Does Athens Need Another Pop Band?

A Group As Solid As The Ice Cream Socialists Makes A Strong Argument For "Hell, Yes"

originally published May 2, 2007

"I don't want listeners to feel like we're a throwaway band. I don’t want to be something that's here today, gone tomorrow," says Talia Bromstad when asked to describe the reaction she desires least to elicit from people who hear the Ice Cream Socialists, the Athens-based pop band in which she sings and plays accordion. Her hopes of making music that will have a lasting influence also comes out when she discusses the possibility of working on a second album: "I hope that if we do record again, we can take something and make it really perfect" - to create a work that "sounds good sonically, and can stand the test of time."

It's refreshing to hear a young musician so readily own up to her pretensions (which, for the record, aren't necessarily bad things to have). If pressed hard enough, most indie rock bands, one imagines, would confess to holding the same aspirations - permanence, a fully-realized album, a broad and sizable audience - as Bromstad and her bandmates. The difference between the Socialists and your standard-issue Pabst-swilling, broken-up-in-six-weeks-because-the-drummer-hit-on-the-bassist's-girlfriend indie outfit is that this particular group of young men and women openly embrace their ambitions in both their songs and performances. Their appreciation of craft and concept in the company of acts who generate artistic capital through novelty, charming amateurism and erratic concerts distinguishes them from other bands as being consumed by a drive to generate music of substance and see their art acknowledged widely as such.

When vocalist, keyboardist and songwriter Ben Austin announces that he wants the Socialists to be "the band in the scene that you don't have to be in the scene to go see," you not only believe him, but are convinced that he'll do everything in his power to make good on this aim.

The band did, after all, captivate its first audience during a dormitory blackout. "The power went off in Myers [UGA's dorm for freshman Honors students] one night," recounts drummer Payton Bradford, "and all these Honors kids were flipping their shit because they couldn't do any work, so we started playing all kinds of stuff out in the lobby!" This impromptu performance happened in the fall of 2005 - each bandmember's first semester at UGA. Thanks to a series of chance encounters and a network of mutual friends, the Socialists - Bromstad, Austin, Bradford, Charlie Key (guitar, bass), Brantley Jones (bass, guitar), Stephanie Davis (violin) and Jonathan Pride (drums) - formed within the first months of their respective members' freshman year. "I don't really know how it went from [the night of the blackout], except we all ended up crammed in Ben's dorm room in Creswell one day," Bradford explains.

The band originally worked with a set of songs that Austin had composed as a high-schooler. With a solid body of work at their disposal, the Socialists could get immediately to work on sharpening their aesthetic rather than finding their voice. Refinement came quickly, too, yielding an opening gig for Tegan & Sara at Atlanta's Variety Playhouse in November of 2005 and a 10-song album, which was completed the following spring.

This record, titled Belles and Missiles, proved to be one of 2006's most rewarding local transmissions. A schizophrenic amalgam of Arcade Fire sweep, ramshackle K Records clamor, Kinks-ish bounce, and childhood- and animal-fixated lyrics, Belles demonstrated the group's ability to operate ably within a wide range of new and old indie-pop conventions. But the recording ultimately amounted to more than the sum of its signifiers, as the group spastically threaded together the elements of its sound with discombobulating time changes and manic dynamics. The album's two-minute nuggets of Byzantine pop weren't quite prog, but they were certainly progressive, in the same sense as cuts from Carla Bley's cabaret jazz epic Tropic Appetites and Electric Light Orchestra's Eldorado. Sometimes, the album's melodies herk too sharply or jerk too rapidly, and the playing shifts on occasion from lovably sloppy to, well, just plain sloppy, but Belles is by no means the glorified demo that most self-released debut records from college freshmen are.

"I think we sound more mature and muscular now than we ever have," claims Bradford. "I feel like the band hit puberty a few months ago… our collective balls dropped!" The beefed-up sound of the Socialists' newest, post-Belles material is due in part to Davis' absence - she's currently away from town playing the role of Beauty and the Beast's Belle at Disney World, which means that charging guitars and anthemic keys play a more central role in the band's concerts. But the Socialists' recent songs are also simply more forceful and dense. Bradford sees the expansion as multidirectional: "There's a heavier vibe to a lot of [the new material]… or it's a little bit richer and lusher."

