The Slackwater News is a musical group from Lancaster, Pennsylvania. We spend lots of time together crafting creative, meaningful, and tight arrangements that serve the motive of our songs. We rehearse and record in a studio we put together in an old warehouse in the historic district of the city, where we recorded our debut EP, "All You Creatures," and our soon-to-be released full-length "Graveyard Mates". Our core instrumentation is two electric guitars, electric bass, trap set, and mechanical keyboards, but when the song is hungry for something different we are not afraid to feed it trumpet, ukulele, cardboard box, desk stomp, synthesizer, or whatever else it wants. We play electric rock music that owes to psychedelic, indie, and classic rock and pop. People always say we have a unique sound, but have compared our music to the Beatles, The Kinks, and Pavement. "Psychedelic Indie Rock" might sum it up as well as three words can. Our lyrics tend to be inspired by the magic and strangeness of things in our lives. A song about loving someone becomes an invitation to share a burial plot. A trip to the basement of the natural science museum down the street becomes a dreamy ode to the art of taxidermy. A desire to travel becomes a sea-shanty about love and longing. Throughout the songwriting process, we try to be true to ourselves and make new and fresh music.
Swimming through the Strange and Wonderous Fishbowl of The Slackwater News
Some bands spend untold hours in search of a distinctive sound, something that will set them apart and give their music a reason to be heard. Then there are those that don't bother and somehow end up selling a decent amount of records while sounding like a thousand other bands. And then there are the truly lucky, like the five guys in The Slackwater News, a group barely three years old who have found their sound through the band members own collective curiosity and individual weirdness.
Blur the odder moments of The Band's Music from Big Pink with the "let's just splice everything in there" approach of Abbey Road, then add a little of The Move and Dr. Dog, and you have the basic aesthetic of The Slackwater News. Their sound may be a deliberate mashup of indie folk and psychedelic garage rock, but to this mix, they add snippets of parlor songs, ragtime, electro-funk and Americana. It's the sound of purely democratic songwriting. Everybody brings something to the table, and whether each addition seems appropriate or not, it somehow all makes sense in the end.
In the musty world of Slackwater's North Queen Street rehearsal space, often a song doesn't become clear until they "huddle together in a windowless room and chip away at it with wooden axes and dissolve its tough outer shell with contemporary elixirs," as the band's website notes. As a result, they have wrestled themselves around a sound that, while based on well-established traditions, is still refreshing.
"I think all of us have an A.D.D. effect on the songs," explains guitarist and chief songwriter, Dan Zdilla. "Sometimes I think it would be great to have a chorus that goes with the way the verse sounds. But I think we would just end up getting bored with that."
Sipping cold adult beverages at Lancaster's Belvedere Inn, four of the group's five members - Zdilla, guitarist Matt Johnson, drummer Matt Blank and keyboardist Dan Ramirez (bassist Hans Wheelersburg was unavailable) - ruminate on all things Slackwater. As the drinks continue to flow, conversation turns to how baseball relates to genetic evolution, the moral vagaries of Twitter and other such important issues of the day. But mostly, they try to give a good account of their unique sound, mirthful and serious all at once.
The group's All You Creatures EP from 2009 includes five songs - most of which feature unpredictable changes in rhythm, key or timbre - and gave the first glimpse of the band's process. Zdilla and Johnson chug away on plunking acoustic guitars and fuzzy electrics. Wheelersburg and Blank supply sharp, reflexive grooves behind the numerous changes. Ramirez's wheezing Hammond organ and Wurlitzer bubble underneath everything, adding carnival colors and a horror film pastiche.
"If The World Goes Mad" bounces between verse and chorus sketches before adding a third, unrelated riff just for good measure at the end. "Taxidermy" contemplates the simultaneously cool and creepy basement displays at Lancaster's North Museum by alternating between funky soul and loping dirge feels.
On "Fish in a Bowl" the band cribs from Steve Miller and the Beach Boys to make a dance-worthy song about how awesome it is to be a goldfish. It's a hit your 7-year-old will love. Then there's the low-fi "Dr. McGillicuddy's," a digital-only single recorded as an ode to the boutique schnapps masked as an old-time patent medicine advert. It's a nifty little number, extolling the virtues of a substance that can cure everything from scoliosis, to nipple sclerosis and premature ejaculation.
While Zdilla comes up with the spine for most songs, Johnson, like the others, is used to throwing ideas into the pot, never quite sure how they'll end up. "We all kind of know what Dan's looking for when we sit down to come up with what to play," Johnson says." But in the end, it becomes something very different than what he might have thought of."
"There's sometimes a completely predictable trajectory to a song and we don't want that," Zdilla says. "I may have something in mind but it's always other people's ideas that make it better." Sometimes it can be a long and circuitous route, they admit. But as long as someone really believes in an idea, it usually gets through in the end, with the band molding it and remolding it until it works. "I was really proud of the fact that I wrote a song recently that has only four chords," Zdilla says with a laugh.
And if listeners have finally become accustomed to the sounds of All You Creatures and all its odd angles, a sneak peak of the group's forthcoming full-length, Graveyard Mares, reveals that while Slackwater may be stepping into less of a patchwork approach to their tunes, their fascination with the strange "what ifs" of songcraft has not wavered. "The Blister," a soulful number, stays in the same key and tempo for its entire length - downright revolutionary for these guys - but it doesn't sacrifice a bit of the wit. - Fly Magazine