Metro Pulse/Music/Enon

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What:
Enon with the Bloodthirsty Lovers and Natural History

When:
Saturday, June 1 at 9 p.m.

Where:
The Pilot Light

Cost:
$6

Enon expands its sounds yet keeps its quirks

by Joe Tarr

A lot of bands profess to always wanting to grow and change as musicians, but the truth is, most groups find a particular sound, and spend their career making minor variations on it. While it may be too early to tell what path Enon will follow, the early indications are that each album is going to have a unique sound all its own.

The group's full-length debut, Believo!, was a mishmash of electronic tinkering, samples, synthesizers and good old electric guitars. The music had a foot planted firmly in both rock and electronic genres, but didn't worry about sticking within those boundaries. While the follow up—High Society—certainly has lots of experimental flourishes, it is comparatively much more of a straight-ahead rock album.

Leader John Schmersal says it wasn't an attempt to reign themselves in, but simply to try a new approach. "We want to do something different. But I guess in the same way, you get tired of hearing that you're weird. It's meant as a compliment a lot of times, but we really don't think of the music as all that strange. We just wanted to do something more straightforward," he says.

The group also wanted to create an album that would be easier to translate live, and kept that in mind while they recorded. "Some of [the songs from the first record] were kind of a pain in the ass and were hard to do live," he says.

Schmersal came out of the Dayton, Ohio, music scene (which also included Guided by Voices and the Breeders) with the band, Brainiac, which also blended electronic and conventional instrumentation. The band came to an untimely end when vocalist Tim Taylor died in a car accident in 1997. Reeling from the death of his friend, Schmersal sought consolation in music, recording a solo album, Forget Everything, under the name John Stuart Mill.

Later, he recruited Rick Lee and Steve Calhoon. The trio wrote several songs, went on tour, and then recorded Believo! Calhoon and Lee have since left (although Lee played on High Society). They've been replaced by Matt Schulz on percussion and Toko Yasuda on vocals, bass and synthesizer—the latter known for her work in Blonde Redhead. Yasuda has helped add some needed bottom to the music and offers more potential to experiment electronically, Schmersal says.

"She writes really great songs. It wasn't just that she played bass," he says. "It's just changed us. Now that Rick's not in the band any more, it's another person to bounce off of and collaborate with."

Although you won't be hearing the new record on Top 40, it has some infectious pop gems—particularly "Window Display" and "Sold"— with hardly a hint of anything that could be termed "weird."

But that new-found restraint doesn't mean the group is abandoning its quirkier tendencies.

"We aren't really concerned with maintaining a strict palate," Schmersal says. "One of the things we like about this band is that it could always be something new. People will recognize the voices, but hopefully there will be some surprises.

"I'm not saying our music isn't derivative of things. But a lot of bands seem more derivative, they stay in a pocket. For me, it's kind of like a lot of music out there feels boring because it doesn't seem to be taking a lot of risks. I don't want to sound too pretentious," he adds.

There's a lot more guitar crunch on the new record, and the title track uses acoustic guitar and Beatlesque string arrangement, accented with horns. Yasuda's songs rely more on electronics, and have a funkier beat. Other songs layer guitars over an electronic backdrop, so the music evokes late '70s new wave, but it also sounds new and reaching. But Schmersal doesn't claim to know whether pop music is going to head in this direction.

"Living in New York and being in a New York band, everything gets hyped up here. From my perspective, it almost seems like people are poised for something to happen. So the press seem to try to dictate or almost make it happen," he says. "I almost couldn't care."