Sound Team

A rousing and inventive six-piece band from Austin, Texas, Sound Team is simply too unusual to nutshell in a sentence. But since that doesn't stop both relatives and critics from insisting Bill Baird do so, he sometimes takes a shot.

"The way I describe it is, we're basically a bunch of people who are into electronic music trying to play a Motown song," says Baird, who co-founded the band with Matt Oliver. Asked to name some of his favorite songwriters, Oliver's response suggests a similar dichotomy: he cites not just Harry Nilsson and Ray Davies, but also Kraftwerk's Ralf and Florian.

MOVIE MONSTER, Sound Team's first proper full-length CD and Capitol debut, celebrates that tension with 11 songs that never fail to find a perfect alchemy of weirdness and directness, of melodic zing and rhythmic clang, of smart narrative songwriting and joyful abstract noise. An underground favorite thanks to self-issued releases, fans on MP3 blogs and live shows with the likes of Arcade Fire and the Walkmen, Sound Team already feel completely formed. From the oddly satisfying tease of the 73-second album opener "Get Out" to the layered hooks of "Born to Please" to the haunted buzzing of the title track, MOVIE MONSTER is an unnervingly accomplished record: epic, deeply textured, and catchy-as-can-be, when catchy is what it wants to be.

"Sound Team? It's like naming your band, 'We are a band,'" one fan wisecracked on the group's Myspace page. But these six musicians—Oliver (lead vocals, guitars, keyboards, songwriting), Baird (bass, backing vocals, songwriting), his younger brother Michael (synthesizers), Sam Sanford (guitars), Gabe Pearlman (keyboards) and Jordon R. Johns (drums)—really are a team, and more than just a band: they're a gang, they're a family, they're a collective, all dedicated to adventurous autonomous creation. Most of them are also involved in video or visual art, talents that carry over to the band's web site and live show; Sanford, who makes his living as a painter, designed MOVIE MONSTER's booklet and CD cover, based on Super 8 footage Bill Baird shot in New York City. The record, produced by the band itself with Mike McCarthy (Spoon, And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead), was recorded mostly at their own Big Orange studio, which is in a former 7" vinyl pressing plant just east of downtown Austin.

Two-thirds of Sound Team attended the same San Antonio high school, but the foundation of the band was poured in Austin, where Bill Baird and Oliver first met as college students. With one beat-up Wurlitzer electric piano to his name, Oliver was gigging and recording around town as a would-be Nicky Hopkins, and Baird also played in the odd band. But both men considered home recording to be their true musical passion, and both were into everything from Sonic Youth to Randy Newman to John Fahey. "He had folk songs, I had folk songs, so we started recording them and making really weird music," says Baird. "We shared a love of getting inside a song, whether it was his, mine or somebody else's."

The duo ventured out to rural Eastern Washington, where the plan was to live cheap and spend the excess time and money on recording. But when the jobs they were supposed to get didn't pan out, they found themselves in Portland, crashing with two friends of Baird who were attending Reed: Sanford and Pearlman, though they would not actually join Sound Team for several years. The band's first official shows took place in Portland, but by 2001 Baird and Oliver were back in Texas, where Michael, who was still in high school at the time, signed on as the third member, providing not just musicianship, but a slew of vintage keyboards and echo machines. "Most kids are spending their money on beer in high school," says Oliver. "Michael was saving his allowance and buying all these awesome old synthesizers. Thank God for that."

Drummer Johns already played with Michael in another band, while Sanford joined after seeing an early show—it was clear to him they needed help. "When you're writing songs by recording at home you can add all the parts you want," he says. "But if you're going to try and arrange them for live performance you need more musicians." Bill Baird agreed. "There were a lot of parts we couldn't play," he says now. "I only have two arms."

With Pearlman rounding out the line-up they played a ton of shows in Austin and the rest of Texas, released a few cassettes and CD-Rs, almost broke up, and then one day, "we had enough junk to move into a warehouse and call it a studio," Oliver says of Big Orange. "It's really just a barn with tape machine." And four pre-amps, an ancient mixing board, six or seven microphones, a mandolin, a flat steel guitar and countless organs, keyboards and effects. "We find things at thrift stores a lot," says Baird. Of course in the age of E-Bay, "you have to kind of lower your standards. But the stuff's still there."

In between sessions for Spoon's Gimme Fiction, Michael McCarthy set up at Big Orange and the band began to record. Some songs from those sessions found their way onto 2005's Work EP (which was itself an extension of a vinyl-only record on St. Ives/Secretly Canadian) while others ended up on MOVIE MONSTER. Along the way, the band got signed to Capitol, but simply continued making the record they'd already started.

And what a record MOVIE MONSTER is. It harnesses both the purity of Sound Team's live exuberance and the sonic maelstrom of their experimental side, all tied together with a limitless cache of hooks. Each of the disc's 11 songs was written or recorded differently. "Between Matt and I there's every amount of collaboration you can imagine," Baird says.

Oliver is prone to writing bare-bones songs the band can then let loose on—that's how the bubbling "Back in Town" got put together, while "No More Birthdays" was written "Rodgers and Hammerstein style," he says. "Bill and I worked on it at home in shirt sleeves at the upright piano with acoustic guitar, then took it to the group and they made it something completely different." Both songs were recorded mostly live—"the sound of us six playing."

Baird, meanwhile, tends to record and arrange completed tracks that are then completely re-imagined. "Born to Please," another song the band cut live, is one of those, as is "TV Torso": it started out as a 13 minute drone track; then Baird added bass, brought in Jordan to play drums (as well as typewriter), and finally, the whole band carved it up and fleshed it out. "Bill's just not afraid to experiment," says Oliver. "He's brave, which makes it really fun to play together."

The title track is another song that changed completely, with the band essentially re-writing it ad hoc. "Michael had come up with that synthesizer part, which is like the main part of the song," says Oliver. "We tried recording it live but it wasn't really working until we decided to try something more stylized." They set up a crappy 40 year-old drum machine that makes one sound and, Oliver continues, "quote unquote programmed it to play that beat and just stripped everything back. It sounds nothing like that when we play it live, but as a recording that gives it another kind of quality. It's like, you can play that song on an acoustic guitar, but you can also make it sound like German synthesizer music."

Yep, there's that duality again. And you can be sure Sound Team won't get any easier to pigeonhole as the band gets even more impressive and ambitious. "The first, and really the only criteria has been if we like how it sounds," says Baird. "And what we like changes daily."

Although Sound Team didn't officially form until later, the band had its beginnings in a friendship started up by University of Texas classmates Bill Baird and Matt Oliver. They were both playing around in various bands, but their interest in home recording brought them together musically. After college, they ended up in Portland, OR, staying with Baird's friends Sam Sanford and Gabe Pearlman (who would later join Sound Team) and holding down office jobs while still writing, recording, and performing some of their own material. In 2001 the duo moved back to Texas, and soon brought in Willis Diviney on drums, Baird's brother Michael, who was still in high school at the time, on keyboards and synthesizers, and Sanford on guitar. With this line-up (the elder Baird took songwriting and bass duties while Oliver did guitar and lead vocals), Sound Team used a four-track to record the CD-R Into the Lens, released in 2002. That same year Michael's former bandmate Jordan Johns, took over for Deviney, and soon Pearlman joined in and keyboards. After issuing some self-released albums and cassettes, the band started Big Orange Records in Austin, where they laid down material for their 2005 EP, Work, and their full-length, Movie Monster, which was released on Capitol in 2006. ~ Marisa Brown, All Music Guide