”

“It’s not just musicians playing my songs; it’s really evolved into a band,” Maxwell explains. “It’s completely democratic.”

Last year, the Bunny Gang went into the studio and recorded what will be their debut full-length album, which they plan to release sometime in late summer on Hardline Records. The songwriting is similar to White Rabbit, but Maxwell plays the electric guitar instead of the acoustic guitar. They have already released the song “Sirens in the City,” which sounds like early-’80s-era Clash, a far cry from the nonpunk White Rabbit.

“The new record is bigger, louder. The sounds are even further out, more eclectic. And it has more energy to it,” Maxwell says.

As the Bunny Gang has grown, Flogging Molly has required less of Maxwell’s time. Nowadays, Flogging Molly are playing roughly 50 shows a year, which is significantly fewer than when Maxwell recorded White Rabbit. This gives the Bunny Gang an opportunity to really become a touring band.

“Initially, it was about letting off creative steam,” Maxwell says. “Now it’s like, let’s travel the world and play this music and see what we can really make of it.”

The Bunny Gang
Saturday, April 27; 6:30pm; free
San Pedro Square Market, San Jose

A few years ago, Worker Bee and Doctor Nurse were two of the biggest local indie-rock bands. They haven’t broken up, but they aren’t as active as they once were. Evan Jewett, Worker Bee’s lead singer, moved to New York, and a couple of members of Doctor Nurse had kids, which made gigging and maintaining a regular practice schedule tough. In the midst of all this change, Dinners, consisting of two members of Doctor Nurse (Jeff Brummett and Todd Sandigo) and two members of Worker Bee (Andy Barnes and Damien Wendel), formed in the most unassuming of ways.

“Jeff was bored and started hanging out with Andy,” Sandigo explains. The band performs during the latest installment of Daydream Nation at San Pedro Square Market on February 23.

While Brummett was the primary songwriter for Doctor Nurse, it was Jewett who took the lead with Worker Bee, yet Brummett found that Barnes was actually quite the songwriter. Both brought their songs to the table, singing lead vocals to their own compositions. Wendel and Sandigo quickly joined and made it a full-fledged quartet.

“It was organic,” Brummett says of the process. “It was going well, and those other guys weren’t around.”

The songs they came up with were entirely different from both Worker Bee’s lush, meditative, dynamic sound and the subtly complex psychedelic-folk songs of Doctor Nurse. Instead, they played bare-bones, heavy, guitar-driven indie-rock songs.

“It was a reaction to both of our bands,” adds guitarist Sandigo. “Worker Bee was really highly composed, with all these different parts and all these different polyrhythms going on. Doctor Nurse was complicated also, with the folk and the other styles mixed in. We just wanted to get back to basics.”

In the year-and-a-half they’ve been playing together, they have been very modest about promoting themselves. The four members just don’t seem to enjoy making a big production about themselves, even down to their name, “Dinners,” which doesn’t exactly sound like a typical band handle.
Yet they’ve worked on their debut album, Black Rabbits, which is being pressed on vinyl now. They write their songs quickly in order to capture a liveliness, yet they have been diligent at selecting only the songs that sound exactly right.

“We’re not meticulous, but we’re really picky,” Sandigo says. The pickiest of all is Brummett, who doesn’t like to spend too much time on a song that doesn’t feel right. “Jeff’s a big song dumper. That’s part of his M.O., and that’s been for all his bands,” Sandigo says.

They spent the better part of four months recording their album in Brummett’s living room with an eight-track tape deck rather than working in a studio, or even using modern computer recording software. The sound quality is reminiscent of the ’80s/’90s lo-fi indie bands, back before underground bands had access to Pro Tools.

“I like the ideas of weirdos hanging out in their houses recording jams at midnight on a Monday rather than a bunch of people in some big studio somewhere,” Brummett says. “When I listen to my favorite four-tracked records—Guided by Voices, Lou Barlow, Bill Fox, Beatnik Filmstars—there’s an intimacy and looseness that is very appealing to me.”

The production is deliberately squashed. The vocals are mixed right down into the guitars and drums, instead of high above as on most radio songs. The songs jump between fast and slow tempos with loose pop sensibilities. Yet people used to standard rock production qualities may not get it, which is OK with Dinners. They spent a lot of time making sure it was mixed just the way they liked. After several failed attempts to do it themselves, they enlisted their friend Yong Muller to give it a go, which worked out.

“I genuinely like stuff that sounds like it’s on a four-track. I generally really dislike the way big rock guitars sound digitally. There’s no grit whatsoever,” says Brummett.

Most of the 13 songs on Black Rabbits were written and demoed a few months before the album was recorded. A couple were written during the recording session itself. All of them were recorded while still fresh so that the band was very excited about them.

“We really should have the recording stuff set up constantly and during practice when a song is really peaking, just record the album version right then,” Brummett admits.

