El Oso - that is a five-peace from Milwaukee consisting of Andy Hartzell (drums, percussion, programming), Jeff Grabowski (piano, keys, synths, percussion, programming), Jim Hanke (vocals, guitar), Lee Gianou (bass, percussion) and Jasen Kinart, who recently replaced founding member Mark Mendygral on the guitars. They have just released their debut "Whichever Chapter Covers Now" (Contraphonic Music Ltd.), which is an album full of light-hearted pop songs that spread the scent of summer and put forward some really, really great melodies, combining classical pop with experimental sounds - in other words one of the most pleasing pieces of music that I heard in a long time. Here's a bunch of questions I mailed Jim Hanke about his young but promising band.
Jim, please tell me something about the band first. Why and when did you start?
I met Andy around April of 2003. He took some black & white promo photos for my old band Twinstar and he used to play drums for a pretty well-known group from here called Radio Tokyo. Shortly after he did some photo work for us, Twinstar split up and I was anxious to keep playing. Andy and I had some mutual friends, so word eventually got back to him about what type of band I wanted to start and he was very interested. We weren’t sure how to describe what we wanted other than “a classy pop band,” so we put some random ads out for a piano/keyboard player and found Jeff, who had played bass in a few bands around town. He was looking for the same kind of sound, so the three of us got together in the fall of that year and wrote our first four songs together – “Location, Location, Location”, “The Great American Novel”, “Tonight’s Now Tomorrow” and “Bury It & Smile”. We pretty much just burned a bunch of CD-R’s for people who were interested in playing lead guitar and bass, and sooner or later we found Mark and Lee. We had played with that line-up since our first show in January 2004. Mark left the group recently and he’s been replaced by Jasen Kinart, a good friend of all of ours. So I guess this is the start of some sort of second phase for us.

What’s going on in Milwaukee, musically seen and otherwise? How does your band fit in there?
Within the last few years, Revelation Records has managed to sign three Milwaukee-area bands – Since By Man, Call Me Lightning and Temper Temper – all of whom are extremely talented in their own ways, so I think there might be more of an industry eye on this area than there was, say, ten years ago. I recently read an article that pretty much compared getting a song on a hot TV show these days to getting on a John Hughes movie soundtrack in the 80’s and I think that’s a pretty fair assessment. Bands who get that sort of exposure, even for ten seconds, get lots of buzz and Temper Temper had a song of theirs this past year on The OC, so that puts them side-by-side with these huge bands like Coldplay and Death Cab for Cutie, which is pretty amazing. As far as how Milwaukee may differ or whathaveyou from other cities, I just think there’s more camaraderie between bands, even those who sound completely different from each other. These people in hardcore bands, alt-country bands, dance bands, garage or punk bands… they’ll drink at the bars together, play shows together, share practice spaces and just be all-around friends without any sort of competition or jealousy factors entering into it. Also, unlike some of the major cities, a lot of these band guys are more accessible in general, everyday life because many of them work service jobs along Milwaukee’s east side. They serve coffee, check ID’s at bars, whatever. It’s fairly easy to just strike up a conversation with some dudes who you admire, which I don’t think happens much elsewhere.

You’ve been together for about a year and a half now, but as I’ve read you have already written more songs than you could actually release. Is that the kind of productivity that comes with a new band? Just having released your debut are there already plans for a second album?
I’m not sure if that sort of work ethic comes with being new or whether we’re just crazy about writing. I think we’ve always kind of had this set mentality of keeping things fresh and writing is becoming just more and more getting to be part of that for us. I mean, if you think about any major band that has the usual cycle of releasing a new album every two or three years, you have to realize that – in most cases – the album has been recorded for anywhere from six months to a year prior to it even being released, so by the time their touring schedule winds down, the songs are already almost 2 years
old to them, but only half that old to the average listener. In general, all I can say is that our #1 fear in this band is for people – whether they’re at home listening to a CD or watching us play live – to be bored. We can understand people who may not like the overall sound or the lyrics or whatever. You’re at least making a choice there as a music fan and saying “Yeah, this just isn’t my thing” and that’s fine. So, we just try not to do the same songs over and over, whether that means writing the same type of song again and again or actually playing certain songs ad nauseum. We at least hope that continuing to write new stuff will keep older fans coming back and help newer fans to stay interested. As for a second album, we will be demoing a few new songs soon at our practice space, just to get a feel of what we can do with them once it becomes time to officially do another record. We have about 5 or 6 new songs since we put the record out and the response from audiences seems to be as positive as the recorded stuff or more so.

