PUBLISHED: 11-10-08

Premium Blend

with Reverie

Some bands figure the only way to the top is to go it alone. But with the recent cohesion of nine Chicago bands, these musicians believe the way to get to the top is to go together.

One band involved with bringing these groups together, Reverie, consists of Stephen Francis on vocals and guitar, Kevin James on bass and Brad Elliot on drums. The band worked with the eight other bands to form Chicago Noise Machine in August.

Reverie, which formed in 2003, said their goal is to not only play shows with these other bands, but to change the city with Chicago Noise Machine by bringing some integrity and professionalism back to the music scene.

The Chronicle sat down with Francis and James, who play music that Francis said some call “hippie metal,” at Fat Cat, 4840 N. Broadway St., on Oct. 26 and chatted about crashing at random houses while on tour and their hopes for Chicago Noise Machine.

The Chronicle: What do you hope to achieve with Chicago Noise Machine?
Kevin James: It spawned three months ago. It’s going to be a great project-really good for the city and the music scene hopefully. The idea of it is to have the bands unified-no egos, no problems. The slogan is, “Monogamy is dead. We play together.”

Stephen Francis: [When] we got all nine bands [together], we started to meet every Thursday at the Elbo Room, [2871 N. Lincoln Ave.]. We want other local bands to come out to these meetings and tell us what they think is going on in their opinion. We discuss the scene; we discuss who’s giving the best prices and where, what venues are cool. Basically, when you go to a show you run into 10 or 15 bands in the crowd and nine on the stage. And we’re not going to keep only these nine bands. The way we are going to keep these bands in is not about the sound, it’s about how professional you are, how regularly you gig and how much you support the scene.

What style of music do you play?
KJ: It’s like psychedelic, ambient music, too, experimental hippie.

SF: That’s what someone said in the crowd once when we were in Kansas City and they were [playing] hip-hop music outside. There was this guy and he was like, “I can’t handle all this hippie metal s–t.”

What is your songwriting process like?
KJ: We start out really complicated and realize that everything is way overdone and just strip everything down.

SF: Sometimes we record and we take away to make it so less is more. [We] try to make it as minimal as we can to be effective. We learned this with the last track we did. We did it ourselves. We did like two or three guitars and three vocals on every track and all these overdubs. You can try to polish a s—-y song by throwing a bigger anchor at it, but it’s not going to help. As a band, we sometimes work on arrangements for months. We spend a lot of time to make sure just going from point A to point B; there’s no reason to masturbate on stage for the crowd. If these four bars do nothing for the song, then why do we have it in there? How bad is it seeing a band when they’re the only ones enjoying it?

What themes do your songs follow?
KJ: They vary. There is no one track, love song bull s–t or political thing. Every song has a different substance; we try and base the feeling of the song on lyrical content. It depends on what the focus of the song is, but they’re all over the board.

SF: Someone once said it’s like the optimistic despair. They’re definitely filled with hope, but they’re [played in a minor key]. For me to want to sing something, it has to be really honest.

What meaningful experiences have you had while playing live?
SF: There was that one time-this is so cheesy-we were playing the Rock Around the Block Fest. We had a little 5-year-old kid dancing for us the whole time. That was pretty cool having a little dude get into our music. His parents kept pulling him away, and he kept coming up to the front of the stage and dancing again.

Chicago Noise Machine will be having its first show on Nov. 14, at 7 p.m. at the Cubby Bear, 1059 W. Addison St.

Reverie’s latest CD, A Boy and His Crown, was released Aug.15.

For more about information, visit ChicagoNoiseMachine.com or MySpace.com/ReverieOne.

Popularity: 4% [?]

No comments, leave your comment or trackback.