Sticky fingers was the cure to every empty stomach, or so John thought as he found himself wandering the streets again, bored out of his mind and with a rumbling in his belly. Put that together with the constant desire to cause a ruckus and you have him in a nutshell.
So there he was, walking out of a store with a bunch of vinyls stashed away in his guitar bag. Into the next and out with a deli sandwich stuffed between his cheeks. The one after proved easier still with a brand new silver chain around his neck and an upside down cross as his choice pendant.
Look at that, a beautiful china vase! An excellent addition to Nick’s living room, most like. John went in with a whistle to his lips and came out after, leaving the display case missing something.
LIVE REVIEW: Upright Man, The Jauntee, Viva La Hop - Brighton Music Hall 11/25
The best lineups are the ones that you would least expect. They take musicians that are complete opposites and have them play a show together. The result is a confluence of different genres, styles, and backgrounds.
From the psychedelic indie sounds of Upright Man to the jam-band funk nature of The Jauntee and finally the hip-hop fusion that is Viva La Hop, there is a lot going on at this show.
Upright Man are an alternative psychedelic band with some grunge and roots-rock influences. They kick off the night with “Animals,” which sets the tone for their entire set. The song features hard-hitting percussion skills paired with dynamic bass and keys and multi-textured guitar work.
I’ve only ever listened to their recordings, but seeing them on stage, carefully piecing together each layer of their songs is an experience on its own. I feel like I’m floating on a cloud.
“It’s time for a trip to space,” says bassist Nick Katz between songs. “I don’t know about you guys, but I really fuck with space. I mean, we all fuck with space, but…”
“He fucks with space the most,” drummer Max Yassky chimes in. “I”ve walked in on him fucking with space,” he says as they begin playing “Ecstasy.”
They play a cover of The Beatles’ “Happiness Is A Warm Gun,” and add in their own melodic guitar introduction, giving it that Upright Man flair. If I wasn’t already familiar with the song, I might not be able to tell that it is a cover. In this case, the band made it their own with the addition of their floaty vocals and airy rhythm section.
There are two types of musicians: the ones that sound better on their recordings, and the ones that sound better live. Upright Man fall into the latter group. Although their debut album was amazing, it is nothing compared to the full experience of seeing them perform it in person. Upright Man are a band you just have to see live to fully understand what they are capable of.
The Jauntee kick off the night with a new song. It features a heavy drum beat layered over keyboards, bass, and guitar.
“I moved to Virginia, to clear my agenda, basking in the splendor, well I highly recommend that,” vocalist and drummer Scott Ferber sings over jazz and funk undertones.
I’m swaying around the room. I’m digging their sound, but after the song’s five-minute mark, I’m a little over it. I am waiting in anticipation for the next song. This is when I realize that The Jauntee are a jam band and they're known for their long, impromptu songs. The crowd is clearly into it, too. They are hooting and hollering after each song, for the entire hour and forty-five-minute set.
The band hardly pause between songs, which is great at times, but it’s difficult to tell when a song is changing. There is also very little stage presence besides the occasional “We are The Jauntee” from guitarist Caton Sollenberger.
The ambiance of the room immediately changes once the band walk off stage. Now, in their place is nine-piece, hip-hop group, Viva La Hop who kick things off with a dual-MC platform, a music board, a horn section, bass, guitar, and drums.
I am impressed by their ability to create a blend of funk and hip-hop music straight from their instruments instead of solely relying on loops and recordings.
It looks like there is a party on stage, and I can almost see that energy being passed down through everyone in the crowd. The room is transformed into a nightclub for the remainder of the night, and I can feel the bass throbbing through every inch of my bones.
The Time I Cried seeing Anton Bruckner’s 8th Symphony: by Max Yassky
Words by Max Yassky, drums in NYC rock band Upright Man. Photo credit: source.
There’s a lot I don’t understand. Why do we care who finds a joke funny or whether or not you look like a Hollywood idol? Do we instinctively connect over shared experiences? Maybe crying makes it easier to find like-minded people whose companionship you can seek emotional shelter in. But I’m not a fucking psychologist. I cried at Lincoln Center seeing Anton Bruckner’s 8th Symphony.
