Danger Adventure plays a quirky, psychedelic brand of appealing pop music, but you would be hard pressed to find their debut CD, “The Pomegranate,” at your local Tower Records — or even your local hip, indie record store. Although the burgeoning three-piece — featuring guitarist/vocalist Faiz Razi, keyboardist/vocalist Caroline Nutley and drummer John Goodwin — calls Chicago home, the album was recently released by a small label called Fork Series, which happens to be based in Barcelona, Spain.
“The Fork Series record is kind of like our golden ticket,” said Razi, 26, putting a positive spin on his band’s odd situation in a recent interview in his cozy apartment on the Northern outskirts of the city. “It’s something that’s shrink-wrapped, it has a barcode and we didn’t make it ourselves.”
Even so, the band’s next major goal is to acquire distribution within the United States. As of press time, one of the few places this side of the Atlantic where you can purchase “The Pomegranate” is at dangeradventure.com, the band’s Web site, which seems apropos given their Internet-based start.
“We had a couple of songs on the Internet Underground Music Archive (iuma.com), a great Web site that lets bands put up their songs on the Net for free,” said Razi, about the band’s humble beginnings. “Then, someone passed a song onto James, who runs Fork Series, and he hated it, but we grew on him. He actually says that he used to hate pop and we turned him onto it.”
If Danger Adventure can make the owner of a staunchly experimental European boutique record label fess up to the power of great melodies, it should be relatively easy to convince most music lovers who take no shame in cherishing the heavenly vocals and dense keyboard and guitar hooks bountifully displayed throughout “The Pomegranate.”
The record kicks off with a nether-worldly hymn justly titled “New Sound.” Nutley’s thick keyboard bass lines and Goodwin’s intuitive drums keep the track moving through the song’s variations, more attuned to a classical suite than a standard verse-chorus-verse pop structure. Many songs on the record take surprising turns, always accompanied by fresh instrumental and vocal melodies.
“New Sound” begins with Nutley’s open-throated, angelic voice amid a trippy wash of organ chords and space-age effects. It then merges into a groovy bounce with Razi’s guitar chiming in the background, until the song opens up into a euphoric wide-screen haze of lofty psychedelia before finally disintegrating into a dirge with Razi and Nutley slowly singing “ba dum ba dum ba” in unison. An exercise in economy and flawless segue, “New Sound” packs four great eccentric pop tunes into its five minutes and seventeen seconds.
The members of Danger Adventure can manage to take so many chances with their sound because of the close relationships they have with each other — Razi and Goodwin have been friends for nine years, and Razi and Nutley have been in a serious relationship for about four years. “We were friends before we started playing,” says Goodwin, 28, whose soft-spoken, deadpan attitude underlines his role as the band’s reliable, drumstick-wielding engine. “The fact that we’re a three piece helps with our closeness because it’s really hard to faction off.”
“A lot of people play music with a lot of different people casually, but I couldn’t imagine doing that,” added Nutley, 24, the youngest and most fresh-faced Adventurer. “It took me a long time to be comfortable with the band and feel free creatively. If one of us weren’t playing, we’d be something else, we wouldn’t be Danger Adventure.”
Mixing pop, prog and experimental tendencies, Danger Adventure takes musical cues from artists as far-reaching as Brazilian Tropicalia pioneers Os Mutantes and Burt Bacharach. In a more modern context, the band could easily find their place within the retro-pop-psych Elephant 6 collective spearheaded in the ’90s by such visionaries as Apples In Stereo, Neutral Milk Hotel and The Olivia Tremor Control. Tellingly, through a network of mutual acquaintances and a spat of good luck, the band recently recorded a few songs with Apples In Stereo main-man Robert Schneider for an upcoming compilation highlighting Chicago’s current music scene.
Although “The Pomegranate” was lushly produced with painstaking care over the course of a year and a half, the band’s session with Schneider was decidedly less obsessive. In fact, all of the instrumentals were recorded together into one microphone with only the vocals overdubbed later. Impromptu recordings may yield more opportunities to work with Schneider, who has produced seminal works like Neutral Milk Hotel’s “In The Aeroplane Over the Sea” and is in the process of starting his own label, Optical Record Mfg.
With an increasingly hectic tour schedule — including a four-date jaunt in Spain earlier this month — and the ever-growing familial chemistry between band members, Danger Adventure is certainly doing something right. As for future aspirations, “We haven’t had anyone (say), ‘Your band sucks, we hate you,'” says Razi. “But I’m excited to have that happen — I can’t wait for that!”
Medill senior Ryan Dombal is a writer for PLAY. He can be reached at [email protected].
