Photo by Kelly Anderson
Surgeons in Heat hit the ground running in the early ’00s. For a while, the Milwaukee/Madison band gigged relentlessly, releasing a new single every few months. They compiled some of those tracks into a self-titled EP in 2011, and promptly followed that up the next year with another EP, Midnight At Bellevue. And then, after lumping those two EPs together as a self-titled album, they more or less disappeared. Given their radio silence, you could be forgiven for assuming they’d broken up. But this winter Surgeons in Heat began playing shows again, and revealed they had something to show for their nearly three years off the grid: a new album, Disaster.
Singer/guitarist Jonathon Mayer admits time got away from them a bit. In 2012, the band decided to take a break from playing shows while they adjusted to a new lineup and recorded the album. That break was followed by more lineup changes, and more delays to the album. That Mayer lives in Milwaukee and the rest of the group lives in Madison didn’t speed the process any, nor did a convoluted set of circumstances that led to the bulk of the album sitting untouched on a hard drive for the better part of a year. So, yeah, Mayer says, the record should’ve arrived sooner. “Ideally I’d like to be releasing albums more than once every three years,” he says.
The Surgeons in Heat of today looks quite a bit different than the band of three years ago. Mayer is the band’s sole constant member, and it takes him a couple moments to count how many members the group has cycled through over the years (current bassist Ryan Reeve is the group’s third, he concludes, while Shawn Pierce is the group’s fourth drummer). But the band’s core sound hasn’t changed. They still play breezy rock ’n’ roll with nods to mellowed-out ’70s mainstays like Steve Miller, Peter Frampton and Todd Rundgren. “The players are different, but the band doesn’t feel any different to me,” Mayer says. “It’s always kind of been a solo project of mine.”
For the last several years, Mayer has also been a member of the Milwaukee garage-pop ensemble Jaill, whose leader Vincent Kircher produced Surgeons in Heat’s Midnight at Bellevue EP and returned to produce Disaster. Inevitably, a little bit of Jaill’s off-kilter playfulness creeps into these songs. It’s there in the margins of the lightly psychedelic single “You Never Know” and in the revved-up, overheated jangle of the title track. But Surgeons in Heat is a fundamentally more traditional band than Jaill, less inclined to cheekiness and mischief. Even when they take liberties with some of their influences, Disaster’s appropriations of ’70s pop-rock and oldies R&B never sound anything less than genuine.
“I just enjoy listening to music, so I inevitably end up replicating what I like,” Mayer says. “This is the music I enjoy listening to.”
Top Five Records will release Surgeons in Heat’s Disaster digitally on April 14 and on vinyl April 28. The band will play an album release show on Friday, May 1 with The Fatty Acids, Canopies and Sat. Nite Duets at Linneman’s Riverwest Inn at 9 p.m. The $10 cover will include a copy of the LP.