The symphony is 88 minutes long and plays without intermission. It was written in the mid 1800s. That’s what I remember from absentmindedly staring at the playbill. I was empty of urine and expectations, sitting in the center seat up in the mezzanine. Not a center-ish seat, but a seat so universally centered that you will never need to stand up to let someone past you. The assembly of instruments curved inwards towards the conductor and I. Everyone else there was a liability; a poorly-timed-cougher, a pamphlet-dropper, a loud-whisperer.
My mind was in a bubble of fuck-everyone-else, and then the music started. Prose can make a person cry. I want to write words that will just transplant how I felt then into the mind of whoever is reading this now. But the memory of that experience is so emotionally thick that I can’t figure out how. I can describe it blankly, objectively or artistically. Nothing makes it sound like a true feeling: a relentlessly blurry color. All I can ever think to write is, “The horns held a B over a densely-arranged A minor chord birthed by the whole orchestra. The timpani struck A and E, first in unison and then in single strokes. The brassy A minor chord with the 9 held over it and double stops on timpani. My jaw actually dropped.” But that means nothing to anyone. Maybe it means more when you consider that it’d be 40 years before chords that held dissonances like 7s and 9s would be regular in music. Maybe the double stops on a timpani, played with force, sounded like the warbeat of a ship filled with violently suicidal lovers. My eyes watered, my chest hurt and my mouth would not shut. That was five minutes into the symphony.
I won’t drag this out, trying to transplant a feeling is frustrating for me. 83 minutes later when the music ceased, some invisible hands pulled me out of my seat. Before I was even fully upright, tears were streaming down my face. My mouth was contorted into a half smile, half ghoulish scream. I wanted to leap over the balcony because I was convinced I had exited reality. A few times in my post-adolescent life I’ve cried that deeply. Usually it happens when I’m thinking myself into oblivion and I trip over what feels like a realization, something like, “in an instant your shelter can be ripped away, but everything's going to be okay.”
Nestled deep within the hustle and bustle of New York City lies Upright Man, a rock group made up of guitarist Aidan Dolan, bassist Nick Katz, and drummer Max Yassky.
The band combine elements of alternative, psychedelic and classic rock with complex harmonies and non-traditional time signatures to create a sound that is both eerily comforting and pleasantly interesting.
Their debut album, Upright Man, is out now, and they're just off a run of shows opening up for Robert Randolph and the Family Band. You could say they've been pretty busy.
In this interview, we chatted about the band’s new album, what their idea of "chemistry" really boils down to, and meeting someone inside a music festival port-a-potty.
Angie Flores: Hello! Congrats on the new album release. That’s exciting stuff.
Max: Thanks.
Aidan: Thanks! It feel’s good to have it released
Nick: OHHHHH YEAAAHHHHH
Angie: So, let’s talk about your album/single covers. The artwork for “Animals,” “Three Easy Pieces,” and “Checked Out” all look like pictures from some trippy, far-off world. I love that they all go together well. What was the inspiration for the album’s cover art and how does it tie into the cover art for the singles?
Max: The artwork was done by a friend of ours named Andrew Vickery. I believe the album art and single artwork is the same. The whole vista really comes together when you see the back and inside of the album, which you’ll have to get your hands on a physical copy to do. It’s worth it.
Aidan: Thanks for the great question! I think there are a lot of ways to read into the album cover especially when you see it as the full 4 panel CD case. The skeleton’s posture and the general art style were geekily inspired by the 18th-century anatomist and artist, Albinus. He painted some famously accurate sketches of skeletons and we decided to put our Upright Albinus skeleton in a world that’s maybe another planet, or could it be earth in another time? The imagery ties into the lyrics of our song “Upright Man” and the themes in other songs off of our album.
Nick: Basically what they said.
Nick: To clarify, the separate pieces of art for the pre-release singles were just different crops of our final album artwork. Gotta stretch what you got.
Angie: For the new album, you took an Elvis Costello approach to songwriting where you wrote and recorded over 20 songs and then released 10. What was the process like for narrowing down songs and getting to the final tracks?
