Strange Americans

By Brian F. Johnson

It’s the kind of music that the Carhartt-wearing, hard-working, industrial beer-drinking, regular Americans would listen to — the ones who could end up on an episode of TV’s Dirty Jobs. It’s a little raw, a bit loud, unapologetic and honest. It’s blue collar rock and roll and it’s something that Denver’s Strange Americans are crafting with both brawn and finesse, like a hot rod mechanic bringing back an old barn find.

In a sense, Strange Americans are rescuing something from the rust pile — straight-forward, no frills rock and roll, and a matching aesthetic that is heavy on songwriting and storytelling, but presented with reverb-drenched punch and passion — the way The Band or Crazy Horse would have done it.

Strange Americans first began to take form in 2009 through a series of Craigslist ads and mutual acquaintances. The group, which released its much applauded debut full-length A Royal Battle in 2012, is releasing its sophomore album That Kind of Luster this month. The ten-song, 45-minute rocker which the group began working on in the summer of 2013, showcases a band that has dialed in an authentic, raucous live show and is somehow managing to convey that same energy in the studio as well.

“A Royal Battle was a very planned-out album,” said guitarist/vocalist Trent Nelson during a recent long-distance interview. “We played those songs for a long time before we recorded them, but after the album those songs took on a new shape. The energy of our live shows started becoming larger and larger and the songs evolved from the album. We took that rawness and energy and the rock side of things and started putting that into these newer songs that have become That Kind of Luster.”

Guitarist/vocalist Matt Hoffman, who together with Nelson splits the songwriting duties for the group, added, not surprisingly, that including that live energy in the studio resulted in a heavier album than their debut. “We ended up with more of a rocking record this time,” Hoffman said in a separate interview with The Marquee. “We cut out some of the more acousticy, twangy songs that we had and we kind of went for a straight up rock and roll feel on this one,” said Hoffman. “I wouldn’t say we’re set on being a full-on rock band like this forever, but we kind of had to get this out of our system.”

The album also serves as a passing of the baton from drummer Scott Gunshore (who now that he has a fourth child, couldn’t dedicate the time to Strange Americans) to Michael McKee, an instructor at Swallow Hill and member of several Denver bands. “We tracked a few songs on this session with Scott and that’s him on ‘Dirty Shakes’ but the rest is all Mike,” said Hoffman. “But the cool thing is that Scott is going to be around for the CD release to play some auxillary percussion.”

Nelson added, “Talk about a guy who could get on board quickly? We really lucked out getting Mike. He took all of our songs and learned them and dedicated himself entirely to the project. It was just perfect timing, too.”

For a band that paints such visual pictures with their music, it’s no wonder that the art behind the album was as carefully crafted as the songs. Strange Americans enlisted the help of art designer/photographer Scott McCormick, who went to great lengths to create the stunning album cover art.

The artwork features a close-up photo of a model farmhouse with an arching snap of lightning hitting a nearby telephone pole. McCormick explained to The Marquee that the shot could have easily been taken and the lightning Photoshopped in at the end, but instead McCormick teamed up with a friend and electrical engineer, Jeff Engelstadt, to string together two old computer monitors through a series of capacitors and resistors, which actually created a 450,000 volt shock that produced lightning in McCormick’s kitchen. “Voltage won’t stop your heart, but it will catch you on fire, and so we spent about 70 hours in my kitchen with our shirts off, stringing this equipment together,” McCormick said. In the end, they fired the contraption just once, and McCormick captured the arch with one frame of film.

The band is taking similar care for its stage set for the CD release. Instead of digitally printing a backdrop of the album cover, the band has coupled with INCITE Productions to have them hand paint a replica of McCormick’s cover shot. Incite’s Justin Hicks told The Marquee that the 15’ x 12’ backdrop will be hand-drawn with no tracing, which he said will give it more of a homemade feel that fits well with Strange Americans music. “It’s going to give it a warmth like vinyl, as opposed to listening to an mp3,” he said.

