Photo by Wes Rich
On the list of worries that keep bands up at night—finances, tour schedules, van breakdowns, whether your drummer is going to move away, etc.—having fans respond too well to your last release ranks pretty damn low. It’s a problem that most bands musicians love to have, of course, yet for Soul Low it’s become a real concern.
Soul Low was already feeling the burden of expectations going into the recording of their sophomore album. Their 2013 debut, Uneasy, was one of the best debut Milwaukee albums in ages—a weird, jittery, lovable record that captured the heightened anxieties of youth just about as well as any record since the first Violent Femmes LP. And so, to buy themselves some time while they figured out their next move, last year they released a fast-and-dirty EP called Sweet Pea as a placeholder.
It was barely even a band effort, really. Singer-guitarist Jake Balistrieri wrote the songs on his own, and in contrast to Uneasy’s showy tangles of indie, jazz and punk, they were unabashedly simple—straightforward, garage-pop songs with goofball lyrics about crushes and STDs and food. And people responded to it. The Sweet Pea songs killed live, and especially on the road, the band developed a reputation as a party band. They played shows in drag sometimes, just for the hell of it.
“Sweet Pea has so many jokey moments, so when we’d go out of town, people who knew us expected a party,” Balistrieri says. “We became the fun band. And then we went ahead and recorded this album that’s super dark.”
That new record is Nosebleeds, the product of two years of relentless writing and rehearsal and more than a few false starts, and it bears little resemblance to the EP the band fired off in a fraction of the time. It’s a dense work, with songs that unfold as tumultuous suites. The band’s pop sensibilities are still intact—the surfy “Be Like You” may be the catchiest song they’ve ever written—but by and large Nosebleeds’ hooks take their time to reveal themselves. Balistrieri still sings in his usual seasick, fingernail-biting quaver, but he rarely plays his nervousness for laughs; instead, he’s singing about heartbreak, mortality, alienation and other indignities. There’s humor there, but it’s black and understated.
So, will Soul Low fans like it, especially the new ones that band has picked up over the last year or so? The band genuinely doesn’t know.
“We just let ourselves make the music we wanted to make,” says bassist Sam Gehrke. The band was just in high school when they wrote Uneasy, he notes, and in the years since their tastes have changed repeatedly. They’d work on Nosebleeds, take a break from it, then return to it only to discover they’d moved on to a new set of muses. Eventually they just had to pull the trigger and finish the record, which they tracked over a productive weekend in Chicago, keeping overdubs to a minimum to capture the immediacy of their live shows.
“We got so in our head about what kind of band we wanted to be,” Gehrke says. “Uneasy is such a young record, so we didn’t want to make that record again, because that’s not the people we are anymore. We’ve changed and we’ve grown, so we wanted to make a record that reflected that.”
“I think we ended up making a record that’s more for music fans and less for somebody who wants to passively listen,” Balistrieri says. “But I’m hoping people connect with it. There’s something very cathartic about hearing music that’s very poppy about subject matter that’s very personal. That’s something we’re very into, being honest about our emotions. Everybody feels anxiety sometimes, so why not be open about it?”
Soul Low plays an album release show at 7 p.m. on Saturday, Aug. 13 at the Miramar Theatre, 2844 N. Oakland Ave., with Milo and The Pukes. You can stream the album below.
