Vicky Speedboat | Photo by Emily Dubin | thedubyscoop.com | courtesy of the artist
Up From the Basement: Vicky Speedboat debuts tonight at Bourbon and Branch
“It was weird, it came together so fast but it’s been in the works for so long,” says Sean Huber.
The Philly drummer, singer and songwriter is talking about Vicky Speedboat, his new punk rock power duo with Will Lindsay. Both guys are staples of the local DIY scene, Huber in Modern Baseball, Lindsay in W.C. Lindsay and together in Steady Hands. Their new collaboration is rooted in a long-standing friendship as much as a collective surplus of no-frills rock the eff out energy.
As Lindsay tells it, having a place to make noise was also clutch.
“We always talked about doing a two-piece and three years ago, Sean had a house with a basement,” he recalls. “We jammed one time and were like allright ,this is a band. And then he moved out.”
This left the emergent project with no place to really hash out ideas. Both guys have access to rehearsal spaces for their various other bands, but as musicians will tell you, that’s not the place to write.
“You don’t really go to a rehearsal space to jam and mess around,” Lindsay explains. “You go when a show is coming up you go to have to rehearse.”
Finally, earlier this year, they got access to a house with a basement again. And within days, the Two Years No Basement EP was written.
“We kind of knew going into it that this is not the kind of project that would work with just us sending each other demos,” Huber says. “We gotta get in the room, get some beers and hash this out.”
If you’re one of the countless people in the music world flipping out over Beach Slang’s driving, anthemic energy this fall, you would do well to check out Two Years. The EP is propulsive, the songwriting is tight – it’s a endlessly catchy set of guitar-drum-vocal, back-to-basics punk nuggets.
Huber and Lindsay’s other projects, while also rooted in punk, are more meticulously crafted, whether you’re talking about the layered and lush pop-punk of MoBo’s You’re Gonna Miss It All, the gang-style folk rock arrangements of Steady Hands’ Tropical Depression EP or the layered electronics and catchy hooks of W.C. Lindsay’s Easy Victim, Charitable Deceptions.
“The other projects more come from an idea from me and Will’s head that’s built upon,” Huber says. “Usually with Steady Hands it’s me creating it and bringing it to the band, slowly building and adding parts with them. With Will it’s like that too, but within his own box.”
Lindsay laughs and concurs. “I just dive into the computer, I basically finish the whole song, and then I send it to George [Legatos, bass] and Richie [Straub, drums] and they’re like ‘woah woah woah, let’s dial it way back.’ And then we spend the next six months reconstructing it.
“I mean, I’ll just casually throw down like 40 synths because, ‘you know, why not?’” Lindsay continues. “Well, actually, there’s a lot of reasons why not.”
By comparison, writing for Vicky Speedboat was much more immediate. As Huber tells it, they wrote the guitar lines, figured out guitars and vocals, and it was pretty much good to go.
“We didn’t want to add too much,” says Huber. “We didn’t want to make like an orchestral piece that we don’t get to play it live and everybody’s bummed out. We want it to be what it was.”
Tonight, the band headlines Bourbon and Branch for its first-ever show.
“The funny thing is, with all our other projects, we’ve done them for a while,” Huber says. “This is the first ‘first show’ either one of us has had in a really long time.”
“When we launched the band, we were talking about how funny that was,” Lindsay adds. “Neither of us had made a Facebook page in five years. We were just putzing around on the page, saying ‘this doesn’t look good, how do we do this?’ We set the other ones up so long ago.”
Beyond tonight’s sure-to-kick-ass launch party, Vicky Speedboat is planning a continued run in 2016. Huber says “we want to tour in weird places off the bat,” and Lindsay adds that an acoustic tour Steady Hands did in the UK was inspiring. He had a mandolin, Huber had an acoustic guitar, they rented a car and were able to do a run of shows at relatively low cost. At any of those show spaces, he says, they could have used a house kit and amp, thus making a Vicky Speedboat tour with only guitar, pedalboard and sticks a very real possibility.
“We’re trying to hit Russia, we’re trying to hit Japan,” Lindsay says. “I heard Saudi Arabia has really sick underground scene because shows are very illegal. Hearing about that type of stuff gets me excited about touring abroad.”
Lindsay explains further: it’s not the living-dangerously element that excites him, but the passion of the people who make those scenes happen.
“I mean, Philly rules, bands here work really hard, but we kind of have it easy,” he says. “We have a great DIY scene here, it’s cheap to live. And there are so many scenes that struggle so much harder to make music. Yeah, we would if we had to, but we are very lucky [that we don’t have to]. I want to visit those scenes, I want to meet those people.”
Vicky Speedboat plays at Bourbon and Branch tonight with The Sixties, Birthday Boy and Ringfinger. Tickets and more information on the show can be found at the XPN Concert Calendar.