378 Vol.2 by The Bascinets is a quick listen that takes you for a very enjoyable ride. The music shifts in subtle ways, experimenting with post-punk, pop, psychedelic, and shoegaze aesthetics. When I listen to this album, lyrically, the band seems to be grappling with choices, with inevitable change that comes with the passage of time, and letting thing happen as opposed to purposeful evolution. They sing about “There is so much I don’t recognize,” “But that was years ago and now the flowers start to rot and die upon the vine,” “something’s different, you’re so distant,” “I’m trying to change it, I’m trying to rearrange it,” and ”there’s only one direction that I’m moving now.”
Check out this interview with the band, and peep the links at the end to listen and see them live.
How did the band form?
Tristan: The two guys I’m sitting with right now, Nick and Nick and I all went to high school together. I met Nick Shew, our bassist, in grade school and I met Nick Wellman pretty late in high school. And actually Nick Shew and Wellman knew each other pretty well during high school as well. So–we all pretty much grew up together. But we didn’t all start playing together as a band, until probably after high school, right?
Shew: Oh yeah.
Tristan: So, we’ve been friends for a while, and our current drummer, Trevor, I met him a few years ago, doing some other musical projects. And then he joined the band a few months ago. We’ve all known each other as friends before being in the band, which is cool.
So how long ago did The Bascinets start up?
Tristan: I think we formed in….
Shew: …late 2014
Wellman: Yeah, late 2014.
The EP you just put out is 378 Vol. 2. Vol. 1 came out earlier this year. Why release it in two parts?
Wellman: They were, Tristan can probably answer this better than me, but a lot of it is that they were recorded in two separate sessions, and it was a good split because the songs on the first EP and the second EP were written at roughly the same time. We’ve basically been working on a stylistic shift since our LP came out last year, so it was kind of good to do that in incremental stages rather than dropping this big weird album.
Could you describe the shift?
Tristan: Last year, we had our full album and we had six people, which is a lot of people. We had a full time keyboard player, but the songs have gotten more guitar-centric. Kind of like jangle-pop, post-punky influence. Generally a little more stripped down.
Wellman: I think a lot of it is just getting past the novelty of ‘we can write songs’ and actually thinking about, this is what I want the song to sound like.
Tristan: Yeah, and that just happened to be a more guitar-centric sound. And, too, I think we decided to specifically release these things in little batches the way they were, because I find generally it’s easier to listen to little EPs, especially from smaller bands, because there are so many bands out there, and there is so much content on streaming sites. If you can, give people a solid 20 minutes to peruse through, and then a few months later give them a little more. Um, I always find that when I listen to music from a smaller band, that’s what I like. And it’s just quicker to make, too. Our album took a really long time, but these EPs went really quickly. Like four or five songs, then move on to the next batch,
Wellman: I felt similarly about the writing process–that it was faster paced.
Shew: Yeah, I think we are finally starting to write songs more collaboratively rather than someone presents a demo.
Wellman: Agreed, the LP was really rigid, like that everyone brought a song or whatever, instead of working together.
So what is the process like now?
Tristan: We are definitely pretty collaborative. Nick Wellman is great–I mean he is the main songwriter–but Shew and I bring stuff in as well. It still kind of functions in a demo type fashion, where someone will have an idea. And we’re also lucky enough to where all of us have a good understanding and capability to record on our own computers and make little demos and stuff, ya know, bring them to the group. So, actually it still kind of functions kind of in that way, but they’re often a little sparser, so we can then jam them out. Feel them out as a group. It really does help because Nick and I live together so we have all our practice stuff set up, which saves time and that sort of thing, ya know. But for most of the songs, it still starts with one person having an idea, whether it is an instrumental or a song demo and they’ll bring it to the group and then we’ll kind of flush it out from there.
When I was listening to 378 Vol. 2, “Outside All the Birds Are Gone” caught my ear. What can you tell me about that song?
Tristan: Yeah, that’s one that I wrote. I that one is kind of different from the other songs on the EP, but in a good way. I like the way that it functions in that group of songs. I wanted to write something that was kind of like, vaguely Velvet Underground-y, like Ultimate Painting or like guitar vintagey [sic] sounding groups. Um, but then I think what we’ve all been kind of interested in is the mix between songs that are melodic or pretty or enjoyable in a traditional pop melodic way and also stuff that’s also dissonant and kind of hairy. So that was kind of the goal in that one, to combine a pretty standard kind of verse/chorus old school guitar pop rock thing and with an end that gets pretty dissonant. We’ve got the keyboard sound, and our friend Mario played the violin. We instructed him to be really just jagged, atonal stuff until it falls apart and leads into the next song.
Yeah, I think that one in particular, and that one mixed with “Universal Love” which is the one after that on the EP, are explorations of that idea of trying to reconcile, or at least place next to each other and see what happens a melodic kind of pop writing with noise, dissonance, angular stuff…
Wellman: It’s not necessarily dissonance, but I like the jammier parts of “Outside,” it’s not only about a verse/chorus thing, it just felt like a longer form exploration.
