To the surprise of its members, local band Big Remote is a
collaborative effort. As the band practices in a garage on Lander
Street, each member, depending on the song, trades vocal duties, and
all have a decisive hand in the structure.
Big Remote was formed as a way out of the traditional ego-pregnant
power relationships that come with playing in a band—when the
side-players are made small by the guiding hand of the auteur.
In November 2008, guitarist Stephen Larkins and bassist Eric Foreman
had just exited two different bands gone sour.
“It was kind of like a divorce situation on either end,”
says Larkins. “So Eric and I got together. We’d start a
fire at my house, get some beer, come up with ideas.”
“We started jamming together and coming out with really good
songs,” says Foreman.
These initial ideas led to the recording of the lone song on Big
Remote’s MySpace page, “Keep the Flight,” a sweet pop
song recorded as a campfire ritual.
“We’ve been in groups that have been really
frustrating,” says Larkins. “We wanted to have some sort of
cohesion with writing. Once that came to fruition, we wanted to add a
couple people that were on the same path.”
Since that November, Big Remote has taken on two new members:
drummer Don Morrison and keyboardist Jon Cornell, expanding their sonic
palette from its initial private atmosphere and its handclapped
percussion to tight pop rock—what some might deign to call
“indie rock.”
“As far as indie can be a genre of music, I think we’re
tucked in there because we … don’t have a record
label,” says Morrison.
“Indie” is a generic descriptor that contains manifold
sounds and poses. Instead, what Big Remote plays are simple pop figures
accompanied by guitar lines that drive down the center of you, like the
Pixies but perhaps less incoherent and frothing. At the same time, Big
Remote travels into Band and Neil Young territory, where there is mud
and blood and harmonies in the water of the promised land. They do all
this while remaining wholly fixated on the pop light from behind the
trees.
A friend of the band “described us as ‘indie-Americana
rock with a pop sensibility,’” says Larkins.
“Keep the Flight” in full-band form holds to all of
these descriptors. It is no longer a campfire-bound spirit invocation,
but a sweet and ringing pop song that happens to still invoke spirits.
Their song “Rearrange” is when all the
“Americana” and Band comparisons flood in—the song is
given to short guitar breaks that recall Robbie Robertson in their
country-rock abandon.
These invigorating, kinetic pop-rock songs come about through the
collaborative relationships among the band members.
“Anything is up for grabs,” says Morrison. “When
we first played a song, for the first time in my life, the guitar
player looked at me and asked, ‘Did that sound OK?’ These
songs show up, and there’s no ego attached to the songs. Yeah,
they’re written, but they’re arranged here
together.”
Big Remote has thus far kept to a limited show schedule.
“We really held off on playing live shows for quite some
time,” says Jenkins. “I’ve seen too many bands that
come out prematurely.”
Regardless, the band plans to record in January. And they’ve
already received a lot of positive response to their music.
“We’re really encouraged by the feedback from people who
aren’t related to us,” says Morrison. “That’s a
really good feeling so early out the gate. At certain times we’ve
looked at each other with a shit-eating grin on our face, because
… this is just a lot of fun.”