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Globecat Interview: The Hoot Hoots
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Remember this band name: The Hoot Hoots.
While the phrase gets tossed around a lot, these Beatle-...Remember this band name: The Hoot Hoots.
While the phrase gets tossed around a lot, these Beatle-esque psych-rockers out of Seattle are very much on the verge of becoming "the next great indie-rock band", as their feel-good melodies, complex song arrangements, and positively wild live shows seem to be signaling a very important message to would-be rockers everywhere: get over yourself and have some damn fun. In other words, "Cheer Up Suburban Kid".
Initially emerging out Illinois, the Hoot Hoots -- lead by singer/songwriter Adam Prairie, Animal-like drummer brother Chris, and trumpeter Christina Ellis -- have slowly been carving out a niche of optimistic guitar pop that's classic in structure but modern in attitude, their songs referencing everything from Calvin & Hobbes ("Transmogrified") to James Joyce ("Australopithecine") without ever lapsing in the emotional honesty department. With a successful underground EP (Less is More) and a self-produced full-length (The Truth ... Relatively Speaking) to their credit, the Hoots have now migrated to the Northwest (along with bassist Geoff Brown and new guitarist Cooper Smith) and are getting ready to conquer the world all over again, starting with this summer's new Missle Teeth EP and concluding with a full-length by the end of the year. No, they won't be faulted for lack of ambition ...
Speaking with Evcat, Head Hoot Adam Prairie gleefully dishes on how he's grown as a producer, the electronic-direction the band might be heading in, and his ideas for some delightfully controversial cover art in the semi-near future ...
[Interview follows this text]
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Mouth Breathers – The Hoot Hoots
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Hoot Hooters Adam Prairie, Chris Prairie, Leah Julius, Geoff Brown, and Christina Ellis know how to ...Hoot Hooters Adam Prairie, Chris Prairie, Leah Julius, Geoff Brown, and Christina Ellis know how to make a good song. A hearty foundation, splashy percussion to get you out of your seat, a smattering of funky guitar and synthesizer riffs, topped off with some smooth and sweet vocals. Plus, any reference to Calvin and Hobbes is as good as gold to me. Take The Hoots Hoots for a spin. And then go see them Monday June 7th at New Crompton in Seattle.
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The Hoot Hoots!
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Next the Hoot Hoots went on. These guys know how to put on a show. For starters they always wear bri...Next the Hoot Hoots went on. These guys know how to put on a show. For starters they always wear brightly colored, crazy costumes. This reflects just the kind of band they are, crazy and fun. They played many songs off their upcoming album “Silly Lecture Series” as well as some of their earlier work. Their music genre would be considered upbeat, loud, fun rock. The band consists of Chris on drums, Christina on keyboards and synth and backup vocals, Geoff on bass, and Adam on guitar and lead vocals. They really know how to work the crowd with their fun lyrics and catchy melodies. They’re the kind of band you go and see if you just want to hop around and have a good time. They use fast tempos, varying dynamics, complex musical arrangements, and energetic vocals. The Hoot Hoots really is a band that deserves more recognition in Seattle. They’ve been together as a band now for around 6 years, and their experience working with each other shows well in their live performances. Each member is more than competent with his or her instrument, and they all have awareness of each other which helps to make their music whole.
Hopefully when their new album comes out they’ll finally take off the ground. The Hoot Hoots are a very talented band.
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Summer Hipster Fashion guide
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The Hoot Hoots not only taught a bunny to play the Mario Kart theme song on guitar, but also commiss...The Hoot Hoots not only taught a bunny to play the Mario Kart theme song on guitar, but also commissioned a starfish and robot to dance alongside him.
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Tonight In Music: Slow Chocolate Burning Carnival, Sad Face, Adele postpones
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The Hoot Hoots were just at Folklife this past weekend and now you get to see them again! They are a...The Hoot Hoots were just at Folklife this past weekend and now you get to see them again! They are also celebrating a CD release tonight and will have a special price at the show. The indie rock band has the ingredients for a successful band: Bearded singing man , siblings, female vocalist who knows an instrument or two, keys or synth. This is a band that knows how to have a fun show, just look at the video!
