{Viper Creek Club celebrates their CD release for Letters on Thursday, September 9 at Nectar with Noddy and Ladyfriend, 21+, $7, 9pm.}
Viper Creek Club is the electronic pop duo made up of Mat Wisner and Brandon Jensen. They self-released their excellent debut album Letters last week, which is pop album for fans of listening to how pop music is created. It’s been getting some attention by making its way into Sonic Boom’s Top 25 albums list at the Capitol Hill location prior to its proper release yet they are one of Seattle’s best kept secrets. Letters was officially released last Tuesday (August 3) and that night, I met up with Wisner and Jensen at a popular Capitol Hill bar for an interview about creating this album.
Viper Creek Club evolved from an indie rock band from Spokane called Ambulance for Angeles. Mat Wisner said of it “Ambulance for Angeles started as a piano-rock sort of thing, maybe more somber, melodic. When it started, it was sad bastard type piano music. It became a full band and had a more organic, indie sound, not really pop.” Viper Creek Club was the name of the EP they released in 2007. There is little sonically that remains in Viper Creek Club’s sound from Ambulance for Angeles.
Contrasting the evolution to Viper Creek Club’s pop sound today, Wisner told me previous efforts resulted in much longer, more experimental songs, “we would take ideas we liked and beat them to death. Each track was a minimum of six minutes.” With Letters, the first album from Viper Creek Club, he said “when we were making this record, we started getting into more MIDI compositions, we just wanted to learn more about about it. I also started producing some hip hop, which you can do all in MIDI if you want. Hip hop and a lot of urban R&B music uses pop song structures. I started focusing our song structure around that, which is inclined towards pop music. Our songs are organized like ‘real songs’, they have a verse, chorus, bridge, intro.”
Letters is one of the most polished pop records to come out of the Northwest and it’s really held together by their making their compositions fit within pop’s basic confines. Where it differs from radio-friendly Top 40, though, is that the hooks are far more subtle; they’re in there (especially in lead single “Eliza”) but they become much more noticeable each time you listen to the album. Nor is it electronic, disco pop, which you’ll probably need to look somewhere more beholden to the 4/4 beat if that’s what you’re looking for. Instead, what Letters is is a well-constructed album that showcases some very intricate beats put together in a consistent structure. When listening to the beats, you hear a lot of different ideas at once within a cohesive unit.
One song where they differ from pop song structure is the closer, “Drowning.” It’s a song that runs past seven minutes and is far more avant garde and experimental than the ten songs that precede it. Wisner said “when we got to the end of this record, I thought ‘I really like this record a lot’ and I thought we really need to blow this out at the end. It’s part of our indulgent side.” Yet it wasn’t fully planned out. Jensen said “we had an idea of what we wanted to do with ‘Drowning’ but not all of it.” Wisner added “we had prepared a lot for the other sessions and the last one, Frank had time and didn’t have time after that for about a month. Before, that non-preparation ruined us but here I think it worked out well for us.”
Between Mat Wisner and Brandon Jensen, they are both producers and fans of the technical aspects of making pop music. Their bio mentions that Wisner produces hip hop (he does a lot of remixes; you should particularly look for the remix of Fresh Espresso’s “The Lazerbeams”) and Jensen produces and mixes acoustic artists and local rock bands. After trying a few different studios and producers, they met Frank Mazzeo and recorded most of it at his Push/Pull Studio. Both Jensen and Wisner talked of being fortunate to work with him because he understood the sound they were trying to get and was comfortable working with artists who weren’t folk or garage rock-inclined. “The sound we were going to was going to be this tight, focused melodic keyboards, MIDI is involved a lot,” Wisner said and then added “I can’t imagine making music without Frank. We’ll always be working with him.”
Working with Mazzeo has also helped with playing those songs live. Jensen said “we do a lot of non-vocal communication on stage because there is only two of us, so we have to communicate really well, which we got to do while recording and that helped us out a lot.”
Playing with just two people on stage is to their comfort as Wisner said about playing live, “that’s always been our thing. We want to have a full sound without having more people. We’ve tried it but it doesn’t work because a lot of people will flake out or not show up. There’s less drama, too.”
He explained that the way the band operates on stage is similar to how a lot of hip hop shows are conducted, “when you see a hip hop show, they have a live DJ playing the backing track and do whatever they do over the top, we do something similar, we have backing tracks to fill in a lot of gaps. Right now, we’re putting that into a MIDI grid, which is a board with all of these square buttons and we can isolate pieces and do crazy shit like that. We’re doing that and playing over the top of that. I have key parts and Brandon has guitar parts we play over the top of that and I sing live, of course.” He summed it up by saying “it’s like a live, electronic DJ set with live stuff over top of that. That gets pretty big, it’s a pretty big sound for us.”
(Photo by Brandon Page.)
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Great piece, Chris. I don’t think they will be a secret for long.