On: February 17 at 04:20 PM
“Loose.” That’s a term you don’t hear used to describe bands very often.
Most bands probably want to be called “tight” (for their precise playing, or by virtue of slang). It’s not usually considered a good thing for your instrumental components to seem almost calculatedly ambivalent to each other, or to have sonic gaps big enough to drive a van through.
For the Mumlers, loose is the new tight.
That’s not to imply confusion or chaos in the group’s brand of playful ghost town folk and jazz-infused junkyard circus funk, but exactly what would you expect from a band that “owes a lot of our sound to the San Jose Unified School District’s trash heap.”
“Our drummer Andy, his mom works for the school district, and she got some email from her job saying that the district was giving away a lot of beat up instruments,” said the Mumlers’ front man Will Sprott. “They got there early in the morning and scored a bunch of stuff; seven French horns, six clarinets, a giant orchestral bass drum, and more.
“We already had horns and stuff, but it just emphasized that we can play as many horns as we want.”
And play those horns they will when the Mumlers roll into town on Saturday, January 21 to perform at the Blackwater Café, where they’ll be joined by Sacramento’s Americana rockers Light Rail, fronted by Tyler Williams and his crew of fellow Lincoln High School graduates.
The show gets rolling at 8 p.m. on Saturday at the Blackwater, 912 N. Yosemite St. in Stockton. Cover is $8.
Patch-worked together from musicians from around the San Jose music scene, the Mumlers were still an infant band that had played less than a half-dozen shows when, in lieu of payment for performing at an indie music festival in San Francisco, they scored some free recording time – in Montana.
“If you convince seven people they should go to Montana, they have to sort of make a break with their everyday life to make that happen,” Sprott said, recalling the band’s recording of their lusciously loose debut record, “Thickets & Stitches.”
“We had nothing to do except work on this music (for two weeks). It was a really good way to do it, (rather than) if we did it around here, it would have been in between people’s shifts at work,” Sprott said.
“It sort of brought us together as a group. It could have gone the other way, we could have all hated each other, but it was a fun time.”
Despite the sponginess of the arrangements, “Thickets” still comes off like a record made by seven (there are currently six members) musicians with obvious chemistry; it’s full of Sunday afternoon drinking folk tunes, and more lavish arrangements like “Shake Your Medication,” which would be the house anthem in a martini lounge owned by Tim Burton. Rumor has it, that song even comes with an unofficial dance.
“We’re a lot more lively of a band than people expect from the record,” Sprott said, “and I feel like that surprises a lot of people.”
Not resting on the laurels of “Thickets” (which turned one year old last week), the Mumlers have just wrapped up mixing their second album, tentatively titled “Don’t Throw Me Away” and targeted for an early summer release. The new tunes are already supplanted into their live rotation.
“This one is probably a lot more outwardly influenced by soul music,” Sprott said. “My favorite singers are pretty much soul singers, that’s definitely something I’ve been into a long time, and it really came out more in this batch of songs.”
