Singer and songwriter Brian Yoder told yours truly that he played at New College once, but nobody came. If you haven't heard of his latest project Fancy Rat yet, then you are doing yourself a grave disservice. Like the Equines, featured in issue two, Fancy Rat is also a member of the Finch House collective and are equally as tough to pigeonhole. From Yoder's background with his one-man folk project JesusChryslerSupercar, it's tempting to call Fancy Rat a folk band; however, once Yoder started fleshing out his sound with bass, electric guitar, trashcan drums, French horn and a real human beatboxer, well — it's hard to know what to call it. Except, perhaps: awesome. Up until now, Fancy Rat mostly appropriated old J.C.Supercar tunes, but the band has been hunkered down in the recording studio for a number of weeks working on their first CD release.
"It really does sound awesome and strange and odd and all that," bassist Adam Marret says of the new recordings. "I'm pretty sure that a couple of the songs are gonna cause head explosions, pants shitting and other terrible things with their awesomeness!" Good to know, right? The latest word from the studio is that the group is still applying final touches to the seven tracks on the EP — some egg-shaking here, a few hidden "your mom" slurs there — but Scene-asota is about to give New College the sneak preview.
One doesn't even have to hear the tunes to be at least intrigued by the record. "It's a fortune CD, not a cookie," Yoder said. "I think what we're going to try and do is for every copy have an original fortune inside. Not like fifty that we duplicate, but try and come up with a new one for every copy. We've got a list going that's getting long. They're all very cruel."
"We were also thinking about putting in just random things, shrink-wrapping them into the CDs," Marret added. "Like bones. Something laying around the house, anything."
"Like a Q-tip," Yoder suggests.
"A whole bunch of hair."
"It would have to be long hair," Yoder qualifies. "We'd have to shave somebody. Or find the right horse."
Again, there's your caveat. Regardless of any thoughtful touches to liner notes, Fancy Rat has secured a place as one of our scene's favorite local bands with their combination of unique instrumental layers, infectious melodies, well-crafted lyrics, attention to musical detail, irresistible dance rhythms — the list goes on. As a live act they are a force to be reckoned with: drummer Adam Brammer showed off several new quarter-sized dents he inflicted on a steel mixing bowl after a show at Felice's Cafe on April 3, and on April 20 Yoder made for quite the spectacle out at the Cock & Bull Pub when he headbutted his microphone and bled all over the electric guitar.
The recording process has been accomplished entirely in-house, or rather in-houses, with Marret sitting as primary sound engineer. "It's all been stuff done in a living room here, a bedroom there — an amp in front of the couch with guitar cases around it and a microphone in the center," he explains. "I was sitting and talking to [Yoder] the other day and I was like, at some point somebody's gonna review this or write something about it, and I don't know what I would say about it. I just feel like somebody else is gonna be like, 'What?? What the fuck is that, and why is there a bunch of random shouting and yelling and then it sounds like a dog in the background?' It makes me want to listen to the song again and figure out what that stupid thing is that we put in there.”
"It sounds about a hundred times better than I ever thought anything we'd do would sound," Yoder says. "I generally write all my songs very simply and, in my opinion, kind of boring. I put a lot into lyrics, and I put a lot into the vocal melody and how it interplays. But I always feel like it's very empty without everyone else."
Although Yoder wrote it a couple of years ago during his JesusChryslerSupercar days, it's hard now to imagine the song "Inanimate" as ever being an acoustic solo number. It begins as a minor guitar waltz, punctuated by a sly French horn riff; "I love my bike more than most people love their lovers / and I'd buy it flowers if it had a heart ... " Yoder sings, and suddenly the whole band crashes down upon its audience with a blast of sound to match Modest Mouse or Animal Collective at their most raucous. The song lurches and reels along with a heavy, drunken tread as Yoder pledges his love to his faithful favorite objects: the bike, his hat, his "godawful cigarettes."
"['Inanimate' was recorded] on one of the days where my voice was giving out, too, and I'm really happy it's the only song that sounds like that, because it works," Yoder says. The whole song is sprinkled with auxiliary percussion, snaps and hand-claps that lend it an atmosphere of rawness and immediacy; listeners get a sense of being present in the same space that the musicians were in at the exact moment of the music-making.
“Any other band I've ever recorded with, it's been that the album is less than the live performances, but I think this album is actually going to be on par," Marret says. "It's loose, but it's tight, ya know? It still sounds really good. Genuine.”
Brass extraordinaire Sarah Mobarekeh layers her French horn with a borrowed
