PELA ///
INTERVIEW ARYE DWORKEN ///
THE MAGICIAN, NEW YORK ///
PHOTOGRAPHY BEN E. GRAHAM ///

Billy Swanson is anxious again. His band, Pela, has just finished playing an ambitious, blistering set at the Delancey, a Lower East Side venue with a subterranean stage, and the amiable lead singer wants to know why "it" hasn't happened yet. As he drinks his beer wholeheartedly, Swanson wonders aloud whether Pela will finally have its big break. I remind him that his band has been playing shows for less than a year. Swanson smirks, pretending to take comfort in my response. "A year's a long time, you know," he finally replies.

Pela is unlike most local bands for a number of reasons. For one, their sound challenges the confines of a club venue. The Brooklyn quartet performs with exclamation points and fists, unconcerned by the smallness that comes along with patronizing the club circuit. Pela strives like they're entertaining an arena, projecting epic waves and resounding vibrations into the limited airspace. You can walk out of a Pela show inspired, knowing that you witnessed true potential, a band you can store away in your I-saw-them-when mental cabinet. Swanson, with his self-proclaimed "construction worker's body," splits his vocal duties between a ferocious howl and a haunting falsetto. Regardless of the weather, the singer wears a sweater vest on stage-a fashion choice definitively not made out of trend. Guitarist Nate Martinez is short and scrawny, almost a non-threatening, smaller version of Metallica's Kirk Hammett. His guitar heroes must be either in Radiohead or U2-despite Martinez's size, he is primarily responsible for the band's bulky reverberation. The bespectacled bassist, Eric Sanderson, flails back and forth as if the floor is too hot for him to stand in one place, and Tom Zovich sits behind the drums, unassuming and disciplined. Paradoxically, every time I see Zovich after a show, he's smiling and charming a new girl, offering to buy her a drink.

There is a definitive Pela sound and it's neither rocket-science nor derivative. Their repertoire, garnering comparisons to classic U2, the Walkmen and the Psychedelic Furs, is an homage to the past 20 years, albeit the non-new-wave aspect of those two decades. It's a retro-ness you can't resent, because it's the sound of your childhood when you first discovered music cooler than what you were hearing on the radio.

Pela's first release, an EP entitled All in Time (Brassland) does not properly convey the rawness of the band's live show. The five songs feel polished and controlled, like the product of upstarts overcompensating for the shortcomings of inexperience. Hopelessly self-aware (who can blame them?), this promising group only gives a taste of what it's capable of with All in Time. The opening song, "Latitudes," is an exhilarating track reminiscent of the breezy feel found in "Where The Streets Have No Name" and "Clocks" (and despite the indie disdain for U2 and Coldplay, these are two songs that a lot of people love). Tellingly, the EP was also recorded nearly two years ago, but the material that Pela has just finished recording for a full-length will assuredly deliver.

I sat down with Billy and Nate at the Magician, an unpretentious, regularly empty bar on the Lower East Side. Throughout our conversation, I sensed anxiety. After establishing a devoted local fan base and scoring some envious opening slots (for Sleater-Kinney, the National, Feist), the band feels there should have already been a tangible next stage.

Has anyone mentioned that you have the stage persona of Henry Rollins?
Billy: Everyone keeps picking on my thick neck. Unfortunately, I have a construction worker's body. Not the emaciated, lead-singer body you normally find 'round these parts.

Do you now have jobs?
Nate: We work when work comes around. Billy: We do catering gigs. We did one last week and we got wasted. Nate: It was a fancy party for money investors, a business environment with unfortunate lighting. We were drunk and near blind.

Billy, you're from Santa Cruz. What were you listening to growing up? What kind of scene were you involved with?
Billy: Goats and cows. I didn't have any neighbors within a mile or two of me. It's a surf town with a lot of shady elements to it. It was also an ultra-liberal city full of Mexicans. I speak fluent Spanish as a result.

[To Nate] And you were from...?
Nate: Buffalo. Snow, hockey and drugs.

