Teenage Angst Has Paid Off Well

WE’VE BEEN STUDYING this social sect for almost two decades now.

They came of age hooked on Pavement, Guided By Voices and a ton of nowforgotten contenders that dispatched tapes and mysterious 7-inch singles to the cool record store in your hometown. But when they became musicians, those formative years would prove near impossible to shake. In 2008, two of them formed a band in Brooklyn, called Knight School.

Huddled around some gear in the band’s Gowanus practice space, Kevin Alvir and Chris Balla, the Knight School duo, and I discussed the life devoted to putting out bread-and-butter indie rock, how the best bands form from coffee shop naps and why it’s cool to just put out a record and chill.

“I would come in on summer Fridays,” explains Alvir, the singer and guitarist. “I had some office job, and I’d always make a full day of running around the city. I’d wind up at Cake Shop and I’d take a nap in the back. Chris worked the counter. I’d get a coffee and we started talking about music. At the time, I had this band that folded and I started doing Knight School by myself. It was me in my apartment working on songs. I got to talking to Chris about it, and he liked a lot of the same stuff I did.”

That same stuff, your OG lo-fi canon, holds a powerful spell over the band’s songwriting process. The first song on its first LP is called “Pregnant Again” and sounds like the guys took a handful of amphetamines and listened to “Trigger Cut” for a few hours before opening the recording software. Really, the tracks on Knight School’s first album The Poor And Needy Need To Party and the brand new Revenger full-length just seem to bleed together into a trebly pool of raw pop songs with in-the-red gain levels and primitive production. You can barely make out the words, but the hooks are sharp and geared to get stuck in your head.

“We ended up just jamming on stuff at home and making percussion out of wooden objects or textbooks and cans,” Alvir continues. “We really embraced the style of lo-fi recording, which I know is trendy, but it made me feel more justified to do this kind of stuff. I just used my laptop [and] Garageband. I don’t even have a microphone. I use the pinhole mic on the computer. It’s a pretty good mic for what it is. I feel like my songwriting and tastes probably stopped growing in the ’90s. I had so much fun in the ’90s that I could never let go.”

Knight School aren’t stalking some A&R dude outside a club. No, Alvir and Balla are content just sort of fucking around, and that’s what makes the quick, natural impulses of the band’s songwriting work so well. After poking at some songs and setting up a no-frills MySpace page, the band started finding likeminded record nerds were digging it and provided a small yet supportive feedback loop. The biggest of those fans was Eric Butterworth, owner of a San Francisco label called Make a Mess records. He pulled the trigger on the Revenger LP, which came out in late March.

“We are really into the work they do,” says Balla. “Brilliant Colors were on that label before they went to Slumberland. Eric and Anthony who started that label are in Nodzzz. It just seemed like some really cool people. We had all these songs that were waiting to be put together for an album, so we hooked up with them then. It’s really exciting to hear this music finally come out on vinyl.”

Part of aiming one’s ambitions at the joy of making little records with (and for) friends is the freedom to be funny and loose. “Hope Everything Falls Into Place Before I Fall Into A Grave” sounds like that Faces song that was in Rushmore and has such a natural easiness that they might have forgotten to put drums on the track. “The Girl’s Getting Fat” is a chiming, detuned ode to a horrible occurrence we’ve all had to deal with, while “Restraining Order” is a straight indie-asclassic-rock ringer and catchy as hell.

My theory is that too many bands are using too many effects these days. If their songs don’t stand up on their own, like Knight School’s do, those bands probably won’t last. This one might be focused on a long-gone decade, but here’s hoping it sticks around for a while.

>> KNIGHT SCHOOL April 23, Bruar Falls, 245 Grand St. (betw. Driggs Ave. & Roebling St.), Brooklyn, 347-529-6610; 8, Free.