“PRETTY SOON, BANDS will be doing the Charleston,” Jim Sykes, drummer for Brooklyn’s Grooms, says with a laugh. Bassist Emily Ambruso, sitting in an old wheelchair— purely decorative—across the room, laughs and shuffles her feet. “I’m cool with that!” she says.
We’re in an apartment behind Death by Audio talking about Grooms—the band plays a record-release show for its debut album Rejoicer Oct. 15 at the Knitting Factory in addition to six CMJ shows this week—and how it doesn’t quite fit in with the current, decidedly ’60s and ’70s signifiers of indie rock cool.
“Sometimes people will listen to our music and say, ‘It’s kind of ’90s, and it reminds me of Pavement,’” says Sikes. “And I really don’t think it does. We sometimes worry that we’re out of step with the trend.”
Considering Rejoicer—an album that’s both technical and ferocious—the band’s got nothing to lose sleep over.The 10-song album, which actually owes more to Unwound than Pavement, is precisely what should be released when everyone else is using tribal beats or covering The Crystals. “At The Pool” moves from loud and savage to precise and spacey, and the climax of “Ghost Cat” finds Travis Johnson’s vocals almost entirely obscured by guitars save for a chant: “We feel fine.”
If Grooms sounds different than the other bands sprouting up in Williamsburg, though, there’s good reason. Johnson started writing songs on his own, playing and recording for years as Muggabears, and it wasn’t until 2005 that Ambruso, a classmate at the University of Oklahoma, joined the band.The name change came more recently: “We were like, this name is dumb,” says Johnson. “We felt like it was holding us back in a number of ways and decided to change it. At the same time we changed our drummer to Jim.”
Before Sykes joined the band, though, Johnson and Ambruso went through three drummers and spent plenty of time paying their dues.The two recall an early show at former LES hotspot Fat Baby where Ambruso’s bass broke. “We played to the sound guy, and he made us stop playing after two songs,” she says.
“Emily’s bass broke and then the sound guy asked if we could just play three songs since there was nobody there,” Johnson adds. “At the time, you don’t know what [shows] to take or not and you play in these venues that aren’t set up for bands that aren’t playing instantly headnoddable music.”
Stick-to-itiveness proved effective, though, and the group (perhaps thanks in part to the name change) persevered.The trio considers itself one of the “house bands” at Death by Audio, where Ambruso lives and Johnson works building distortion pedals. Rejoicer is also the first full-length out on the performance space’s eponymous label.
The album was recorded almost a year ago—mixing and mastering was finished in May—and Grooms has already started working on a second full-length, though with a policy of everyone having to agree on a song for it to work, things could take a while.
During the recording of Rejoicer, Johnson says he faced difficulties that Muggabears recordings hadn’t presented. “We were in a really small room just listening to music and wondering, have we jumped the shark in terms of trying to push ourselves to do things that surprise us? It got to where we had to take a couple of months off and come back in to redo stuff and record new tracks,” he explains. “I was having panic attacks while we were recording the vocals. It was the first time that vocals have been hard to do.This time, for whatever reason, I started singing and was like, wait, what’s the melody?” Singing could have been tough since Johnson had recently quit smoking and, according to him, it “felt like I was singing too croonery.” Ambruso points out that a quick dose of dairy rectified the tobacco-free situation. “He ate a pizza before he sang and his voice was back to normal. Pizza helps his voice for whatever reason.”
Whatever it was, the songs that came out of the process are an enjoyable and essential step out of the current glut of derivative music coming from the purportedly eclectic New York scene. And while Grooms will certainly benefit from New York’s latest rock renaissance, the band isn’t going to get anywhere by biting off whatever’s buzzing in the earbuds of Bedford Wives.
“I realized recently that a lot of [New York] bands are getting known…and, Oh! We live there, too,” says Johnson, before taking off to practice. “But I was never like, ‘Alright guys, the scene is hitting again! It’s time!’”
> Grooms
Oct. 15, Knitting Factory, 361 Metropolitan Ave.(at Havemyer St.), Brooklyn, 347-529-6696; 7, $12