Would you say that you’ve already found “your sound” or are you still developing?
I think, in general, we’ve found a general understanding for what we want to aim to be, but we always want to continue to push our own boundaries and develop our songwriting more and more. I think the general sound of this band is really hard to pin down in some ways and hopefully people pick up on that. We always want to keep evolving though.

On your homepage four of you listed the latest Decemberists album as one of your favorite ones. Listening to both El Oso and the Decemberists I would say that it makes sense. Chance or common ground?
We all have a soft spot for the Decemberists. From a lyrical standpoint, Colin Meloy pretty much represents what I strive to reach as a songwriter. You get put in a time and place when hearing their songs, plus their music can be heartbreakingly beautiful while still having a little fun. In that sense, I feel that he’s on par with people like Elvis Costello, Morrissey, Bob Dylan and the like who often get tagged as 100% serious, artsy songwriters when in actuality there are things in all those artists’ songs that are quite funny. Especially with The Smiths. You take a song like “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” where Morrisey sings pretty wearily about how people don’t care whether he lives or dies, but then he’ll have lines like about how he was first depressed that he was unemployed, but then was even more depressed that he had a job. It’s brilliant because we’ve all been there or had friends like that where nothing will cheer them up. It’s sadness to the point of absurd humor. Anyways, in that sense, I think that within the next ten years or so, the Decemberists could grow to be this generation’s Smiths and be thought as that rare type of perfect balance between sincere, romantic wordplay and genuinely funny tales of woe. I’d know their love for storytelling has rubbed off on me as a songwriter, for better or for worse.

What keeps you together?
Like, as a band? Probably our energy as far as always wanting to improve, always wanting to play out, always wanting to write. Once we get on a roll, we can’t seem to stop ourselves. I think we honestly respect each other as people and musicians. This is really the first band I’ve gotten feedback on as far as lyrics. The rest of the guys always want to know what the songs are about or whatever and that’s always really encouraging. That fuels the live shows too, where the guys will shout some of the lines along with me, which adds to the group dynamic that we go for. It feels good that they have confidence in what’s being sung and by them backing me up without actually having a mic in front of them to sing into is really humbling. If they feel the need to just belt out a line here or there, it’s awesome. It brings us closer together as friends, I think. I’ve
always liked when bands that I go see do that sort of thing, whether it be shouting some of the words or even just mouthing them, because it shows that they aren’t in their own little world of just being up there to play whatever they play and be done. They’re up there with the person who wrote the words and more or less saying “I love being in this band.”

Your bio says that most of you have a strong punk/hardcore background. How comes that your music now sounds the way it does?
I think we all bring something different to the table but share the same sort of vision as far as rhythm, spacing, vocal phrasing, etc. I don’t know why we play this style of music, but it’s something that is interesting to us and will remain interesting as we continue to grow. The crazy thing is that when we started, I pretty much convinced myself that people under 21 years of age probably wouldn’t have the patience for this type of sound and it’s been quite the opposite. Our most rabid followings are in areas where we do tons of all-ages shows in legion halls, church basements, underage clubs or whatever. We hear a lot of people say “There’s nothing like you around here” and that’s really quite humbling. We don’t try to sell this sound as being 100% original, but maybe there are things we’re doing that keep people on their toes. I’m not sure what those things would be, really, but we appreciate all the support nonetheless.

Your band name doesn’t seem to fit your music, reading it I first considered some sort of stoner rock or something like that. Did you think about that before choosing the name?
When Jeff, Andy and myself first met up and started working on material, we discussed names and decided that whatever we chose, we didn’t want to have “The” in it. It just seemed like a lot of bands in our area and elsewhere were The this or The that. So I think one of us was like “What if we used The, but not in English? Like, a foreign equivalent or something?” so that’s where “El” came from. After that, “Oso” just sounded the best, I guess. It just means “The Bear” in Spanish.

