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Article published Jun 8, 2007 The Royal Bangs revamping thoughts on music, performance
By Steve Wildsmith Of The Daily Times Staff
It was astronomy class, but it wasn’t a lecture on the Big Bang that captured Chris Rusk’s attention.
It was an e-mail about his band, The Royal Bangs, from Black Keys drummer Patrick Carney. And the moment he received it, everything else — the professor, his classmates, his grade — pretty much faded into the background.
“It was funny, because I’m in college at UT, and I was actually in an astronomy class, on my laptop, on the Internet, working on The Royal Bangs’ Myspace site,” Rusk told The Daily Times this week. “We had sent him a demo, and he wrote back and told us it was the best thing he had heard off of Myspace, and that of all the bands on there, we were his favorite.
“I read that and freaked out. Everyone around me was studying and actually listening to the lecture, but I was freaking out.”
Such began the rebirth of The Royal Bangs, which began as a project between Rusk, the band’s drummer, and guitarist/vocalist Ryan Schaefer, who first formed the group (under the moniker Suburban Urchins) when they were teens attending Farragut High School. Over the years, the lineup has changed more times than Madonna does outfits between songs, but Rusk and Schaefer have always remained its core.
The Bangs spent two years working on their debut album, “Julius Vampire Breath,” Rusk said — but it was the band’s sophomore effort, last year’s “We Breed Champions,” that catapulted The Royal Bangs into the upper echelons of East Tennessee’s talented indie rock scene.
“We go back now and listen to ‘Julius Vampire Breath,’ and we don’t really like it, which is funny because we spent so much time on it,” he said. “With ‘We Breed Champions,’ around the time we started writing it Ryan started thinking about going to France for a year, and we knew the band wasn’t going to do much anymore.
“So we stopped getting so dramatic and caring so much about having the right material and just decided to have fun with it. We only took a few weeks to record it, which is also funny because we think it’s way, way better than the last CD we did.”
The key, Rusk added, was in not over-analyzing the music and focusing instead on having fun with it.
“We were more concerned with having a good time,” he said. “Before, we would have band practices and really harp over them and needlessly get overwhelmed about the shows. The last few months before Ryan left for France, we would have band practice, drink beer, eat pizza and shoot fireworks.
“We were super-relaxed about it. We’d play around a bit, decide something sounded cool and just go with it. Then, the music came easily.”
The result is a glossy, frenetic record filled with pop hooks and a spastic rock sound swirling around synthesizers, electric guitar and Rusk’s rolling drum boil, anchoring the whole affair like a line of battleship chains. It’s easily one of the best local albums to come out of East Tennessee in the past year, and for fans of squared-away indie rock, it’s easy to understand how Carney got hooked on the band’s sound.
Fortunately for those same fans, Carney’s interest renewed the passion that Rusk, Schaefer and their bandmates had to keep The Royal Bangs going.
“Ryan had been in France for about half a year, and all we had was the CD we recorded before he left,” Rusk said. “I had joined Dixie Dirt and was kind of focusing on that, but the more I listened to ‘We Breed Champions,’ the more I realized how good it was. I had never felt that way about any other thing I had been on. Usually after I’m done recording something, I go back and listen to it later and I can’t even stand it.
“With this, I could actually enjoy it like it was a piece of art. So in February, I decided to do something about it. I started adding labels and whoever I could find on our Myspace site to get people to hear it, and Audio Eagle (with which Carney is affiliated) was one of those people on Myspace who heard it and responded.”
Out of the blue, Carney sent the band a request for a demo. Immediately, Rusk sent an e-mail to Schaefer; upon his return — with a batch of more than two dozen frameworks for new songs that the band hopes to use in the recording process for the follow-up to “We Breed Champions” — the band hashed out a deal with Audio Eagle that won’t make the guys rich but will certainly enable them to reach a wider audience. And with renewed focus and a formula for making the kind of music that sounds so good on “We Breed Champions,” the future’s looking bright for The Royal Bangs.
“I think it’s going to come easy because we have so much material to work with, and we realize what we’re capable of now,” Rusk said. “Now, we know more of what we’re supposed to do. We know we’re supposed to have fun doing this, because if we don’t enjoy what we’re doing, it’s going to sound (terrible).”