Melty Melty

For some reason the Other Paper never got the Melty Melty preview I wrote up on the website, so here it is, even though the release show was last weekend. Of all the local releases this year, Rise of the Birdmen is one I highly recommend picking up.

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On Melty Melty’s debut album, Rise of the Birdmen, singer Sean Gardner sounds like a man who has come to grips with technology’s aggravating tendency to implode. “Machines can tumble on over, it doesn’t even matter to me/ Machines can burn out their motors, it doesn’t even matter to me,” he sings on “Same Situation,” the leadoff track.

Gardner learned to roll with the punches the hard way. He and bandmate Kevin Davison had just about finished recording the album with their engineer/drummer Mark Himmel (The Slide Machine) when Himmel’s hard drive crashed. They lost everything.

“It was awful,” Gardner said. “We looked at companies that could recover hard drives, and it was way too much money and they couldn’t guarantee it. We got programs to try, spent countless hours at the Mac store, but it was just a lost cause. And then we all invested in external hard drives.”

It took a couple of months to gear up and start over, and once they did, the record began to take on a whole new feel. The first time through the songs had a raw, home-recorded sound, but Rise of the Birdmen is “a lot more polished than we expected and a lot more produced,” Gardner said. “We love it. I’m really, really proud of it, but it’s definitely a lot different than the beginning.”

The real beginning of Melty Melty goes back even further, to the days when Gardner and Davison were in Kopaz, a Columbus band that garnered some major label attention and then promptly called it quits. So the two began focusing on the direction Kopaz had started to take--slower, spacey, poppy and simple, taking cues from Pinback and German duo Tarwater. (On Rise of the Birdmen, the Pinback influence is impossible to miss.)

At first the pair tried to tour on their own, looping live drums with Gardner behind the kit. “It was a really cool idea but it didn’t always work,” he says. “Every song kinda started out the same and it wasn’t as fun to perform. And sometimes you’d get a bad sound guy who didn’t know what we were trying to do.”

Eventually Himmel came on board and Melty Melty did some touring, but he has since been replaced by Brian Moore, drummer for Brainbow and formerly of Tiara. Bookmobile’s Antonio Garza occasionally fills in as well, and the plan for this Saturday’s record release show at Ruby Tuesday is to have all three drummers playing simultaneously at certain points. It’s super-trendy these days for indie-rock bands to have two drummers, Gardner says, but three? “We’re treading new ground,” he joked.

Like Gardner’s other projects--Bookmobile, Winter Makes Sailors--Melty Melty doesn’t shy away from a hook. But Gardner said the different bands occupy a different space in his head when it comes to songwriting. Slower songs tend to become Winter Makes Sailors tunes; catchy, fun songs usually go Melty Melty’s way, and when writing for Bookmobile, Gardner said there’s “beer in the air and jump-kicking, the fun rock and roll side.”

Oh, and then there’s the Kyle Sowashes, but Gardner admitted not much sweat goes into his role there. “All I have to do is write a sweet tambourine part.”