Max: The three of us can really write a lot in a short amount of time; maybe a chorus gets written for a song but doesn’t fit and becomes its own tune. Maybe we shouldn’t have written and recorded a song about Hobbits.
Aidan: The process of elimination was pretty natural. We had two batches of recording and mastering over the 2 years of building the band. The first one was a shotgun approach, where we came in with a lot of material and ended up with around 14 recorded tunes, some of which sounded very different from each other. After taking those songs into a live atmosphere and playing a lot of shows, we started to evolve more as a band and realized there were certain songs that were clicking for us and aging well and others that weren’t. That inspired us to write some more songs and go into the studio again. The second time around we recorded six songs, all of which made the album. We have become a lot more focused in our writing and in touch with the fact that we want to rock. It was easy to pick after going through all that.
Angie: Why ten songs?
Max: We tracked 17 songs in 8 days and played some of them live for a few months but most of the first batch of tunes were either too clunky to play as a trio, or just didn’t roll with the rock. 11 is a hard number to count to, so we stuck with 10.
Nick: We thought the 10 made a cohesive record. We didn’t set about to make a ten song album, we just wound up with it. Also IDK WTF Max is on -- LOTR lyrics are awesome, he’s just too “cool” to admit it. Speaking of, anyone wanna buy a song about LOTR?
Angie: You met while studying music composition at New York University, then went on to form Upright Man. How has your music education background influenced how you approach both songwriting and performing?
Max: How? In some ways, and not all the time. Sometimes I’m more fixated on what I’m eating, and I’ll use the neurotic energy of desperately wanting my hands to be free of barbeque chip-grease to get inspired about a lyric or series of chord changes. Sometimes I'm thinking about implying subdivisions or pedal tones. Coin toss.
Aidan: I knew based on my informal music training before college that I needed a good educational ass-whooping in music to become a better musician, so I took it gladly in the form of studying music theory and composition at NYU. Along with all the standard music history and formal skills, I had a private teacher that pushed me to write complex modern classical pieces with heavy rhythmic elements and changing time signatures. I went full on into those studies for four years but quickly reverted back to my singing, rocking, songwriting self after graduating college, just with a lot more tools and tricks up my sleeve.
Nick: I know nothing.
Angie: You've mentioned that, at first, Upright Man's music was very scattered with no real identity. What was the process like for you all when trying to discover and create a consistent sound?
Max: There weren’t too many twists to the path. We just stuck with what worked naturally. I remember one day we started talking to each other about “the band’s sound,” and that was about the time we started excising tunes until we were left with what you hear now.
Aidan: We started with a collection of songs that we wrote together for fun. We were exploring with little direction, but the intention to create something. Once we started talking about the types of songs that we write together and want to write more of, we were basically on our way to being a band. By the end of our recording process for this record, our vision of what Upright Man sounds like became clearer to us and we didn’t feel the need to try so many extremely different song ideas.
Nick: I think a lot of it has to do with what it feels like to play the material live. It’s easy to sit in a recording studio and go “Oh, this is a great song, let’s just follow it and record what we get,” but once you get in front of a group of people, you can feel which songs work and which ones don’t.
Angie: You talk about how strong of a chemistry you all have. Seems like you really lucked out. What are some important (and often overlooked) things people should think about when starting a band with their friends?
Max: We worked together a good bit before we got to the point of writing songs as Upright Man. Aidan had brought me on to play drums for his friend’s band, then I brought him into my own music where he read charts that I’d wrote. After that, I did the same thing for him when he got Nick and I to read and perform his complex rock-ensembled prog jazz. At that point, we were all friends and used to playing with each other. But chemistry is kind of a red herring. Trust and respect are earned, lost, and regained. Those qualities don’t just happen and they’re more important than something intangible like “chemistry”. What we have is a commitment to our music, which means we have to have a commitment to each other. The only way we actually lucked out is that I can always count on Aidan and Nick to play the shit out of their instruments.
Aidan: At some point, understand that you’re all going to have to get in a van together and spend a good deal of time driving, moving gear, and waiting around. Oh, and you’ll get to play some music too. The reality of the grind required to get something happening for a band is something to be realistic about, in the beginning, knowing it has to be a priority for everyone and it’s always a big risk.
