Plan B

WHEN ENERGIZED WITH a little ingenuity, idle hands can beget exciting digressions. Take the recent chronicles of Kelly Pratt, a songwriter most notable for manning horns in indie-rock outfits Arcade Fire and Beirut.While spending most of 2007 touring with one of those bands, Pratt racked up empty hours with little to pass the time.

“Arcade Fire’s erratic schedule—two days on, one day off, three days off—[allowed] a significant amount of time off,” explains Pratt. “Once you’ve been to London for the fifth time in a year, you’re done with doing the sightseeing things. It’s not hard to hole yourself up in a hotel room, especially if it’s not nice outside.”

Pratt’s method of combating boredom began as follows: Pick one instrument out of the group’s elaborate repertoire—be it an acoustic guitar, a flute, an accordion or whatever else was available—and return with it to whatever space was available.

Meditate with said implement for hours at a time—working only with that—and pump out a chord progression or a melodic line. After a few sessions, Pratt was able to compile a substantial amount of material. Over the course of the tour, he fleshed out theworks, crafted full arrangements out of the pieces and used a computer and a mic to lay down skeletal demos.Tour malaise had turned into a project called Team B. “You’re doing the same thing every day,” he says in reference to road life. “The Arcade Fire music is great, but I didn’t write those songs. It was great for me to decompress and work on some different music at the time.”

Pratt’s impromptu undertaking intrinsically led to a new working environment.

Instead of collaborating with and bouncing concepts off of other musicians while writing at home, he was left to his own creative devices with no distractions. It was only after he returned to Brooklyn and was about to finish the album’s recording that he enlisted some peers (including wife and fellow Beirut member Tracy Pratt) to take the material to the stage with Team B, he’s singing lead for the first time in his career.

Team B’s self-titled Tonacity bears the marks of its origins as an experiment. “On My Mind” is a sleepy, lukewarm keyboard-driven pop song that’s easy to ignore until jarring effects slur after a couple of minutes.The dimmed noir of “Hang Me” is bookended by ambient flutes that start softly and finish at manic, shrill pitches. The tapping that begins “Tons of Fun” feels like it should dissipate but ends up forming the underlying rhythm of a song that veers from far-out twinkling to woozy voice samples to lucid, luscious pop. A rattling deviation into dance appears in “Redd’s Opus K607” and “Salad Days” provides a horn-heavy romp.There’s little consistency from track to track as any sound found will be replaced with something else.Team B is playful and imprecise.

“There’s no stylistic common thread in the things that I write,” Pratt says of his work’s many flavors. “I like so many types of music that one song may end up sounding doo-wop and another electronic.”

In that spirit of exploration,Team B injects improvisation into its live performances. “If people don’t like solos, then oh well,” he says. “It’s something that’s really important for us, to keep the integrity of [the music].”

As information about Team B spreads, Pratt’s credentials precede him. “It can obviously be a good or bad thing,” he says in reference to the associations with Arcade Fire and Beirut. “It does sound completely different from either project.You’re not going to get very far trying to compare [Team B and the other two] musically.”

Team B is still very young. Pratt hopes to cobble the scattered squad back together for an EP where everyone will be involved; otherwise, he has no set ambitions for the group. “I’ve recorded since I was in college, trying to document where I am compositionally at any certain time. I’ve never tried to put all my eggs in one basket and say, ‘This is my chance to try and make it.’ It’s just a way for me to play some music.”