The Bushwhackers of Bushwick

IF YOU HAVEN’T been paying close attention, chances are you’ve missed [Keepaway]. Until it was called out last winter by a rave review on Pitchfork, the Bushwick-based trio was the quintessential band’s band: Its shows attended mostly by knowledgeable locals and fellow musicians.

Sure, there’s nothing particularly remarkable about any of that. It’s the law of the concrete jungle: most of the city’s artists will never get the recognition they crave.

Yet therein lies the appeal of Keepaway: while entirely deserving of its new-found (if still limited) renown, the band doesn’t seem to be reveling in it. In fact, it seems to have avoided the limelight for as long as possible.

Until recently, the band went by the name IN—not exactly the most Googleable handle out there. In fact, the name was effectively a middle finger to any outsider hoping to scope the band.

“Obviously we were cognizant of the fact that [the name IN] was cheeky on some level, but we were also just like, huh, this is a nice name—it’s very efficient,” says Frank Lyon, Keepaway’s drummer. “I don’t think any of us were truly aware of how much it would evade the functions of the Internet.”

Only when the name became an actual impediment to the music did Lyon, synthman Mike Burakoff and guitarist Nick Nauman consider a change. But that period of anonymity was a critical one for Keepaway—in fact, it may be the reason you’re reading about the band right now.

Months of obscurity actually seem to have done quite well for Keepaway. For one thing, the added time allowed the bandmates to get comfortable with each other’s styles and goals. “We’re glad we had that long gestation period,” as singer and guitarist Nauman puts it. “We were able to be born walking, in a sense.”

Born running would be more like it. It’s rare to find music as simultaneously trippy and tightly woven as Keepaway’s; it’s almost unheard of to find a band that can alternately sound like Birdman or New Order or Jane’s Addiction—much less within the same track. It’s as if Keepaway is constantly refining and reinventing itself; yet somehow the band has managed to carve out a style all its own.

“If I don’t feel like I’m exploring when we’re making music, even if I’m playing the song 100 times, then I really lose a lot of investment in playing,” says Burakoff, (who not un-ironically describes his role as “the loop guy”). Still, he says, the band finds itself returning to a certain sound.

“It’s like bushwhacking,” Bukaroff says. “You head out in whatever direction you want, and after a while you get tired of bushwhacking and spending all this energy, and you just want to take the paths that you’ve established—the ones you like the most.”

If experimentation is hard-wired into the band, it may have something to do with the environments that produced it. Burakoff is a graduate of the famously liberal Hampshire College in Western Massachusetts, while Lyon and Nauman are both alums of indie-rock breeding ground Wesleyan, where they overlapped with acts like MGMT and Das Racist.

“The success of some musicians who went to Wesleyan is no coincidence,” reflects Lyon, “if only to say that the way that school is organized, it’s a great place to go to become a better musician, and also to go and learn about different kinds of music… I would go to as many good shows at Wesleyan as I go to now.”

“More,” says Nauman. “I’m not sure if it’s always been this way or always will be, but for six years in the mid-aughts, that place was fire.”

Bukaroff pipes up, “Hampshire’s a horrible place to see music,” his tongue firmly in his cheek. The band had just played a show there with Gang Gang Dance—another New York-pedigreed band with a tribal sound. Both acts have a madly psychedelic tinge to their music, and also a sort of mad-scientist brilliance: an air of deliberate untethered creativity.

Now that Keepaway has a deal with Lefse records and an EP, Baby Style, coming out this month, studied eclecticism is the name of the game. Bukaroff says the band is being forced to hone its style a bit in preparation for a full-length album, but says the guys are still keeping in mind that “it’s really important to exercise all of your impulses.” One might have expected him to say ‘sow your wild oats’—but we get the point.

>>KEEPAWAY May 18, Mercury Lounge, 217 E. Houston St. (betw. Essex & Ludlow Sts.) 212- 260-4700; 7, $10.