Nick: I think there’s an element of chemistry in terms of the writing. We tend to, intentionally or not, come up with ideas that are cohesive and demonstrate an understanding of where the others are, musically. All of the songs were written by the three of us together, the melodies, the changes, the grooves, all of them are a group effort. To have three sets of ideas that actually work together the majority of the time is what I’d call chemistry. I do think Max is right though, we approach this with a dedication to the music and a professional trust between the three of us that we know that no matter what happens we’ll play the living shit out of the stuff and everyone will deliver. It’s easier to solve personal differences when they’re inconsequential to the task at hand and when we all know that performing the task at hand is the main priority for everyone.
Angie: You all played Savannah Stopover earlier this year!
Max: That was a blast.
Angie: What were some major differences between playing a festival of that caliber compared to, say, a small club show?
Max: We befriended a few bands down there that we’re still in touch with. Show-wise it really wasn’t too different except that afterwards we really hung out. Can’t do that when you’ve got a five-hour drive back to NY.
Angie: What were some things that surprised you about playing a festival?
Max: We got free festival merch.
Angie: Free merch is always great!
Aidan: It was pretty different than a normal club show in NYC, where you step out of the club and you’re in a big a city where no one cares. Savannah Stopover had the feeling of a scene that loves and propagates music. Before and after our show we walked around the nearby streets, hearing the buzz about other bands and meeting other musicians in a similar developmental place as us.
Angie: If you were playing your own headlining tour, what musicians or bands would you want to open for you?
Max: By the time we get there, there’ll probably be a smattering of new awesome bands out.
Aidan: Mini KISS.
Nick: I think we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves here.
Angie: Well, which bands would you want to open for if you had the chance?
Max: BECK and Crowded House would be incredible. I’d also love to meet Dave Grohl or Glenn Kotche. So if we got the chance to play for Them Crooked Vultures or Wilco that’d be a dream come true.
Aidan: Radiohead would be an awesome one..
Nick: Dr. Dog
Angie: What was the most interesting way you’ve met someone, either a fan or someone in the industry?
Max: The bathroom door in the band lounge at Savannah Stopover didn’t lock, so I had to multitask (crap while listening for people striding confidently towards the bathroom). I pantslessly had to refuse this woman entry, which I did courteously by complimenting her sweater. Later I saw her play an awesome set and she complimented my jacket so our friendship was cemented. Speaking of laying bricks.
Aidan: There was that one time at band camp …
Angie: At That’s Why We Musyc, our staff members participate in a feature called “Growing Pains Playlist.” What are a few artists who were important to you growing up?
Max: Most things from 2007 (In Rainbows - Radiohead, Boxer - The National, Era Vulgaris - Queens Of The Stone Age)
Aidan: Eric Clapton, John Scofield, Trey Anastasio, George Harrison--just a few of the many.
Nick: The Beatles, The Who, Beck, Led Zeppelin, U2, James Brown, Sly and the Family Stone, XTC, Crowded House, Leon Russell, Little Feat, Elvis Costello, Stevie Wonder.
Angie: Thanks for the interview, guys!
Aidan: Thanks for having us!
Angie: Do you have any last words you’d like me to pass along to our readers?
Max: If you find yourself in a place you’ve never been and you’re having to weigh the pros and cons of ordering fish tacos, just get french fries.
Aidan: We’ll be playing a few shows at The Bowery Electric this Fall. October 5th, and another date to be announced. Keep an eye out for a music video we hope to release this Fall.
The Book of Jasher or the upright man is a historian book Chapter 1 1 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and God created man in his own image. 2 And God formed man from the ground, and he blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul endowed with speech. 3 And the Lord said, It is not good for man to be alone; I will make unto him a helpmeet.…
Let us lay traps for the upright man, since he annoys us and opposes our way of life, reproaches us for our sins against the Law, and accuses us of sins against our upbringing ...
For if the upright man is God's son, God will help him and rescue him from the clutches of his enemies...
This is the way they reason, but they are misled, since their malice makes them blind.
