“Holly, Michigan is a small town full of small-minded people”. Our Brother The Native are a band that seem to come straight out of suburban middle America. There is nothing small-minded about their music, however. It is experimental and ambient, and above all it is imbued with an over-riding sense of space. Heima showed us that Sigur Rós are making the music their landscape commands, but it is a testament to the artistic powers of this trio that they can conjure music of such scope from a world of white picket fences.
The obvious thing to mention about Our Brother The Native is their age. Of the trio, only John-Michael Foss could legally attend gigs in clubs in America. Chaz Knapp is close too, but has his own DIY label to keep him occupied instead. Josh Bertram, who I talked to, is eighteen and not long out of high school. They met over MySpace in 2005 and signed to the same label as Animal Collective and Sigur Rós in 2006. And their latest album, ‘Make Amends For We Are Merely Vessels’, is not even their debut. It can’t have been easy starting out in the weird world of freak-folk and post-rock that their dense, pastoral music inhabits.
“The reviews of [debut] Tooth and Claw made me think we weren’t taken very seriously. But I feel anyone who has met us or seen us hopefully could understand that we are very serious about our music”, Josh says. That’s that then. “I know for me, college is just for the time being. The band and music is my definite priority and passion in life”.
The band’s formation is a matter of some discussion too. Josh and John Michael met in high school in Michigan and had started playing together, but Chaz lives in California. How did they even find each other? “I contacted Chaz through the MySpace for his DIY label Delude Records. He had been putting out some really interesting obscure folk recordings and I told him that if he ever needed a new release to contact us. So he did. He was really adamant about putting out something of ours. We put out the six-track EP “Cheer Up My Dear, The Sun Will Shine Again. Over the course of working on the recording, we became great friends. I talked to Chaz on the phone almost every other day. We started to do collaborations via e-mail on two songs, and they turned out beautifully. So I thought we should just add him to the band. He accepted the invitation, and that was that.
Tooth and Claw was received as a record from the New Weird America camp, but Make Amends… is much more panoramic and spaced out. Combining that sort of cinematic quality with falsetto vocals was always going to draw comparisons to Sigur Rós. This is not a problem for Josh.
“That is an endearing compliment to have. To be compared to Sigur Rós is an honour, and I will always strive to make our music as dramatic as some of Sigur Rós’ work. However I think we are much different in terms of what we are trying to convey. We will always be much darker in mood. I also think there is a little more experimentation happening on our part. I try not to have many rules for us when we go about writing a song.” And the vocals? “The falsetto comparison I can understand, but I have been singing that way long before I heard Sigur Rós. I have a weird fascination with women’s voices and hushed, cute vocals. Also I guess I have always wanted to have a range that fits the mood of any style I want to sing.”
Fat Cat signed the band after Chaz sent them a link to their MySpace in the hopes of getting some constructive criticism. The label liked what they heard and asked for a demo. They liked the demo even more, and instructed the band to record a full-length album with a view to releasing it. For an experimental but still mostly teenage band, to share a label with the likes of múm and Sigur Rós must have been exciting.
“I would say we feel a closeness to the bands on the label. They are all so amazing, and I feel we share a lot of their ideals. There is a lot of bands on the label trying new ideas all the time and that’s something inherent in our goal as a band as well. But if you’re asking if I think we’re on the same level as múm or Animal Collective or Sigur Rós, I would have to say no way. We still have much more room to expand and grow.” Most bands that lean towards the sort of organic, experimental music Our Brother The Native make come to it through improvisation, or jamming at the very least. It’s interesting to find out how that works in a long distance set-up.”John-Michael and I wrote Tooth and Claw long distance, sending parts of songs back and forth to Chaz until they were complete. On Make Amends… John-Michael and I wrote songs over the course of two years since [the band's first gig, at a Fat Cat festival in] Belgium, playing them live with Chaz occasionally. Parts got added here and there as they aged. When the time came to record, Chaz wrote a load of new parts for it, including the piano base for one song and the entire two parts for The Multitudes Are Dispersing.”
“There is a balance of improvisation and structure. The music part of it has been planned out for the last two years and hasn’t been improvised on the album. But a lot of experimentation I did with the atmospherics in each song came from testing new ideas out to make the songs fresh to me, considering I had been playing them for quite awhile. I do a lot of searching for the right samples to fit each song.”
In an attempt to have a little fun with Josh, I asked him to describe his idea of Ireland. “Lots of pubs, green pastures, Nessie and leprechauns”. Despite this slight gap in knowledge of the specifics of European affairs, he says there’s a good chance they’ll see Ireland this summer. “We actually are looking at a little summer European tour. We have a couple of promoters inquiring about us in Ireland, France, and the U.K.” A good chance to get to know the place a little better perhaps.

Karl McDonald Generally either listening to music or asleep. Sometimes both simultaneously. Those Geese Were Stupefied
Email this author | All posts by Karl McDonald

Similar Posts