The Mellow Rose of Texas

Austin's American Analog Set introduces a quieter sonic boom.

BY RICHARD MARTIN


A decade ago, Texas produced some of the noisiest, most histrionic bands on the national rock circuit. Scratch Acid, the Jesus Lizard and the Butthole Surfers blasted off with more pomp and power than anything that came out of the NASA headquarters in Houston, but those days are gone. With the legacy of such bands faded, the youthful musicians of the Lone Star state have slowed things down and spaced things out in groups like Bedhead, Windsor for the Derby and our heroes for the purposes of this article, the American Analog Set.

To Andrew Kenny, the Austin quartet's vocalist and guitarist, it's perfectly natural that synthesizer-based, laid-back pop should emerge from the Texas flatlands.

"You might think Texas seems like an unlikely place for this to happen," he says on the phone from Austin, "but I think it would be harder in the big cities, where it's such an adrenaline-packed lifestyle, running around with the subways and buses and always having something to do. That's the place where people would want to play straight-up rock 'n' roll to have some kind of release."

Quiet and low-key, the American Analog Set has released three albums in the past two years: The Fun of Watching Fireworks; the follow-up full-length From Our Living Room to Yours; and an EP, Late One Sunday and the Following Morning .

The three records are packaged with no information beyond the song and album titles and were home-recorded on an 8-track machine. The drifting compositions develop keen rhythmic grooves based on repetitive guitar riffs, drum beats, synth runs and bass lines, occasionally rising to cathartic codas with a high-in-the-mix farfisa.

AmAnSet, as it's commonly abbreviated, didn't develop this graceful sound overnight. Kenny, keyboardist Lisa Roschmann and drummer Mark Smith began playing together in the Dallas/Fort Worth area in the mid-'90s as the Electric Company. They disbanded but soon reformed with bassist Lee Gillespie, quickly recording Fireworks in the Fort Worth home of Kenny's grandmother and releasing it on Trance Syndicate's spin-off label, Emperor Jones.

Despite rave reviews in major music magazines, which compared the band favorably to Stereolab and Spiritualized, AmAnSet didn't tour; Roschmann and Smith returned to their studies at the University of Texas and Kenny went back to work in a used book store.

"Even at our most dedicated we're a part-time band," Kenny says modestly. "We love each other and we love hanging out, but everybody's got things to do."

Still, the quartet found time to write and record the shimmering songs that would make up the second record. With minimal funds and a limited schedule, AmAnSet built an even more textured sound structure. There's a touch of trip-hop present in the compositions "Using the Hope Diamond as a Doorstop" and "Two Way Diamond II," and Roschmann's assertive voice now complements Kenny's lissome style. The droning pop numbers and Velvet Underground-like bursts of energy that marked the first album are here as well, on songs like "Magnificent Seventies" and "White House." The subsequently released EP, on the San Francisco label Darla, finds AmAnSet experimenting with ambient tones on two minimalist tracks.

This time, the band's recording activity has yielded a series of tours, its first outside Texas. A late-summer jaunt on the East Coast with Seely, a like-minded atmospheric synth-rock band from Atlanta, was an unqualified success.

"We had a great time," says Kenny. "We'd heard all kinds of horror stories about bands going out on their first tour and losing thousands of dollars, sleeping in gutters and getting ripped off a lot. We just had a charmed month. Nothing went wrong. Our van was awesome the entire time, no one ever stiffed us and we had plenty of fans offer us places to sleep."

Now, AmAnSet will head out West on its own, helping spread the new, mellower sound of Texas to music listeners. Unfortunately, the band not only has to confront the stereotypes associated with its home state, but the notion that because it combines analog synthesizers with guitars and gentle vocals, it's simply a Stereolab knock-off.

"It's one thing to go out and want to sound like another band, and there are some people who do this," Kenny says. "Of course, I'd be a fool to deny the influence of such seminal artists as Stereolab, Bedhead and even Spiritualized. But I like how we sound. I wouldn't change anything just because people think we sound like somebody else."