Otto Modest - the local band with a powerful sound

by Jarret Green

The Otto Modest don't have a drummer. At least, right now, they don't have a particular person who could answer to the title of the Otto Modest's fulltime drummer.

But this is territory the Cape Girardeau band has already explored. Before previous drummer Eric Wilke joined the band a year ago, the other members, who have been together for about a year and a half, used a drum machine or took turns rotating onto the drums.

The evidence of this openness is still seen in the band's live shows, where between-song shifting of a member is combined with electronic beats. The band completes itself out of necessity. They don't need constant and structured roles, and their music reflects that. On a recent Friday night, the band was gracious enough to allow me to visit one of their practices.

Now that Wilke has left the band to focus on his family and career, Josh Evans, Collin Giles, Aaron "The Razor" Schafer and Ross Martin are struggling through shifting back to their former style of working together. This process has hindered their progress on a new full-length album, planned for release in mid-April. Wilke left when many of the new songs were ready, but now the band has to relearn each one in preparation for studio work on the follow-up to "The Wicked" EP (available at PMac and Hastings).

On "Wicked," the Otto Modest's most obvious influences are Radiohead, The Verve and other alternative Britpop, but more than sonic styling, the Otto Modest has been influenced by those bands' ability to transcend genre. They could be classified with loose terms like post-rock or alternative, but those do little to describe their sound. "The Warning" comes off as a slow dark country ballad about love and music, while "Country Mouse" could almost fit seamlessly onto "Kid A."

The songs for the new album, however, have the band moving in a slightly different direction. The post-rock work of bands like Mogwai and Sigur Rós, which lurked beneath the surface before, is now more pronounced. This album should reflect the band's live sound more directly.

When we play live, I don't think we really realize that we're playing live," says vocalist Josh Evans. Like many of the shoegaze acts, such as My Bloody Valentine and Ride, that the band references, their performances are completely about the music, and the members often seem too focused on their instruments or one another to realize anyone else exists.

It makes sense that a band that is so focused and open-minded in execution and product would also have an organic creation process. "Many times a song will completely change," explained Evans, who writes the rough ideas for most of the songs. "Love on Me," a new song which began as acoustic, morphed into one of the band's loudest songs. "Country Mouse" began with a drumbeat Collin Giles, who usually plays guitar, created electronically.

The new album will also be more ambitious than anything else the band has recorded. They plan on recording 15 or 16 songs, some of which will be instrumental interludes to add to the overall cohesion of the LP. The album will feature more of the band's experimentation with electronic beats, samples and various effects, especially reverb and echo from guitarist Ross Martin.

You'll also hear Giles playing his guitar with a bow, a technique created by Jimmy Paige and updated by Sigur Rós, or an EBow, both of which create a sound similar to whale singing. Much of Giles' guitar work calls to mind Kevin Shields or TV on the Radio, but he sounds more like Muse's Matthew Bellamy when he's behind the keyboard. Aaron Schafer's bass work is often the warm center of the new songs, whether it's the slow rise to a screaming chorus in "Far Between" or the wavy verses of "Equals."

The band, it seems, is destined for greatness. Not many bands fill the niche that their music encompasses, especially in America. Like, for example, Explosions in the Sky, an instrumental group from Austin, Texas, who went from releasing two semi-successful albums on a small label to scoring the soundtrack to last year's "Friday Night Lights," The Otto Modest is too big to be contained by a regional scene. They play music people need to hear.

Unfortunately, you won't be able to hear them much until after the new album is released; they're taking time off from live shows until then. Meanwhile, check them out at theottomodest.com and listen for them on The Rage local spotlight.