Ironically, when the album was just a few weeks away from release, both Hoffman and Nelson said that the band, which is almost entirely D.I.Y., is already looking forward to getting back into a studio to record their third album. “We recorded this a year ago now,” said Hoffman. “We’ve been playing and recently we’ve been focused on getting ready to release this and being away from the creative side for a bit now, we’re getting that itch again.” - Marquee Magazine

The members of Denver band Strange Americans have been anticipating the release of sophomore effort "That Kind of Luster" since we hosted them in the CPR Performance Studio this summer.

Unfortunately, they had to anticipate it just a little bit longer after the delay of their album release party was rescheduled from Sept. 12 to Saturday, Sept. 20.

Nevertheless, the Americana five-piece is prepped and ready to unleash the follow-up to debut full-length "A Royal Battle" at the Bluebird Theater with fellow locals The Knew and Josh Dillard & The Streaks of Lightning.

We spoke with members Matt Hoffman and Trent Nelson about the band's newfound rock sound, playing four hour live sets, and why they choose to record their albums the old fashioned way.

Your record release show was recently rescheduled from earlier this month to Sept. 20. What were the circumstances behind the move?

Matt Hoffman: About a week before the show we got a phone call from AEG saying that there was a lot of shuffling of bands and venues due to a last-minute change involving an outdoor festival moving to an indoor venue. Basically the situation trickled down to Bluebird, which needed to be offered to a band that couldn’t use their scheduled AEG venue.

Last year you won Westword’s “Best Roots Rock” group award. That moniker can be a fairly blanket term: what do you find are the “roots” of Strange Americans’ sound?

Trent Nelson: Agreed, "Roots" is an extremely blanket term. Most bands are "Roots" bands, right?

I think the roots of our sound are all a part of our experiences and where we're from. We've all been playing in bands and listening to music for a good majority of our lives - and obviously the mixture of all these backgrounds and experiences pool together into what makes us who we are.

MH: I would say some underlying themes to our creative process are honesty in musical and lyrical ideas, and a balance of tradition and innovation.

We tend to draw inspiration from older bands like The Band, The Rolling Stones, Neil Young, Tom Petty and others, as well as newer bands like My Morning Jacket, Ryan Adams, Centro-matic, Water Liars, Strand of Oaks, and tons of others. There’s probably an artistic/aesthetic side to tone and instrumentation in those influences, and we definitely appreciate accessibility but not at the expense of creating something new and unique.

You’ve said that “That Kind of Luster” is a different kind of record than its predecessor “A Royal Battle.” What can we expect in terms of new elements to your songs?

MH: I would say that the first noticeable difference is the tone color palette we used on each record is different; "A Royal Battle" is pretty classic in its tone, very recognizable guitar tones, keyboards, vocals . . . it explores that part of tradition that is important to us. "That Kind of Luster" experiments a bit more with guitar tones, some more innovative keyboard sounds, a little bit more adventurous and unique in that respect. But still hopefully rooted firmly in those classic influences.

Secondly, the overall energy of "That Kind of Luster" is more rock and roll: with a few exceptions, it’s 42 minutes of pretty non-stop, upbeat music. "Battle" has a bunch more mid- and slow-tempo tunes. Who knows what the next group of songs will do . . . ?

TN: Another difference in the record is our new drummer, Michael. He came on board when we first started the record, so he drummed on nine of the 10 songs. In regards to the sound, we've definitely received a better level of comfort in the studio since the first record. We pushed ourselves a little harder on the arrangements, spent a little more time finding the right tones for each song, and also experimented with some new sounds/setups i.e. running guitars and keys in stereo.

As Matt said, the batch of songs in this album definitely have a more driving, upbeat theme to them. As we were making this record, there was definitely a certain energy in the air while playing these songs -- we feel this energy was well captured in the end. - Openair CPR

After establishing themselves as one of Denver’s bands to watch through live shows and a smattering of songs released on compilations, like the near-perfect “Hogwarsh,” Strange Americans have finally released a full-length album. A Royal Battle is a soaring debut that mixes country, Americana and rock ‘n’ roll to create a sound that is at once familiar and exciting.

A Royal Battle is such an assured collection of country and rock ‘n’ roll, it’s hard to imagine they’ve only been a band since 2009. The five members are comfortable together and it comes through in a way that makes the album sound like an old standard rather than a new release.

