Sometimes taking a break can spell the end of a band, but Two Gallants’ new record The Bloom and the Blight proved the folky blues rock duo was doing anything but fading away since their hiatus began in 2007.
One Eyed Jacks in New Orleans saw the recently reunited Tyson Vogel and Adam Stephens rock a tightly-played set Monday night that demonstrated the long-lived bond between the two San Fransisco natives. With a musical partnership that dates back to grade school, the two developed a stronger bond after they’re break.
“The band is so much based on listening to one another,” Vogel explained. “When you’re so close to it sometimes it’s hard to see it. It just kind of happens. But the thing that we focused on closely was how to be as together as possible. You have to allow that to happen too. You have to mature.”
As the band kicked off the soft beginnings of “Song of Songs” with Stephens’ tranquilly crooned vocals, Vogel propelled the song into a heavy explosion, shaking the building as he brought his arms down onto his drum set. Vogel’s face disappeared beneath his moppy hair and thick beard as he pounded away and Stephens ripped off notes on his guitar, sending the front row of onlookers into a head bobbing frenzy.
Like most songs on the Bloom and the Blight, “Song of Songs” presents a heaviness and speed that recalls the group’s older interests in ‘90s rock. However, Two Gallants approaches each song individually rather than conceptualizing a cohesive idea for an album first, Stephens said.
“These [songs] just happened to be heavier songs that harken back to our grunge and punk upbringing,” he said. “They happen to have a consistency in that nature, but there was no intention in that. It was more serendipitous I guess — just whatever mindset we were in when we started working on them.”
The production of the new album came about innately as most song writing does in Two Gallants. Stephens and Vogel’s reunion naturally brought about a new album
“It’s not very entertaining for us to continue to play only old songs,” Stephens said. “It wasn’t something we planned out. It was just understood.”
But songs from the new album weren’t the only pieces that comprised Two Gallants powerfully deafening set Monday night. Classic, upbeat, folkey classics like “Despite What You’ve Been Told” became heavy rock pieces with Vogel blasting back the crowd with percussions and Stephens spitting out poetic lyrics with a loud bite.
The two beaded back and forth between speed heavy segments and mellow tones, smoothly descending into calmer numbers where Stephens simultaneously worked his guitar and harmonica. These song progressions recalled elicited the unique balance of folk and rock the two have maintained throughout their ten year career.
“There was also a middle ground between the two of us in a lot of ways,” Stephens said, referencing the bands beginnings. “When we first started playing Tyson was in a heavy band. Kind of like a noisy post grunge . . . all I was listening to was old timey stuff, like really outdated music. And I think our sound came out of those two forces fighting each other.”
And Stephens’ thoughtful lyrics and piercing voice form a nice addition to this sound. Two Gallants’ namesake, borrowed from a short story in James Joyce’s Dubliners, seems appropriate given Stephens’ knack for poetic songwriting.
“I don’t like to say things unless they have some sort of meaning — at least to me and hopefully to other people,” Stephens said. “I always think it’s a waste of time just to fill some fucking phrase — just to fill a vocal melody you know? A lot of people don’t like it . . . I honestly just don’t know any other way of writing a song.”
With a long tour ahead of them that will span into Europe, Vogel sees their time away from Two Gallants as productive and helpful to their future.
“The break was a bit of practice for us in other areas of life,” Vogel said. “Our creative inclinations and our lives sort of took their own course for a little while. I think we learned a lot from both of those things.”