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Win Tickets to The Hoot hoots!
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Upon seeing the name The Hoot Hoots, the first object that comes to mind might be an owl. But which...Upon seeing the name The Hoot Hoots, the first object that comes to mind might be an owl. But which aspect of the owl would be best associated with the music created by this band? Is it the ambient grace of the owl’s glide through the air? Not really. Is it the hard-core intensity of an owl diving to attack its prey? Not quite. Instead, The Hoot Hoots‘s music can best be related to an owl whose wide eyes curiously scan its surroundings as its head spins around almost 360 degrees. This view of the owl and the sounds created by The Hoot Hoots are quirky and a little strange, but mostly interestingly entertaining.
The Hoot Hoots combine synth sounds with more generic rock band type instruments like guitar to create very unique music. With songs like “Robots In Space,” “Cupcake,” and “Walrus and Rigby” off the album Silly Lecture Series, there is no way The Hoot Hoots music could be mistaken for anything but happy! So if you want to listen to some fun and playful music, go to High Dive on June 21. Supporting The Hoot Hoots are alternative pop rock band Amsterdam and eclectic instumental band Spyn Reset.
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The Hoot Hoots Ring In the Solstice in Bunny Costumes, Last Night at the High Dive
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"I don't know how I'll get things done today, when all I want to do is go outside and play," sang Ad..."I don't know how I'll get things done today, when all I want to do is go outside and play," sang Adam Prairie of the Hoot Hoots last night at the High Dive. It was an easy thought to sympathize with--on a beautiful, sunny day the last thing anyone wants to do is go into a windowless venue and see a show. Luckily for the audience, the Hoot Hoots are cheerful and engaging enough to make missing a few rays of precious Northwest sunshine seem trivial. Besides, even though it was the longest day of the year, it was finally dark when the Hoot Hoots started to play.
The Hoot Hoots are a band working in a genre you don't see too much in Seattle these days, sort of psych-power-pop (they covered "Mr. Blue Sky" by ELO, if that gives you a hint, but you could equally imagine a choice of "Birdhouse In Your Soul"). Their songs are fun and a bit spastic, occasionally about textbook subjects like love but more often dealing with outer space or the annoyance of having to wait all day to pick a friend up from the airport when you're anxious to see them. Singer Adam Prairie (his brother Chris drums and sports a matching beard) can croon, growl, and pull off a respectable falsetto, and sometimes uses all three techniques in the course of a single song. The band is fond of costumes, and celebrated the solstice with bassist Geoff Brown in a bunny suit, keyboard player Christina Ellis sporting a child's star costume, and Adam Prairie wearing a full-length, hooded rainbow caftan.
It was obvious from their performance (and their name, and their "Silly Lecture Series" videos on YouTube) that the Hoot Hoots exist primarily to have a good time, rather than to put on an excessively polished live show or achieve world domination. Yes, watching them you get the feeling that a band is a band is a band. But man, it's so refreshing to see a band having fun and getting into it instead of taking an overly serious, pretentious approach. For that, Hoot Hoots, we salute you.
Random notebook dump: Why wasn't a band member dressed as an owl?
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Up & Coming by Stranger
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The Hoot Hoots, Solvents, Gary Reynolds and the Brides of Obscurity
(Columbia City Theater) If yo...The Hoot Hoots, Solvents, Gary Reynolds and the Brides of Obscurity
(Columbia City Theater) If you like your pop music with a dose of goofery (let's pretend that's a word), then check out the Hoot Hoots, an owl-loving Seattle band who play low-maintenance, fuzzy upbeat songs about robots in space and sad suburban kids. They're a must-hear for fans of Boat. In fact, their latest record, Silly Lecture Series (available for free listening at www.thehoothoots.com), recalls a number of greats, including the Flaming Lips ("Stop on a Dime") and Ash ("Cupcake"). And while I've yet to catch them live, photos suggest their performances may sometimes involve bunny suits. MEGAN SELING
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The Hoot Hoots: Silly Lecture Series
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Cheer Up Suburban Kids
There’s something to be said for a band that’s as obsessed with revisionis...Cheer Up Suburban Kids
There’s something to be said for a band that’s as obsessed with revisionism as The Hoot Hoots are.