The group kicked out many of its new jams at a recent house-show, and Bradford's assessment was spot-on. Some of Key's fresh guitar licks nod toward Iron Maiden. Choruses drill through the skull with the reckless abandon of The Replacements' classic singles. And everything hangs more tightly together, complementary flavors in perfect proportion, like ingredients in a hearty stir-fry. Older songs also sound more fluid; Key massages wrenching distortion from his guitar and allows the noise to bleed from one segment of a song into the next - feedback becomes a bonding agent.

Jones wrote some of the newer songs, and his approach to songwriting and arrangement helps to account for much of the group's increased tautness. Here's Bromstad's take on his style: "When Brantley writes songs, he tends to have a lot of ideas in mind. And then when Ben writes songs, he's kind of like, 'Hey, this is what I'm doing,' and people just sort of noodle around with them."

The Socialists have also, however, matured into more focused performers. House shows are often wracked with out-of-tune instruments and flubs, because energy matters more than execution when everyone's gathered for the free booze and camaraderie. But the Socialists absolutely owned the living room at the Secret Squirrel at a recent show, attacking with precision and a minimum of banter. They behaved like professionals… professional assassins!

In the set's first song, Jones accomplished an even rarer house-show feat: he convinced the audience - a large number of whom were friends or acquaintances - to suspend their disbelief and view him as a character in a song rather than some dude from philosophy class. Accompanied by only his own clean-toned guitar, Jones spun a tale of mobster noir, exhibiting perfect tone and timing. He was even able to get away with some over-the-top choking sounds while enacting the death of one of the song's characters. Everyone shut up, listened, and bought into every second of the performance, which happens far too seldom in Athens.

An encore performance of that night's lineup - Ice Cream Socialists, Telenovela, Quiet Hooves and Mouser - swings into a more traditional venue this Saturday, May 5 at the Caledonia Lounge.

"Yeah, we're singing about stuffed animals," Jones comments when asked about the band's lyrics, "but I never felt like I was trying to go at some sort of kid feeling. I still feel like I'm my own age when I sing our songs. I don't know why, but it's always felt simultaneously genuine and humorous, too."

Since the beginning of the 21st century, pop music has trafficked heavily in sincerity, which often comes at the expense of its ability to crack a smile. You can chalk this turn up to the atmosphere created by the War on Terror or view it as the natural counterpoint to the irony and emotional removal endemic to the 1990s. Whatever the case may be, it's clear that the overly earnest "We're gonna make it!" stutter of The Arcade Fire and Wolf Parade has replaced the slacker draw as indie rock's default vocal setting. Even edgier rock groups with cryptic lyrics - bands like Deerhunter, Liars and Animal Collective - sketch austere images of deeply buried emotions and pivotal childhood events. Guided by Voices couldn't thrive in this climate.

As the Ice Cream Socialists have come into their own, their songs have become more driving and urgent. But their music's desperation is highly situational, an in-the-moment brand of desperation - much like the frantic, out-of-proportion emotions everyone feels as a shortsighted adolescent. In the Socialists' songs, a "bastard monkey" (the antagonist of "Fuzz Is a Friend") is without a doubt worth wigging out over, and simply falling asleep with a cuddly teddy bear is a sensible resolution. The problems with which the music deals are not, in other words, too large to tackle within the space of a three-minute pop song.

For all their energy and ambition, the Socialists seem to have a healthy idea of exactly how much and how little is at stake in a song. Like many of us, they realized long ago that pop fails miserably at mending brokenness and wooing lovers, but they still find value in the genre's kinetic release. The simple act of making pop, and not the act of gesturing towards larger problems through pop, holds redemptive prospects for this band.

Phillip Buchan

WHO: Ice Cream Socialists, Telenovela, Quiet Hooves, Mouser
WHERE: Caledonia Lounge
WHEN: Saturday, May 5
HOW MUCH: $5