ON THE DAY I got Paul Holmes on the phone, he was visiting his mother in Eerie, Penn.—“the middle of nowhere”—and had already been to the doctor. For the leader of Paul and The Patients, a Brooklyn-based rock band, this is nothing new; really, his band’s name says it all.
“Just from the amount of medical things I’ve gone through—I have all of this heart condition stuff—it seems pretty fitting,” he says. “I don’t know how the other guys feel about it.They seem pretty healthy.”
About a year ago, Holmes took on those other guys, drummer Dave Greenwald, guitarist Jay McBride, bassist Pete Swan and keyboardist Josh Ascalon, to fill out the songs he had been writing on his own. “For a while I was doing some acoustic shows and I started recording demos in a more fleshed out way. It made sense that I would have to get people to fill in and help me out,” says Holmes. “A lot of the guys are old friends of mine so they had known music I had done in the past, so it just made sense.
“A lot of it is the same as the demos I make on my own, though recently I’ve allowed a new inspiration to come from the band playing together. As we play more, everybody’s understanding their role more and introducing their own ideas to it.That’s ultimately what a great band is.”
Whether everyone understood his role on To The Lions, a five-song EP released in May, isn’t clear. What is apparent, though, is Holmes’ knack for writing catchy songs. His vocals loom large over the music on the tracks—it’s mostly smooth, but at points is pushed to a perfect, raspy howl. Songs like “The Other Side” are lyrically conversational and musically driving; there’s an obvious attention to construction and detail, and it’s no surprise when Holmes says that he still writes all of the parts of the band’s songs. “A lot of the writing I’ll do is simultaneously melody and lyrics so it’s more phonetic,” he says.
But this isn’t the dark work of a tortured control freak. A Paul and the Patients song is fun, easy to listen to and biting when you listen closely enough.
In “Complaint 15,” Holmes groans, “I’ve heard all your songs/ Your heart isn’t there.” The song, he says, “is not a literal, direct accusation, but it’s just in general that I feel the overwhelming loss of artistic integrity in recent times. It depends on what you’re looking at— really, I’m just calling people out who are being fake. I think it’s valid to say that even in our tight-knit world, there’s a lot of stuff that gets celebrated for some reason that shouldn’t be.”
And though his own band has yet to be put through the indie wringer, Holmes is enjoying where he’s at right now. “You do see that when people do one show with the Virgins and all of a sudden they’re huge—there’s a lot of politics in indie music,” he says. “We’ve only been at this format for a year now, and it’s grown organically for us. I don’t think we have enough hype to have it any other way.”
> Paul and the Patients
July 22, The Bell House, 149 7th St. (betw. 2nd & 3rd Aves.), Brooklyn, 718-643-6510; 7, $10
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