And what else would you need in upstate New York? When did you all get here?
Billy: I moved here a week after September 11th, and I was trying to find a job. I couldn't find anything, and I was broke. For Christmas, I wanted a watch-just a watch. I didn't have high expectations, but I promised myself that I would dig myself out of the badness, and something eventually great came out of this desperation: I started playing music in the subways to make some money. We started playing at a Park Slope stop, because that was the only subway stop we weren't getting harassed at and we also weren't competing with Peruvians and their mystical pipes. And that's how we met Eric and Nate. I met them on the subway platform.

How did you get Pela to develop its sound?
Billy: I was used to playing only acoustic guitar, and Nate came in and added a lot of effects and sounds. I fought it for a little while; I wasn't too sure about what the rest of the band wanted to do. I was into country and folk, so I was hesitant about this new large sound.

It seems that you're all scrounging around for cash. How did you make the EP coming out on Brassland?
Billy: A friend of ours who worked at a fancy, reputable studio knew that Foxy Brown was booking all three studios at once-Studio A, Studio B and Studio C-for a new album and she wasn't using all three rooms. We were told that if we kept the lights off the whole time, we could have seven or eight hours to record the EP. So we recorded the whole thing in the dark. Nate: She even walked by at one point in the night and said, "Sounds good, boys!" Billy: Foxy Brown gave us our first break in the music biz.

Are you recording a full-length now?
Nate: Yeah, we have about 10 or 11 songs that we're going to use. Billy: We want to be a touring band, really--just get out there and play shows.

Tell me about the anxiety of recording a full-length? Are you already thinking about the album title?
Billy: How about My Stomach is Empty? Nate: Or how about We Need a Van?

When you first got together as a band, what was the ultimate plan?
Billy: I don't mean to sound like a bleeding heart, but we never really had a plan. I am a high school dropout. Not necessarily something to be proud of, but I don't think we're the type of guys to have plans. I do sometimes wish we hadn't romanticized New York so much and that we had set up camp somewhere else. I don't mean to offend anyone, but it's not so easy here. I moved here from Seattle. I had a great life-it wasn't bells and whistles, but it was a life. I had a car, I traveled, and I had a decent place. I come here and a lot of what we're doing here is a little bleak.

What inspires the lyrics and the songs that you're writing? Like "Episodes" seems to be about a relationship through three different intervals?
Billy: I've tried to play covers, and it feels so weird and unnatural to me. If I don't feel it then I have a very hard time singing it, so I do feel connected to the words. But it's not always conscious. It's just what comes up. I do notice some recurring things, but nothing intentional.

Do you tilt to a melancholic sentiment?
Billy: We were playing a show a couple of months ago and a girl asked me if I liked being sad. I hadn't thought of our music as being sad or emotional. I think people tag me as being earnest, and that earnestness can be misinterpreted as melodrama.

What's the ideal? Let's imagine Pela 20 years from now-what would the greatest hits album be called and what is your band like?
Nate: We Got the Van. Billy: Looking back from our greatest hits album? Hmm...nothing changes. Nate: More people are listening to us. Hopefully.

Where did you come up with the band name?
Billy: I think "Pela" is a pretty name. It feels very '90s to me. And there's no "the," although we could have gone with "the Pela." Nate: I knew this girl from South America whose name was Pela. Billy: And then two years later, after we had already named our band after this girl, we look in Nate's yearbook and find out her name is Pelar.

So, bottom line: When does the full-length come out?
Nate: We're working through the logistics now. We're meeting with all these random people. Billy: The music business is kinda weird. We always forget when we go out for dinners or drinks-like this one-we forget that the person across the table from us is the enemy. Well, not the enemy per se, but they're working. Having a dinner with us or having drinks with us is their job. ("American Girl" by Tom Petty plays through the speakers.) Billy: Man, the Strokes totally ripped off this song. Every single one of their songs is stolen from this one Tom Petty song. Nate: Maybe we should just steal songs from Tom Petty? That must be the secret to success. Billy: Then we'll reveal our secret by calling our greatest hits Stolen From Tom Petty. ///