All Crushed Out

Web Dating, like most romantic endeavors, started as a bit of a joke.

Tucker Rountree’s main band at the time, Total Slacker, was invited to play a show at Death By Audio, but Emily Oppenheimer, his girlfriend and the band’s bassist, was going to be out of town. So Rountree did what any resourceful musician would do: He called up a bunch of friends.

“We were just like, hey man,” Rountree tells me, “all-star band, this night at Death By Audio, and we’re going to call it Web Dating but it can really be whatever. And then we just started playing and made up really dumb lyrics on the spot.”

Fast forward 10 months through several ideas that never quite got off the ground (including a drum machine-bass duo called Home Alone II) to a day near the end of the summer, when Emily left town.

“She was gone for three or four days,” Rountree says, “and I got lonely. I was like freak, man, I gotta write a bunch of love songs.”

So he took his acoustic guitar into his bathroom, wrote about five songs, and Web Dating was finally born. Greg Timmes, who befriended Rountree at a Total Slacker show, plays bass, and Matt Stevenson, on guitar, joined the band the day before their first show—actually, the first show he’d ever played.

“I was working at the same place as the drummer in Web Dating,” Stevenson says, “and Tucker came in to say hi to him. He was like, ‘What are you doing now?’ And I told him writing music, and he asked, “Do you want to join this band?’ So we jammed, and the next night I played a show with them.”

Rounding out the band is brand new drummer Austin Jackson. The band has been consistently playing shows—often picking up gigs that Total Slacker can’t fit into its schedule—and will release a foursong EP in January.

Rountree is telling me this in the topfloor studio in Bushwick he shares with Oppenheimer. The walls are plastered with Total Slacker posters, art from Showpaper, flyers and Total Slacker memorabilia. The television is hooked up to a microphone, which is attached to an amp. There is a spotted bunny rabbit named Taco roaming free throughout the apartment.

“Total Slacker has its own idiom,” Rountree tells me, “and it’s very much that it’s this weird, lazy, psychedelic, almost apathetic thing. And Web Dating is kind of the opposite. It’s very sincere, not that Total Slacker isn’t, but it’s very heartfelt and there’s a lot of yearning. A lot of emotion you know? And I think I kind of needed that to get out in a way because it’s not ironic or sarcastic at all. It’s just like, these are love songs. And I love to write love songs.”

Built around multiple guitars playing power chords in unison, Web Dating specializes in a kind of heartfelt, high-energy love song. As Rountree says, the lyrics and themes are straightforward and sincere, yet, especially when seen live, the energy of the band can bowl you over.

“It’s funny because on all the recordings they sound like, ‘Oh they’re just fast pop songs,’” Rountree says, “but as you heard at [a show at] Monster Island, it’s like a wall of sound to be reckoned with. So I think that, like, kids that love to just mosh and, like, trash their brains out love dancing to these songs and coming, you know?” Bassist Timmes chimes in, “Web Dating sounds like three people playing air guitar but with actual guitars—all at the same time.”

While the band has been making the rounds in the Brooklyn DIY scene, it hopes to branch out to larger venues, too.

“There’s two trains of thought right now in New York,” Rountree tells me. “There are these bands that only will play in Manhattan, because they feel like they want to break into this Bowery Presents, Piano’s, Cakeshop kind of thing. And they’ll dis on the DIY scene in Brooklyn because they’ll feel like it’s not mainstream enough and they call it bullshit and that it doesn’t really amount to anything in the mainstream world. And then you have the complete polar opposite bands, very much like what we’re doing now. We don’t [go into] Manhattan at all. We only play in Brooklyn. These DIY bands that only play in Brooklyn and they are always dissing on Manhattan and the mainstream.

“But,” he adds, “I think both are kind of wrong. I love playing all the DIY spaces in Brooklyn and all the people that inherently come to those places. But at the same time it’s like really exciting to every once in a while get a show and a good bill and play at Bowery or something.”

Still, the band is ultimately out to have some fun, and not take things too seriously.

“[Our songs are] light,” Timmes tells me. “They’re not too heavy.”

“It’s like, let’s talk about this stuff, but let’s not really go too deep,” Rountree adds. “Because, I don’t want to do that.”

>> Web Dating Nov. 11, Silent Barn, 915 Wyckoff Ave. (betw. Weirfield & Hancock Sts.), Queens, 212-253-8080; 9, $TBA.