Generally speaking, a musician’s previous band is the best predictor of whether you’ll like their new one. There are some exceptions, though, and Vanity Plates may be one of them. Before he formed Vanity Plates, singer/guitarist Alex Shah was one of the two titular siblings at the helm of the Milwaukee sextet Ugly Brothers, but that group’s ornate, folky chamber-pop doesn’t have all that much in common with the bratty, vaguely emo-y pop-punk he plays with his current power trio.
For Shah, Vanity Plates’ streamlined, three-piece setup only made sense in the wake of Ugly Brothers’ breakup. “I feel like when your six-piece musical clan doesn’t work out the next logical step is to par everything down,” he says.
“After Ugly Brothers stopped playing together, I was in a bit of a songwriting rut for a little while,” Shah explains. Though he was still playing bass in another band, Lifetime Achievement Award, supporting his former Ugly Brothers bandmate Jay Joslyn, “it’s different playing bass than it is having an outlet for your own songwriting.”
And then, after about a year without writing much of anything, “I totally wrote a song,” Shah recalls. “It was different than what I had been doing with Ugly Brothers. I’d been listening to a lot of garage rock, bands like Krill and Pile and that whole Exploding in Sound Boston scene.”
Shah recruited a couple other guys—bassist Ian Worcester, who usually plays guitar but happily made the switch, and drummer Shane Timm, Shah’s childhood best friend who had fortuitously just moved to the city—and the three worked fast, writing the nine songs on Vanity Plates’ debut album You Want to Move in about three months, then recording with Andrew Jambura at Silver City Studios.
Clocking in at a brisk 54 seconds, the title track is about one of the most common adult conundrums: One partner wants to relocate, the other not so much. “It’s definitely a song about growing up,” Shah says. “And I guess I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was fighting depression. I wrote the album when a lot of things were going well in my life. I’d been in a great relationship for a few years, I got a promotion at work, and I quit smoking. But then I started seeing the other shoe drop. Because I quit smoking I started gaining weight. And because I got a new job I wasn’t seeing a lot of friends anymore. So, a lot of the album is about trying to start a new life but trying to hold onto who you want to be.”
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None of that is unusual territory for a band like this. For the last few years emo and pop-punk have made issues of responsibility and mental health their specialty, and Vanity Plates carry on those recent genre traditions of tackling heavy subjects with a mostly light touch.
“I think it makes sense that the genre attracts those kinds of subjects, because it’s music where it’s OK to talk about your feelings and to be able to do it in a smart way,” Shah says. “It’s very cathartic music, but it’s a lot of fun, too. I think that’s it more than anything. The music’s just really, really fun to play. So not only is it good to get some of those heavy feelings off your chest, but if you can do it in a danceable way, it just makes you feel that much better.”
Vanity Plates play an album release show Friday, June 8 at Company Brewing at 10 p.m. with Yum Yum Cult and Bum Alum.