For the longest time, “Head Hoot” Adam Prairie has been the kind of songwriter who doesn’t compromise his work: he continually remakes the same songs over and over, trying to improve upon them with each new iteration. When his ragtag band of Midwesterners released their rare Less is More EP back in 2004, it sounded very homespun: it was a simply-produced collection of pop-rock numbers that had little flourish but never once shied away from the band’s knack for an optimistic hook and a playful atmosphere. The best of these early songs, the charming keyboard ditty “Transmogrified”, would later get revised for the group’s debut full-length, 2007’s The Truth ... Relatively Speaking, here given a thicker layer of production, with drums and bass far more prominently featured this time around. Yet Prairie and company weren’t stopping there: on 2009’s Missile Teeth EP, the group re-recorded the song one more time, here beefing up their production once more, adorning the track with all sorts of electronic bells and whistles, giving the simple little song its most professional sheen yet. Although the indisputable charm of the original version does gradually dissipate through each new revision, it’s obvious that, for the Hoot Hoots, things like radio play are a tertiary consideration for them: all they want is for their songs to sound as great as they possibly can.
Now, with Silly Lecture Series, it feels like the group has finally found their sound.
Prairie—along with drummer brother Chris, bassist Geoff Brown, and keyboardist/trumpeter Christina Ellis—finds joy in his childlike sense of whimsy and wonder, nowhere more evident than on the obvious winner “Play”, with its joyous shout-along chorus of “I don’t know if I’ll get things done today / All I wanna do is go outside and play”. Keyboards hum, and drums tumble along during the verses, but when that big fat chorus hits, some gigantic 90s-rock guitars kick in, a flurry of trumpet bursts fade us back into the verse, and it become immediately evident that the group’s main goal is to leave a big goofy smile on the listener’s face. To put it another way: if the Hoots listed “Calvin & Hobbes” and “Dr. Teeth & the Electric Mayhem” as musical influences, no one would question it for a second.
That said, the Hoot Hoots know that there’s only so much whimsy one can take in any given sitting, which is why Silly Lecture Series favors brevity: 10 tracks clocking in at 36 minutes, nothing more. Even in that short timeframe, Prairie draws from a nice set of poppy influences, ranging Paul McCartney (the charming “All of This Day”, which threatens to turn into “Rocky Raccoon” at any given second) to NES video games (the serviceable “Cupcakes”) to Weezer (the chorus to “Basement” sounds more reminiscent of The Blue Album than just about anything Rivers Cuomo has penned in the last five years). While the tone for the whole album remains unrelentingly upbeat (almost to a fault at times), it’s still great to hear how such a young band is able to synthesize their divergent influences into a sound that still remains very much their own.
What’s unfortunate, however, is how the Hoots’ sense of whimsy can sometimes overtake them, no more apparent than on disjointed opener “Robots in Space 2.0” (the original—you guessed it—appearing on Missile Teeth EP), wherein the band speaks of robotic bears, taking one’s (robotic?) lover to a British commonplace, and planets exploding, all while armies of people shout along, creating a rather noisy, chaotic introduction to the band’s sound, one that fails to highlight their greater attributes. Ridiculousness can only take you so far, which—coupled with the album’s perpetually sunny trajectory—does tend to wane on one’s ears when played straight through. Even with all of Prairie’s sweet peons to love, there are times where a grounding sense of gravitas is missing, which is why tracks like “My Aren’t You Small” and “Downtown” fail to make much of an impression given the Technicolor highlights they’re surrounded by.
