The Bravery
w/ Fiction Plane, Your Vegas, Civil Twilight
Wed. May 7
8 p.m.
$17, $15/advance
Music Farm
32 Ann St.
(843) 853-3276
www.musicfarm.com
www.thebravery.com
“Believe” from the album The Sun and the Moon
Audio File
“We look at recording and live as two different media,” says Sam Endicott, singer/guitarist and main songwriter of New York quintet The Bravery. “We actually play the songs pretty differently live. In the studio, it’s more about subtlety and layering. Our stuff is definitely fun to listen to on headphones. The more you hear it, the more things you pick out. On multiple listenings you hear a lot of stuff that you don’t hear the first time. But live, we sacrifice some of that in return for just pure energy.”
Endicott formed the band in 2003 with Michael Zakarin (guitar), Michael Berreto Hindert (bass), John Conway (keyboards), and Anthony Burulcich (drums). They were drawn to New York’s “electroclash” scene, in which DJs created a fairly lo-fi brand of electronic dance music by mixing and manipulating samples from songs into new tracks.
Borrowing and expanding on that concept, the Bravery sought to add a rock band element to that sound. The band recorded in a fairly traditional way, then downloaded the song onto a computer, chopped the music up, manipulated the sounds, and edited it all together with the originally recorded track to create a fresh mix of electronica, rock, and dance music.
Endicott can’t help but chuckle when asked how the band’s music might evolve on the heels of their recently released album The Sun and the Moon (produced by Brenden O’Brien). It’s a question he’s obviously been asked incessantly in interviews to promote the Bravery’s 2005 self-titled full-length album.
“After doing this record, I feel like we have no limits on what we can do, like we’re not categorized into a certain sound or a certain style of song,” Endicott says. “That is very freeing to me.”
Fueled by the single “An Honest Mistake,” the first CD spent 24 weeks in Billboard’s Top 200. Endicott says the Bravery continued to use its slice-and-dice approach to building tracks on The Sun and the Moon, but also did more straightforward recording for the new CD.
The Sun and the Moon opens up many new possibilities for how the band’s music will evolve in the near future. While the synthesizer-laced pop of their debut met comparisons to The Killers, Franz Ferdinand, and synth-pop groups of an earlier vintage, such as Depeche Mode and New Order, the new one is harder to pigeonhole. For one thing, the dance beats are employed far more sparingly.
The Bravery’s new material is more timeless, more textured, and at the same time more adventurous than the debut. Beyond a more varied rhythmic pulse, The Sun and the Moon also offers a wealth of other musical dimensions that the Bravery had yet to explore. It’s aimed in more of a traditional pop direction, as songs like “Believe” (a recent Top 10 single) and “Time Won’t Let Me Go” (a previous Top 10 on modern rock radio) fall into a tuneful, yet edgy mid-tempo territory. Meanwhile, songs like “Split Me Wide Open” and “This Is Not the End” rock a bit harder and take on more of an epic sound. With “The Ocean” and “Tragedy Bound,” they take the sounds to the opposite end of the stylistic spectrum, stripping back the songs to an acoustic ballad setting.
“We didn’t want to just do the exact same thing again,” Endicott says. “When we made the first album, we intentionally made every song like a dance party. We wanted it to be like that. With this one, it was like we have all these different sides that we haven’t explored a lot yet, so whatever comes out, we’re just going to roll with it. We’re not going to limit ourselves.”
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