Brick By Brick

IF THE BUILDERS and The Butchers were going for accuracy in a band name, The Buskers would have been a more appropriate title.The five-man band started out on the Portland, Ore., music scene by setting up shop on streets and playing sparse, reverbfree, genuine Americana music to whomever would listen. Lead singer and guitarist Ryan Sollee describes that first year of acoustic street shows as “peaceful” and free from altercations with the law.

Sollee and his fellow band members are all originally from the Anchorage area of Alaska. Some met through bands while still in Alaska, while others met through mutual friends once each member had separately migrated to Portland between 2002 and 2005. Sollee first made the move out of Alaska to Portland in 2003 with Born Losers, his band at the time, both to explore a new music scene and to escape the sub-zero temperatures. “The winters were pretty hard,” he says. Born Losers had gained a steady following in Alaska and wanted to try its luck in Portland. But Sollee and the group soon learned that Portland was “a lot harder of a scene to break into,” he says, while Alaska, with fewer bands, offered less competition.

Not everything Sollee found in Portland was quite as disheartening. Upon making the move, Sollee, who had grown up listening to punk, garage rock, albums from the 1960s and The Rolling Stones, found himself listening to a lot of Americana music.The music consisted mostly of pre-1950s recordings of artists like Leadbelly and Son House, but Tom Waits also snuck into the mix. The music influenced Sollee to write songs that incorporated an early American roots-music style, fusing R&B, rock, country and folk. On a rainy day in 2005, Sollee brought some of his songs to the home of Harvey Tumbleson, Ray Rude and Alex Ellis. The guys picked up instruments that lay around the house, including an acoustic bass, a mandolin and a piano, and had an informal jam session that led to the start of The Builders and The Butchers. “We just kind of formed the band out of that,” Sollee says, with Rude on percussion, Tumbleson on mandolin and banjo, Ellis on acoustic bass and, a week later, Paul Seely coming in with more percussion.

The group started out using the name the Funeral Band, but it eventually changed to The Builders and The Butchers, for no other reason than it was the only name all five members liked. The street performances lasted for about a year, with the guys standing mostly outside of music venues with their instruments and “a snare drum worn around Ray’s neck,” Sollee says.The band played primarily acoustic until opening for eccentric experimental band Man Man in 2006. “We very slowly started plugging in,” Sollee says. Around this time, the group had to figure out how to utilize its two percussionists on stage. The band found a solution by splitting one drum kit between Seely and Rude, with one handling the kick drum and another playing the snare, developing what the group calls a “deconstructed” drumming style.

The Builders and The Butchers released their debut self-titled record in 2007 with the help of a neighbor who had experience in music recording and offered up his living room as recording space.The group finished the album in about a month with the recorded songs about “80-percent live,” Sollee says. For this year’s follow-up album, Salvation Is a Deep Dark Well, the band wanted to give the songs developed on the street more substance. “We wanted to make more of a studio record,” Sollee says.To help in this endeavor, fellow Portland resident Chris Funk approached the group about producing the album. Funk is the guitarist for The Decembrists, a band whose Americana sound and interest in storytelling align with The Builders and The Butchers’ own style.Through Funk, the band found a way to polish its songs without losing its raw sound. Funk left his mark on the album with more variety in the instrumentation and a welcoming in of other Portland musicians.The album shows a fleshing out of the songs, as well as a signal that Sollee and his band now stand in the middle of the Portland music scene rather than as Alaskan outsiders standing on the edge of it.

> The Builders and The Butchers

July 30, Bell House, 149 7th St. (betw. 2nd & 3rd Aves.), Brooklyn, 718-643-6510; 7:30, $10/12. Also July 31 at Pianos.