The album opens with the Americana gem “Roses On Ice.” An infectious, high-energy barnburner that starts things off with galloping drums and a memorable chorus that brings to mind Springsteen or the band’s contemporaries, The Gaslight Anthem, but without as much of a punk-rock edge.

The slightly gruff vocals give the songs a little bit of grit, but not so much that it sounds like an affectation or a parody of other bands in the genre.

On “Alamosa” we get our first taste of pedal steel courtesy of guest musician Jeff Rady. It adds to the balladry of the song without overpowering the rest of the music, and the result is a weepy country song with the welcome addition of heavy guitars and some solid vocal harmonies. It sounds like Lucero before they went “southern soul” and added a horn section.

The amazing thing about A Royal Battle is that each song builds on the last. The ante is upped with each successive track, through the aforementioned “Hogwarsh,” until we arrive at the eight-minute opus that is “Station.” The record’s literal and figurative centerpiece.

The song is big. A sweeping piece of music grabs you right from its first notes. What starts as a sparse ballad eventually builds into a raucous climax that is surprisingly emotional. While the other songs on the album are fun to listen to, this track elevates the rest of the album into something special. “Station” makes it clear that Strange Americans are in fact the real deal.

In fact, they might have considered making “Station” A Royal Battle‘s closing song. After such an impressive show of power, the songs following lack the same punch.

The banjo on “Benji’s PJs” is a nice change of pace, but the song doesn’t come close to the bar set by “Station.” What is actually a pretty solid song as a whole, feels like a let-down by comparison.

The closest the band comes to matching the magic of “Station” is on the album’s final track, “Rebuild The Radio,” that stretches out past the six-minute mark and features a few guest musicians who add horns and fiddle to the fray. It’s another slow burner with strong lyrics that eventually get lost in a huge swirling mass of noise.

For a debut, Strange Americans have surpassed expectations. In fact, they may have put out one of the best local releases of the year. - 303 Magazine

If you're a boxer or something," says Strange Americans frontman Matt Hoffman, "you box because that's what you do. You go in and you fight every day, and sometimes you get your butt kicked, and sometimes you win."

Being a musician is often like getting in the ring, except sometimes the fight you face is internal. That's especially true for Hoffman, which is why his band's new album is called A Royal Battle. The title was pulled from a line in the song "Engine," and it's also a theme that runs through most of the tunes on the record.

"I feel like part of that whole battle thing is that I believe you can do whatever you want," Hoffman elaborates. "And I believe I'm going to keep trying to do this as much as I can. I love it enough to where if I'm doing it at the level I'm doing it now for the rest of my life, I'm going to be very happy, and I'm going to keep trying to push it and do more.

"It's kind of like a fight," he goes on. "It's kind of like an awesome fight, too. We're up there on stage with axes and stuff, kicking ass. It's a pretty cool thing. I would say that you can find something in every song that's dealing with that whole dynamic."

Another theme that plays in the album is summed up in "Rebuild the Radio," one of the first songs the guys — Hoffman, guitarist Trent Nelson, drummer Scott Gunshore, bassist Trevor Sinnard and keyboardist Murry Mercier — played as a band. "It's not in the sense of 'Oh, we're going to rebuild music and put something completely different out there,'" Mercier clarifies. "For me, it's like rebuilding my musical ability, and then the battle and the struggle to get through that to create something that I'm really proud of."

A Royal Battle is certainly a release in which the members of Strange Americans can take pride. It also shows that while they have their roots firmly planted in Americana, a fair amount of rock can be found in more than half of their songs, which often end up sounding as much like something from Lucero or Gaslight Anthem as they do something from, say, Ryan Adams, who also happens to be one of Hoffman's influences. Like Adams, Hoffman tends to avoid flashy chord progressions, relying instead on tasteful instrumentation and arrangements to bolster his words. "Sometimes finding a nice melody on an instrument is easier than trying to fit the English language into it and how that all lines up," he points out. "So, to me, I tend to try to start with the words as much as I can and build around that, because it drives me nuts when people crowbar words into melodies and their accents don't line up and stuff — but that's just an aesthetic preference."

