Show Preview: Fathers of the Revolution, Shamantis, Wampum
The Union
Saturday, March 29, 2014
By Colin Roose, Reviews Editor
The subtlety of swing music is one that contemporary music has passed by. In today's thump-thump-thump world, its steady, sophisticated swing has largely fallen out of favor. No one really sees anyone other than serious jazz folks taking the A train or doing the one o'clock jump. Swing has been out of the spotlight so long that you, reader, probably don't know what an “A train” is. This writer certainly doesn't.
But really, it is an often-overlooked and compelling genre. It has a storied history and has climbed its way into popular music several times since its conception in the '20s. Traditionally using brass and woodwinds, it grew out of jazz and became so popular that the period around World War II was called the "Swing Era." Think Daft Punk for the first half of the 20th century.
Fathers of the Revolution have been bringing that style back since 2008, and they will be playing The Union once again with Shamantis and Wampum. Singer Daniel Spencer says that the style of the band came partially from his love of the '90s swing revival.
"I was listening to a lot of that stuff and I thought 'yeah, yeah that's a pretty good thing that sort of fizzled out,' around 2001," he says. "It just didn't stick around for very long."
Three of the Fathers, Spencer, guitarist Buddy Smith and vocalist Luke Chaffin, have a history that is almost as complex as that of swing itself. Spencer and Smith played in metal groups before forming the band, but found some resistance from the Columbus scene at the time.
"When we were doing it there were a lot of kind of scene kids playing lots of metal music filtered through hardcore," says Spencer. "No judgment, that's just what was going on. And it was really hard for a band like us, who were trying to embrace those retro elements of metal, those slower, sludgier Sabbath kind of things to find a spot."
Eventually they teamed up with Chaffin and began playing acoustic sets around Athens once they started attending OU. Being a folk group never quite clicked for them, however. He says that the final straw came when the band was booked to play at The Union for the first time.
"If The Ridges played there, it would be great. It would be awesome, it would work," says Spencer. "I'm sure they've played there plenty of times. But two guitars and an egg shaker, not quite."
That's when percussionist Seth Alexander came in, having been trained as a jazz drummer. Seeing that it was difficult to write music for a live, filled-out folk band, the group then made the switch to electric instruments and never looked back.
The members refer to their rhythms as "gypsy-jazz" and combine both swing- and surf-rock in their songs. Currently, they are in the process of integrating horns into their sound to make it more authentically Duke Ellington.
"There are just things you find out really early on, I don't know what it is, it's something in the air when you're rehearsing," Spencer says. "But you know something's working, and if it doesn't, and swing worked. Something about it, the way we like playing it, something clicked."
Even though the band has their unusual swing deco style down pat by now, Spencer says he still finds it hard to resist slipping back into metal mode with his voice.
"We made an appearance on Fridays Live and that video is up on Youtube," he says. "Like, my voice is very, very abrasive on that. And it was meant to be. Because that was the kind of thing we were doing, we were like 'we're gonna play vaudeville music, but with like a mountain man tinge to it.’”
But vaudevillian mountain men they couldn't remain for long, and Spencer began to smooth out his voice. Now the growl mainly comes out in the more theatrical songs, like in the group's song about Hamlet. As he talked to me, Spencer demonstrated with a low growl that closely imitated the abrasive tone of the ghostly character in many productions of that play.
"I sing it like that. You got to," he says.
A Shakespeare-inspired song from a band that takes influences from the '40s and '60s? That's classic in every sense of the word. There won't be anything rotten at The Union saturday evening when the three acts take the stage at 9 p.m.
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