Song, by Toad

It can be a little difficult to interview a band in the absence of the main songwriter, so certain questions about the slightly arcane, grotesque nature of the subject matter can’t really be put. Other rather brilliant ones can, though.

Like how on Earth the band ended up guerilla gigging the lines for other people’s shows early in their days. Apparently they’d just rock up to group of people queueing to get into a gig and play for them, and when I ask them about it they just shrug it off.

“We’d been practising for a while and we didn’t have any shows booked, so we thought ‘we wish we were playing this show’ so we would crash the show. And when there’s tons of people standing in line for a show, they’re already there for music and you can see what kind of a response you would get.”

I can’t quite imagine that sort of habit working very well in the drizzle of Scotland, but The Builders & the Butchers seems to have a pretty relaxed attitude to what constitutes a performance. The fourth wall barely seems to be there at all.

“We ended up playing on the street a lot in downtown Portland. Mostly just practising, we were just kind of playing, seeing what would happen with it.”

This kind of approach is probably related to the nature of their live shows, which are supposed to be raucous as hell. The footage here is dubious at best, and is from a gig they played as a support band at Portland Zoo. The stage was pretty big and the sound turned down far too quiet, so between that and the distance from the crowd it was impossible to really gauge anything much about them as a live act. The reports I have from regular readers Campfires & Battlefields and DC are really positive, as is this from Linda over at Speed of Dark. I am at once delighted to have had the chance to see them during our brief stay, and a little bit gutted that it wasn’t somewhere more suitable.

Quite how they made it from there to being named the best new band in Portland by Willamette Week seems a little higgledy-piggledy at best. Bladen County Records are one of the nicest, friendliest labels in the industry, but it is only recently that Matt has started to make that extra step to being a little bit more ambitious, both for himself and for the bands he works with.

“The label’s grown up so much since these guys started.” he says. “They were the first real effort, you know, for us to really say shit, here’s a good album let’s get it out there. We had no resources – nada – we grew up together in a lot of ways. I knew a lot of people so I introduced these guys to the right people and a lot of people fell in love with their music. A lot of things came together like that. It’s a small town with a lot of resources – pretty much anything you need to make things happen in music you can find here.”

I find myself reminded of Alela Diane, and her slow route from tiny runs of hand-made self-releases, to a deal with another Portland label, Holocene, from there to an equally small label here in the UK, Names Records, and eventually to Fargo for European distribution. She was essentially touring the same album for about five years, and there’s something a little similar about the Builders’ steady progress from the streets to the clubs of Portland and now beyond, to the rest of the nation.

“We’ve retired a lot of songs. Right now we’re playing a lot of new stuff. We recorded a new album recently, but we’re not going to release it before Spring. We’ve written some new songs since that, there’s lots of new stuff.”

Although, of course, the people in DC have only just recently heard the old ones, so the news ones are somewhat caught in limbo until the process of getting the name out there is a little more complete. Reigning in artistic energy is a dangerous thing though – you don’t want to smother it altogether.

Lead singer and main songwriter Ryan Sollee might be a little more focussed, and Matt Brown from Bladen County might have suddenly decided that it might be time to step things up a notch, but the guys in the band still seem able to take it pretty easy. Portland is such a musical town that more or less everyone has a couple of side-projects and other bands which they help out.

I wonder if there comes a point at which you realise that one of these four or five bands in which you might be involved suddenly and obviously becomes one that is going places. Can you tell that one is a cut above the others and might stand a genuine chance of going places? The consensus is that you can’t really, and there is no real desire shown to give up the side projects, although Harvey, the banjo player, confesses that he has somehow ended up giving up all his extra-curricular projects.

So by hook or by crook the Builders & the Butchers might end up being famous. I bloody well hope so, because this chatter may be amiable and harmless enough, but their music has genuine purpose and venom. A friend and I were recently discussing that what the modern folk revivial lacked, for all its fey obscurantism and prettiness, was someone with the bite and snarl of The Pogues. Then I played him this. Or alternatively you could just read this quote from Campfires & Battlefields from the end of his email to me after seeing their show in DC: “I said hello to Ryan for you after the gig, and he expressed much love for all things Toad. He signed my CD and tee shirt. I’m almost 40 fucking years old and there I was grinning like a kid while a rock star signed my tee shirt for chrissakes.”

The Builders & the Butchers – Black Dresses
The Builders & the Butchers – When it Rains

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