HUDDLED IN A quasi-smoking circle on a brisk, windy night on the Brooklyn waterfront, the members of Himalaya are debating which is more difficult: stand-up comedy or playing in a band.
Just inside South Williamsburg’s Glasslands Gallery, where the six-piece collective will take the stage in less than an hour, struggling indie comics are, one-by-one, plying their material to crickets.
“Man,” says singer/guitarist Brian Mc- Namara, peering through the barred windows, catching a glimpse of the dying comic currently on the stage. “It’s brutal in there. It’s definitely harder to do what they do.”
“That’s because you’d have to stand up there and tell jokes,” says fellow singer/guitarist Jamie Scythes who, along with McNamara, formed the now-Brooklyn-based sextet in Philadelphia in 2005. “You’d just depress everybody.”
They both laugh.
It’s easy to dismiss a brooding, drone-y band with lyrics like, “I’ve got it bad/ I’ve got a sickness baby that you ain’t never had” as the new purveyor of mope rock for the Facebook generation. But Himalaya is more interested in giving its listeners a sonic alternative to its dark, decidedly depressing lyrical themes.
“There was a point where we had all of this dark material, lyrically, and we realized that there was this kind of undertone of prettiness to it,” says Scythes who, at 29, is the band’s youngest member. “It became about finding the beauty in the depression. And a lot of the time we find that in the melody.”
The material to which Scythes refers is the band’s self-titled debut record, which was released in early 2009 and recorded over the better part of a year. But its origins go all the way back to the winter of 2006 when McNamara and Scythes had just moved to Brooklyn from San Francisco and Philadelphia, respectively. The cold, the inability to get the band off the ground and an overall uncertainty easily found their way into the songs the pair wrote in McNamara’s bedroom in Greenpoint.
“It was the middle of the fucking winter and it was just a lot of, ‘Did we do the right thing? Do we belong here? Can we make it?’” says McNamara, 35. “That’s where a lot of those songs come from. It’s all the blues, right?” But the band’s sound owes more to its musical influences than it does the winter doldrums in New York City. Originally borne out of McNamara’s and Scythes’ love of The Verve, Spaceman 3 and My Bloody Valentine, the New York incarnation of Himalaya—rounded out by drummer Nick Maglione, bassist Tom Lawrie and keyboardist Chris Pace and multi-instrumentalist/vocalist Kristina B. Nameless—quickly evolved into a louder, heavier band that was still willing to embrace its softer, atmospheric, even psychedelic, side.
“We’ve really concentrated on not presenting something that’s tied up in a neat little package that’s easily defined,” says Nameless. “It’s not lost on us that we have so much material that we could go out and press three records. But instead, we choose to play six songs for 50 minutes and we can keep all of those dynamics alive.”
A solidified lineup, a definable sound and a dynamic live show that is drawing raves across the city might even be enough to threaten McNamara’s muse—the despair that defined Himalaya’s early days.
“Not likely,” McNamara says, only halfjoking. “We’re all day-jobbing, we all hate having to go to work, you know? This city’s always going to kick your ass.There’s always something shitty going on to write about.”
> Himalaya
June 11, Spike Hill, 184 Bedford Ave. (at N. 7th St.), Brooklyn, 718-218-9737; 8, $5.
