Jumbling Towers builds on heavy vocals
Published March 16, 2007
What began as an escape from boredom has become a promising musical career for Missouri-based Jumbling Towers.
"All four of us went to high school in St. Louis," bassist Nate Drexler said. "We played sports our whole lives, and we all quit our sports senior year. We got bored, and there wasn't much to do after school, so I guess we just decided that we were cool enough to start a band."
Rounded out by vocalist Joe DeBoer, drummer Scott Ingram and multi-instrumentalist Kyle McConaghy, Jumbling Towers has come a long way from a high school band that played, what they called, "really, really bad pop songs." After graduation, the band members parted ways but continued to write and perform music during summer vacations.
"One point in 2005 in the summer, we decided we really wanted to try," Drexler said. "We just decided that summer that we were going to move to Columbia to be all together and actually pursue it for real and write real songs. Maybe because we liked cool music we thought we could generate good music, I guess was the gist of it."
The band has taken a technical hands-on approach to its music. A demo released last summer to reach new audiences was self-recorded by the band but primarily by McConaghy who studied production and mixing work.
After garnering a name for itself in St. Louis and Columbia during the past year, Jumbling Towers began work on its self-titled debut. Completion came slowly as the band strived to achieve a specific sound on the album. After first recording with the help of the band Eagle Seagull, Jumbling Towers returned to Missouri disappointed with the results.
"We actually recorded the whole album with them, and when we got it back, it just wasn't exactly what we were looking for," Drexler said. "It was very un-us. We were really going for a specific sound of trying to replicate a lot of live reverberation, trying to replicate a lot of that older lo-fi but still somehow professionally lo-fi."
The band, which is self-described as "picky bastards," moved on with only the rhythm section tracks and opted to re-record the remainder of the album.
"We knew it was probably best if we just tried to figure it out ourselves," Drexler said. "So the rest of the album was recorded, like, in Kyle's apartment in Columbia, some of it recorded in my basement, in my house in St. Louis — just different rooms for different instruments and really pieced together over several months."
The careful work put into the recording of the album, a subtle mix of Wolf Parade and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, helped make the record's strong points more noticeable, particularly DeBoer's unusual vocal delivery. Jumbling Towers takes less influence straight from artists' songwriting, but more from the production of their favorite albums by legends such as the Pixies, David Bowie and The Talking Heads.
"Production like theirs is very vocal-heavy, and it's very based on that off-kilter vocal style that kind of catches your ear a little bit," Drexler said. "We knew that when Joe came into his own voice, we needed to somehow centralize that. As far as we were concerned, the record is not going to be good unless the vocals are good."
With the album complete, Jumbling Towers now hopes to expand its horizons but will take things slowly. No extensive touring plans have been set. Instead, the men of Jumbling Towers plan to create buzz through blogs and word-of-mouth interaction, something that has worked for them in the past.
Whatever might come, Jumbling Towers represents a culmination of a lifetime of musical experience for Drexler.
"It's just a really cool way to make something that you would enjoy listening to," Drexler said. "That's what I get out of it most — just being able to create something with our limited resources and our limited ability that we would enjoy listening to or that we would think is cool. If I was not in college like I am now or working in a restaurant five days a week, I think I'd go crazy if I didn't have something like this to attach a lot of what I do to."
