ALLSTON GOULASH: Picture Squarepusher and Enya collaborating on songs for In Utero.
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Hooray for Earth singer/guitarist Noel Heroux spends so much time at his band’s Allston rehearsal space, you could imagine he practically lives there. And in fact he does, sleeping on an air mattress among broken guitar parts and empty beer cans. After spending a Monday night there with him and his band mates — bassist Chris Principe, drummer Seth Kasper, synth player/guitarist Gary Benacquista — I get the feeling he calls the small, dingy room home not for economic reasons but because that’s where he’d spend all his free time anyway. He was holed up there for most of the last three years writing and recording fleshed-out demos of the 13 songs that make up Hooray for Earth’s new self-released Hooray for Earth, an outlandishly good CD and one of the best local debuts in recent memory.
“I don’t write songs on guitar,” he tells me over beers at the nearby Model Café. “I’ll be driving and I’ll be like, ‘Aw, crap, I gotta pull over,’ because a song pops in and I’ll have to go to the space and do the whole thing. It’s not like I’ve got this chord progression and a melody. It’s always all worked out, which actually drives me insane. If I forget something, I’m freaking out. I’ve gotta do it all at once. If I think of a song and it’s a half-hour before I have to go to work, I’m fucked.”
Which is remarkable given the intricacy of Hooray for Earth’s music, a goulash of grungy guitars, electronic dance music synths and beats, and classical and new-age elements. Picture Squarepusher and Enya collaborating on songs for In Utero.
Then there’s the way Heroux and Principe tune down a ridiculous two and a half steps to B, with Heroux often playing in drop-A, the strings slack and rattling against the frets, creating an ungodly ribcage-shaking rumble. Heroux recorded almost all of the album’s guitars at the rehearsal space by running them directly into a decrepit old HP Pavilion computer — an unconventional technique that was born out of haste and became an aesthetic preference. “I’d just plug a pedal in and be like, ‘All right, that works.’ But then I started really liking it, and I started doubling everything in a way and panning everything — these dry, low-tuned, Rat pedal-direct tracks — and I was like, ‘Wow, this sounds like dinosaurs.’ ”
Most of the synth sounds on the album are patches that Heroux made by manipulating homemade samples: a single plucked violin note triple-tracked and soaked in reverb, a heavily effected snippet of his girlfriend and her sister singing faux opera, a string part from Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis pitch-shifted to match the chords of a song, his own voice run backward, etc. But it’s Heroux’s goosebump melodies riding atop unorthodox chord progressions that set Hooray for Earth apart. There are unexpected dynamic shifts and improbable harmonic twists and turns. The songs are structured with a snatch of melody acting as a teaser for the impending chorus or a bridge setting up the song’s climax.
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The seeds for Hooray for Earth were planted some 10 years ago in chorus class at Grafton High School. Principe was a senior, Heroux a lowly freshman. The school was having a battle of the bands, and the band Principe was fronting, Gas Food Lodging, had kicked out their guitar player and needed a replacement. Heroux, who was playing guitar in his own band at the time, offered his services. “Noel was this sort of crazy little guitar player back then,” Principe says. “He was like this big, had braces, but he ripped on the guitar.” Heroux joined GFL, they won the battle of the bands, and he and Principe have been playing together ever since.
In 1998, the year after Principe graduated, GFL broke up and he and Heroux started a band with a drummer named Andrew Patrick. They called themselves Raymond and played Principe’s songs, which he describes as “straightforward pop-punky rock-type shit.” In the meantime, Heroux began writing his own songs and recording four-track demos; he eventually took over as the band’s singer and principal songwriter. Kasper joined after Patrick landed a job performing with Stomp in 2001. Keyboardist Bill Zern rounded out the Raymond line-up, which recorded an EP and played locally.
Zern left the band in 2004, just as Heroux was starting to put together the songs that would become Hooray for Earth. They asked Benacquista, who had been in a band Gas Food Lodging used to open for on occasion, whether he wanted to try out. Benacquista had recently seen Raymond at T.T. the Bear’s. “They had gone from being these young kids where it was ‘Oh, that’s cool’ to being ‘Oh, wow, these guys are really good’ to, like, I was totally jealous — ‘I wanna be in that fucking band right now.’ And they ended up calling me and asking me to audition. They wanted me to play keyboards, and I didn’t play keyboards. I had to learn on the fly. They asked me to join the band, and two weeks later I was standing on stage at the Knitting Factory with the notes taped to the keys.”
The band started piecemeal recording sessions — at the rehearsal space, with Brian Brown in “proper” recording studios like Witch Doctor and the Moontower, and later with Shawn Briggs at his Briggs Bros. Studios — for what would become their debut as Hooray for Earth (they changed their name last Halloween). “Usually, we’re trying to imitate Noel’s demos because he does them so well,” Principe explains. “He makes a demo and it’s a fully realized thing. That’s how the band works. We’re probably the biggest Hooray for Earth fans you’ve ever met.”
Kasper agrees: “It’s my favorite band, and I’m in it. It’s fucked up.”
HOORAY FOR EARTH | Middle East upstairs, 472 Mass Ave, Cambridge | September 14-15 | 617.864.EAST