Shew: It reminds me of that one Byrds song, “Wasn’t Born to Follow,” that one weird little psychedelic part.
I thought the biggest departure was the last song, “Turn”. It came on and I was like, oh, that’s some shoegazey shit here…
Tristan: Yeah, now that I think about it, yeah.
Shew: I think we play it different from how it is recorded.
Tristan: That’s one that Nick Wellman brought finished to the group.
Wellman: The way we play it live though, we play with the dynamics of it a lot more. Like the quiet parts get really quiet and the chorus is a lot more aggressive.
I love how driving the chorus is and the dynamics of that song; a lot of bands don’t realize how powerful that can be.
Wellman: I think people have said stuff like that at shows before.
Shew: Yeah, dynamic, we are dynamic people.
Tristan: I think that is my favorite song on the album because of that reason. I love songs that have a recorded version, like Nick double tracked his vocals and the tones of the guitar are pretty dry. It still gets kind of big, but in a restrained kind of way. But when we play it live, we can take those ideas and mess with them without making it a totally different feeling song. When we play it, it’s still very obviously “Turn.” It functions live in a slightly different way than on the EP. I think it’s really cool, ya know songs that can have a double life.
Wellman: It’s a little thing we’re kind of interested in, too. Like some of the other songs, it’s kind of like needing part of a song to make a more aggressive or softer vibe.
Shew: Like a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde thing. It’s pretty cool.
You mentioned vocal layers, “Bikes” that’s some masterful vocal layering. That’s all Nick Wellman, right?
Tristan: Yeah, Wellman is very good at that.
How many passes was that?
Wellman: I went into our basement and recorded a bunch of vocal takes and kind of placed them all over each other. But I like how it came out, like a little group of me.
Tristan: I think he’s really good at that because Wellman is really influenced by Elliot Smith, who is a master of vocal layering.
It’s not easy to do.
Tristan: No, its really not.
We’ve touched on most of the songs, except “Harold in Conversation”
Tristan: That one, actually all the music for that one was written by Nick Shew, our bassist, and I wrote lyrics over it. It’s definitely a departure cause its just a fast, really hard to play…I don’t think we will ever be able to play it live, I’d like to figure it out, but….
Wellman: We actually had to record the hi-hat part separately because it was such a fast hard thing to do.
Shew: We need a punk.
Tristan: Yeah we need a punk drummer to do that.
So is Trevor a punk drummer, will he be able to handle it?
Shew: No [laughs]
Tristan: He’s really willing to play hard though.
Wellman: He listens to a lot of Bruce Springsteen, he’s got a very muscular sound.
Tristan: He’s willing to try anything we throw at him, which is kind of nice. We’ll learn of version of that one at some point and play it live.
Anything else coming up?
Tristan: A few local shows in Columbus, I think that we will probably take it easy towards the end of the year and think about what we want to record. That’s the next step for us. We have figured out what our sound is going to be for the next little bit and we want to explore within that. We have a shared dropbox where we all deposit this stuff. The upside is that there is all this stuff to pull from and the downside is that there is constantly shit to pull from. There’s just so many things to comb through.
Wellman: It’s a good problem to have!
Shew: Last time I checked we have 20 or 30 demos sitting around I think what we’re planning on doing for the next release is an LP and I think we are going to try and do a mix of pulling demos from there and things that are purely created from jamming.
Wellman: I’d like to have some songs that are entirely collaborative, that’d be cool.
I’m curious, what does the DIY scene in Columbus look like on the ground?
Tristan: Yeah, we’ve played around in it for a little while now. We definitely don’t play exclusively DIY shows. There are some bands, I think in every DIY scene, there will be kind of DIY scene only bands, but we kind of go back and forth between playing venue shows and DIY shows. But there are definitely a nice handful of consistent venues, I mean DIY house venues in town that do a really good job of getting bands that are looking to have a place to play and providing hospitality and stuff. Some of the venues are more consistent and better than others, but that’s just how it goes. But I say overall we’ve had positive experience in the DIY scene in Columbus.
Shew: The thing is, well, any DIY scene as opposed to playing, like, bars, the crowd is gonna be more enthusiastic. It’s just gonna be a much better show, generally, than five people at a bar scene.
Wellman: I like house shows better than bar shows.
Tristan: Typically, if you’re at the house show the people are there because they want to hear the music, as opposed to at a bar where sometimes the people are there just to kind of hang out. Especially when you’re a smaller band, they don’t really know who you are. Playing DIY shows, I find that they are a lot more supportive or welcoming.
Wellman: We actually just got back last night from a little week long tour, and I think our best show by far was a house venue in Oxford, Ohio. Just because, I don’t know, people were there and they were enthusiastic and welcoming. And we got to stay at the place. It’s just more often than not, it’s a positive experience for sure.
Hope you will take 15 minutes to check out The Bascinets new EP 378 Vol. 2, out now on Bandcamp and your streaming music providers. If you have 30 minutes, go crazy and listen to 378 Vol. 1 too! If you are lucky enough to live in Columbus, check them out at one of their shows before the end of 2018.