The Senate: Melting faces with acoustic riffage since 2005
By BLAIN BOWMAN for LSHS Valhalla
When people think of acoustic music, they usually think of mellow. Of quiet renditions of well-loved songs, like Iron & Wine’s cover of “Such Great Heights;” of popular bands relaxing with some less strenuous instruments, like The End’s Sunday morning “Unplugged” show; of uncomplicated music, a guitar and a voice making a song. So, understandably, when I saw The Senate walk on stage for the first time in matching black shirts, lugging two acoustic guitars and a standup bass, I had understandably expected a quiet and simple set.
What I got was something altogether different.
That concert was kind of like the first time I picked up a guitar. I had never really thought about my hands, but suddenly I had realized how much more they were capable of, when I could make such beautiful music with them. Similarly, I had never thought critically about the structure of the bands I listened to, simply accepting them as the norm. The Senate smashed my preconceptions about music, proving that the traditional rock band setup and electric instruments were both unnecessary to make rock music.
Together Nick Drummond (guitar), Oliver Franklin (guitar), and Andrew Pulkrabek (bass, beatboxing) craft exquisite songs, usually comprised of only their complicated string work and overlapping vocals. The end result is music that is at once familiar and surprising, firmly rooted in rock but a completely different interpretation of it, and very, very fun.
“It was like, ‘Okay guys. We gave this limited palette; we have six things to make noise: our three voices and our three instruments… How do we make as much noise as possible with this limited palette, and try to make it as full and as big as we can?’” Oliver says, trying to explain their songwriting process.
Nick agreed. “Good bands should kind of have a wall of sound that’s impossible to ignore. When you get a good group of people playing together as a unit, it just kind of comes across and just hits you. It doesn’t matter if it’s a soft song, it just hits you… There’s moments when we’re pushing a lot of air, we’re really making some noise, and I think that’s kind of part of the novelty of The Senate.”
When most bands play acoustic music, it’s just “big open chords.” But rarely, Andrew says, “it’s riffy, like heavy metal would be, where it’s more about the speed and the rhythm of individual notes as opposed to the blanket texture.” He says that while there are some bands that play fast acoustic, like in bluegrass, it’s not aggressive, a statement that has him grinning. “Bluegrass speed is all about dexterity, not about bludgeoning somebody over the head.
It would be a hard task not to like these three men. On stage they are funny and welcoming. At their interview they constantly broke out into song (including Monty Python’s “Traffic Light Song”), flitting around Oliver’s tiny house, pointing out the bra hanging from the light in the living room. Apparently they asked some friends to throw some underwear on stage at a show, because they had been dreaming of it since they were 14. Andrew offers me some tea, they answer most of my questions before I can even ask them, and are just so nice.
This same graciousness is the driving force behind the band. Everything is about the audience. Nick says that, “We’ve always been about creating live moments I believe, and really getting out there and putting on a fun show, and having fun while doing it… Right now the songs we’re coming up with… are all geared towards keeping a live show fresh and engaging and exciting. There are parts of the set where you just don’t know what’s going to happen, and that will keep you coming back for more.”
Or perhaps it’s just songs like “Space Shanty,” where they beckon the whole crowd to join arm and arm and sing along with some reather absurd puns about drinking in space, and “The Awesome Song,” which was recently and regretfully retired, and really needs no explanation.
In any case, people keep coming back. “The only reason that we’re here is that people have cared enough to keep coming back and telling their friends. That’s something that I’m very proud of, that we haven’t bought into that [corrupt] side of the music industry,” Nick continues.
“There’s definitely and established machine that you can engage in to become successful in the music industry, and a lot of people spend a lot of time banging their heads against a lot of glass ceilings trying to plug into that machine,” Andrew adds. Rather than take the traditional path of trying to get signed by a record label and become famous, they would rather focus exclusively on the live experience, without diluting or changing it for the studio (which explains their decision to make their first full album live). Because of the effort they put into making that connection with their audience, the end result is a product so good that it allows them to continue in their unorthodox ways, because they can now promote themselves almost exclusively through word of mouth and the internet, so they don’t need to get signed.
Not only does The Senate’s music exist outside of any sort of predefined niche, but the band itself does as well. And what isn’t more rock and roll than nonconformity?