In El Oso electronic sounds seem to play an important role, though you’re not playing the kind of music that uses to have such elements. What made you realize that it would work?
I don’t know if there’s a secret formula for having programmed beats sound good necessarily. We always aim to treat those types of elements like any other instrument in the sense that if we use them, they assist the song instead of just being there. If it feels remotely tacked on, we ditch it pretty quickly. On something like “Tonight’s Now Tomorrow,” we feel it adds a fun twist because, lyrically, it’s all about NOT partying and NOT going out, while the programming kind of says the opposite. On “Country Radio” or “Lions,” the beats are more choppy and sort of fuel the moods of those songs. We’ve gotten some good response in the press or from people who come to our shows regarding that aspect of our band and we’ll continue to experiment with beats and programming, but we’d like to think that it’s not a gimmick or anything. We’re pretty picky people, musically-speaking, so we try not to overuse any one single aspect of our sound. If people find that appealing, that’s awesome.

Your releases on Contraphonic have some very strange animals on them. I think there’s something to it but yet haven’t found out what. Please help me.
I don’t think we had a set theme or anything about the covers of the album or the live EP. Mark designed all those and we just liked the idea that when you looked at it, you couldn’t really tell what type of band made the record or what sound you might be hearing. I think a lot of album artwork these days tries too hard to fit into whatever genre the band happens to be. Like, if they’re any sort of emo or hardcore band, there’s got to be a heart or blood or the color black involved. If they’re a ska band, it’s got to be goofy-looking. If it’s hip-hop, it’s got to have cars on the front or girls jiggling or
something. I think the next record we do will be completely different from the whole “animals” theme, but I guess we liked the fact that it was a clean, simple look.

At the beginning of this interview you said that Mark left the band. Who is the new guy and what is the relationship between both involved bands like?
Jasen Kinart is our new guitarist. Everyone calls him JD for short. I’ve known him for a really long time and he’s one of the most genuine guys I know. He’s an incredible guitar player and just a fun guy all-around. He and Jeff both play in another Milwaukee-area band called Those Royals with our friends Aaron Spransy – who used to be in Radio Tokyo with Andy – and Mike Stewart. They’re more of a straight-ahead guitar-pop band, kind of the the Weezer vein. We play shows together a lot and come to each other’s shows and although we share a few members, we have yet to step on each other’s toes as far as booking tours and stuff. We definitely tour more than Those Royals, but there’s never been an instance where they need him for shows or anything at the same time we do. Everything’s been really smooth so far and we think it will continue to be that way.

Mark said that he left because he wasn’t able to put as much effort in the band as the rest of you do. I guess that for a band of your size it might be hard to make a living out of music, so what importance does El Oso have in your lives?
Well, we definitely don’t make a living on it. We all have jobs and some of us go to school on top of playing out, so it’s not like we can drop everything as of now and go tour for three months. I don’t know if it was a question of putting in as “much” effort as the rest of us, so much as that he had a ton of issues to deal with outside the group and by taking the band out of his schedule, he had a lot more time to free up and dedicate to those issues. That’s what works best for him now and we totally respect that.

Any plans of coming over to Europe yet?
Wow. I can’t really fathom how amazing a trip to play overseas would be. I’ve only heard stories of how American bands go over there to play a few shows and have such a rabid fanbase, sometimes more so than they know. My friend Matt Tennessen, who formerly played in bands like Pele and Paris Texas, has told me these crazy stories from when they toured Japan. Kids would come up to him and play their Pele ringtones they had on their cellphones, which I’m sure was just surreal. They get to play to sometimes triple the normal audience that they’d get on a good night in somewhere like Chicago. Obviously, that’s now how it is for everyone, but if the planning and finances were right, I think it would be a dream for us to see the other side of the world while playing music for people.

All photos taken by Christopher Stingl (Fluxus Photo/Design)
Visit www.eloso.net and/or Contraphonic Music Ltd.
interview done by christian

...