During the end of closer “Walrus & Rigby”, however, the band locks into an incredible, highly melodic (and repetitive) groove, no doubt excited by their discovery (which is doubly amazing given how frantic and unfocused the track starts out). When Prairie then rips out his electric guitar to throw some wild rock-guitar noodling over the whole thing, a sense of true pop euphoria is achieved, one that is meant to be heard live in bars, with groups of friends, or to be played as the last song of the band’s live encore (preferably with some sort of confetti dropping down). It’s a fantastic way to close Silly Lecture Series, which brims with the confidence of a group that’s ready to break through the big leagues. Although The Hoot Hoots have been at this for years, one can’t help but feel that their unique brand of joyous guitar rock is something sorely needed in a landscape filled with Eurodisco and too-serious indie rock. The Hoots may certainly sound like the odd ones out in our current pop climate, but that’s probably because they’re the ones having the most fun…
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The Hoot Hoots!
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The Seattle four-piece The Hoot Hoots have a host of shows coming up, and their flashy, out of contr...The Seattle four-piece The Hoot Hoots have a host of shows coming up, and their flashy, out of control pop sensibilities will be on display around the Northwest in the coming weeks. Their sonic melange is intricate and dense, and their influences are particularly well used in their songs. The upbeat, overwhelming orchestral compositions of Neutral Milk Hotel are a definite reference point, but what they take from The Unicorns I find even more noteworthy. What The Unicorns did so well that The Hoot Hoots have paid attention to is related to song structure. The Unicorns hardly, if ever, repeat lyrics; their choruses are never standard fare. And when considering this from a songwriting perspective, the transitions and overall flow of a song is directly influenced by the very inclination to infuse this variety. What I'm also impressed with is their ability to boisterously belt lyrics about outer space and somehow seem tender at times as well- even in the same song. They're a strange amalgam of influences, that bunch, and really, they are an incredible live band.
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Hoot Hoots Return with Bouyant New Tunes
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Light-hearted power pop quartet the Hoot Hoots know how to have fun, and their newest release Appeti...Light-hearted power pop quartet the Hoot Hoots know how to have fun, and their newest release Appetite for Distraction proves it. On the shelves since Dec. 3, their second full-length album of the year is rife with singsong choruses, idyllic imagery and enough peppy riffing to keep listeners feeling fuzzy long after the last track has finished. The animated call and response dialogue in “Worlds” is alternately whimsical and unsettling, but never strays far from the lively spirit of the album. “All these men, I hope they get along,” sings frontman Adam Prairie, and it seems hard to picture any kind of confrontation with such a playful soundtrack. The album ends on the appropriately titled “No More Sad Songs”, an appeal for the end of others’ melancholy outlooks. With a handful of shows slated for the coming months, the Hoot Hoots will get the chance to combat those downers themselves, as they bring their party to the people.
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The Hoot Hoots' Appetite for Distraction Is Chirpy, Cheerful, And Yes, An Absolute Hoot
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With The Shins on sabbatical and quirky pop outfit The Unicorns long-dissolved in other projects, Th...With The Shins on sabbatical and quirky pop outfit The Unicorns long-dissolved in other projects, The Hoot Hoots have picked up the torch, carefully building on the idiosyncratic, whimsical sounds of those bands with their second release, Appetite for Distraction, a 10-song long cakewalk crammed with tight pop melodies, expressive, lush harmonies, and kooky sound effects across the board.
"I firmly believe that there is no experience that is unfit to be the subject of art," frontman Adam Prairie says. "I love Shakespeare, Samuel Beckett, and Beethoven, but Chris [Prairie, drums] and I also played a bunch of video games when we were kids. It's what we know and it seems inconsequential, but all those things changed us, shaped us," Prairie explains.
These formative experiences play out in the album's spacey, synth-heavy landscapes and often cartoony sounding refrains (I hear Futurama's Zoidberg in the "do-do-do's" of "Worlds"). The Hoots' website even playfully boasts that the band: "could destroy any other band on the face of the Earth in Mario Kart."
While the group's fun-loving, reverential spirit keeps them orbiting their influences--"Do You Know What They Say About The Pacific?" is pure Shins, with sharp time signatures and Prairie's easy rolling lyrics sounding much like the mellow, metered James Mercer, with a lyric about unicorns thrown in for good measure--their high-energy songbook, full of stories about ghosts and robots and brain eating dinosaurs ("Nightmares"), captures the essence of goof-pop with upbeat, irrepressible glee.