While writing the songs is obviously very important, Hoffman says, what the guys do with those songs is another key part of the process. Trying to bring the tunes to life and capturing the same sort of energy that comes across on stage can be challenging. So when the act began sessions for A Royal Battle with John Macy at Silo Sound Studios, they ended up recording a lot of the songs live. "I still feel like our live show is kind of our identity," says Hoffman. "It's very important to us. I feel like the energy we feel at every show, no matter who's there or how many people are there, we're just pretty much behind the whole mission, the whole music thing. So we wanted that on the record — the meat and potatoes of every song, where we're all mostly in the same room, but everything is isolated. We did 90 percent of it like that with quite a few overdubs. That was the vibe we wanted."

And that's the vibe that was captured: The group succeeded in injecting a lot of fervor of the live shows into the more rocking cuts. But it also had little difficulty reeling things in on slower tunes like "That Kind of Weather" and "Station," which starts off unhurried and gradually picks up steam about halfway through until guitarist Trent Nelson rips into a solo near the end, with his guitar run through a Leslie rotating speaker.

A Royal Battle also documents a band that's grown since it started with its current lineup two years ago. Before finding Nelson through a Craigslist ad in 2009, Hoffman says, he was just trying to write songs and figure out what the hell he was doing. For close to a year after that, he and Nelson wrote together until bringing in Mercier, whom Nelson had played with in the alt-rock band Wide Right Turn.

For his part, Mercier says he had to get out of some bad habits when he switched gears from alt-rock to Americana, mainly changing his licks and style. "I'm still working through that, two years later," Mercier admits. "I like it more. I think from my standpoint, it was fun to make a lot of noise and to be loud and to have some pretty cool licks in there. But to actually delve into a tune and figure out a three-note run that we're so picky about — that really makes a song. You get that chance a lot more in Americana."

Maybe even more so here. After all, this isn't exactly your everyday, standard brand of Americana. It's a little stranger — at least that was the idea when the guys came up with the name. After considering a list of hundreds of band names that they'd been compiling for several months, the gents settled on Strange Americans. "I think just having the word 'American' in there and the fact that we consider..." Hoffman says, trailing off for a beat before adding, "If you ask and we have to tell you one word for our music, we always lump into Americana. And also having it not be your standard, traditional Americana. It's got a lot of different flavors to it."

Nelson, who is originally from Rockford, Illinois, says it's also a nod to the fact that they all came together from completely different backgrounds and from completely different parts of the country. Mercier's from Baltimore, Gunshore moved from Phoenix, Sinnard's from Iowa, and Hoffman grew up in Fort Collins.

"We didn't really have it together when we first formed," Nelson confesses. "It took us a while to click, and so it was kind of this thing where there's all these influences and roots pulled from different areas of the country. I guess that the name fit the best at the end of the day."

Sometimes you have to pick your battles. - Jon Solomon, Westword

Strange Americans

A Royal Battle

Independent

4.5 out of 5 stars

It’s fairly astonishing that A Royal Battle is Strange Americans’ debut album. The disc comes across as an effort by a group that is far beyond their only two years together as a band.

While there is a questionably placed 20 seconds of background noise before drummer Scott Gunshore clicks his sticks and really starts the album, A Royal Battle kicks off with a bang of a barroom rock track, “Roses On Ice.” Lead vocalist Matt Hoffman’s voice sounds like he’s sucked down a couple too many filterless Camels, and a shot or ten of whiskey, which fits perfectly with the slight twang of the melody; and it fits equally as well on the following, somewhat more poppy track, “Cavalier Home.” But when the Denver quintet hit their third song, “Alamosa,” the heavy reverb and fuzzed out guitars couple with the soaring pedal steel sound like a white-hot mix of Drive-By?Truckers and Crazy Horse. (That ‘soaring pedal steel’ is the work of Grammy winner and Silo Sound Studios owner John Macy, who recorded, engineered and mixed the album.)

The rest of A Royal Battle continues on, gracefully straddling a rickety picket fence of 1970s FM rock on one side and outlaw country on the other, teetering back and forth just enough to keep it consistently fresh and interesting. It’s truly a wonderful album for such a young group. — BFJ - Marquee Magazine