In September, Dinners started an Indiegogo campaign to pay for the vinyl pressing. Rather than offering a rewards for different levels of contribution, Dinners just treated the campaign as a way to pre-order the album, because really all they care about is being satisfied with what they’ve created.
“It’s fun to play songs with people, but absolutely it’s about the content to me. Just listening to a song and capturing what the song is supposed to be, that is incredibly fulfilling. That’s the whole thing really,” Brummett says.

Shuteye Unison, alumni of the legendary indie group The Rum Diary, take the stage at San Pedro Square Market for the third installment of Daydream Nation this Saturday. The Rum Diary’s balance between heart-on-the-sleeve emo and tongue-in-cheek prog-rock set them apart in the crowded landscape of indie rock in the early 2000s. Shuteye Unison continue the Rum Diary’s penchant for redefining genres, but give it an even stranger spin.

Their debut record, Our Future Selves, is a hand-crafted collection of oddball, technically impressive and stylistically diverse tunes. They mix punk and dance grooves with indie-pop piano ballads, ’70s space-rock jams and of course atmospheric guitar rock. Every song seems to be referencing a different style of music, several in most cases. Their one commonality: They walk a weird line of sounding both intimate and larger than life, like an amphitheater rock band listened to on headphones.

Headlining the show, are the relatively new local band Colorscout, who play fun jangle-pop. They have keyboards, an acoustic guitar, an electric bass and drums and a female singer. There are elements of folk and ’80s new wave, and Colorscout are already turning heads in the local scene.

Also on the bill are Cartoon Bar Fight and Curious Quail, two more folk/80s-pop influenced local bands.

COLORSCOUT and SHUTEYE UNISON headline Daydream Nation #3 at San Pedro Square Market in San Jose on Saturday, June 30 at 7pm; free.

There were so many different slices of San Jose’s nightlife present at San Pedro Square Market this past Saturday night. It wasn’t just because it was Save Alternative’s Daydream Nation’s kickoff show. Really, it was just the perfect venue for Saturday’s show.

There were different rooms for different people—a bar for people looking to hook up, a patio outside for friends wanting to hang out and chat, a place to eat for families and couples and of course a cozy spot to watch the bands. Everyone could hang out together under one roof and get exactly what they wanted. Since everybody seems to be hanging out at San Pedro Square anyway, hopefully they will be doing a whole lot more shows like this there in the future.

Ben Henderson was the main support for the concert. He put on yet another amazing show, performing most songs just him and his guitar, though he had the occasional accompaniment of a backing vocalist, a banjo player and a drummer on two songs. Henderson’s voice has gotten so fierce in the past year and a half that he can command a crowd all alone just as well, if not better, than a four piece rock band. This was Henderson’s farewell show before hitting the road for a month where he will be playing all over the country without a backing band, which explains the decision for him to not bring a full band to the San Pedro Square Market. He wanted to try his act out on a hometown crowd first.

The headliners, Dogcatcher, played a laidback blend of soul, jazz and melodic indie rock. When I interviewed them a few weeks ago they told me that they were a “rhythm section oriented band,” something not apparent on their folksy debut album, KILR, but live, it was crystal clear, this is a band that likes to groove. Even the songs on KILR were reworked to give it a dancey edge. The bass and drums locked into a solid groove while the guitar and organ layered sounds and harmonies over the top. Andrew Heine’s breathy vocals and introspective lyrics were the final touch, creating something artful and original.

Mountain View’s Dogcatcher will play at San Pedro Square Saturday, April 28, the first show in a monthly series called Daydream Nation that will last until August, and comes out of Bill O’Brien (of Save Alternative)’s efforts to showcase exceptional emerging Bay Area and San Jose artists.

It’s surprising to how much intense personal upheaval went into the gentle, jazz-inspired indie folk sounds of Dogcatcher’s debut record, KILR. 32-year old singer Andrew Heine wrote the record during a several-year stint as a bohemian artist in San Diego, which was a 180-degree change from his prior life. This dramatic shift in his life’s direction was a result of re-examining his life after going to Iraq as a Marine.

“I was a completely different person before. I went abroad completely conservative, a George Bush Republican. I came back a straight hippie,” Heine says.

The quiet intensity of KILR presents itself after several listens. Heine does not emote painful screams or make dramatic statements about Iraq, rather Heine exhibits the kind of self-reflection on the album where everything in his life is being looked at through a new lens.

Before joining the Marines, Heine got a degree in engineering and was planning to get a good paying job in the engineering field, while playing bass in jazz bands as a hobby. He was told this was the smart thing to do. The war gave him first-hand experience to not take everything told to him at face value and to look at things from his own perspective.

“We were told that we are the good guys and they’re the bad guys. We’re not necessarily 100% the good guy. The Iraqi are definitely not all the bad guy. Everyone’s the same. We’re all just people. That’s something I came back from Iraq with,” Heine says.