Awesome New Republic
Interview by: Patrick Albertson

Fresh off a move up the Eastern Seaboard and after a reunion gig at Montreal Pop, Miami dance/rock/noise/R&B kids Awesome New Republic met up with 'Sup at their Sin-é soundcheck last week.

So you two have just made the move from Miami to New York.

MJ: Yes, this is our first show in NYC as locals. The first show in NYC in a year and the second show we've played together in a six months. We're getting back into it.

Have you been rehearsing a lot?

MJ: No. [laughter] We practiced one time, very quietly at my apartment. And then we played Montreal... it went pretty well.

Montreal Pop, which you played last year as well? How was that experience?

MJ: It was cool it-was a fun show. We played with some good bands. We played with these really nice guys form here, Dirty On Purpose? They played a pretty cool set, kinda dramatic. I don't know if it was the shtick or whatever, but they were fighting a lot on stage...

Is it the same thing as CMJ where it's just a ton of bands playing every plausible space in the city at every possible hour?

MJ: Definitely, but... It's a lot less corporate. A lot more of the people who put the thing together have their hand in every show. They really want to get these bands an audience and put these groups together on the same stage. Rather than, "Hey Johnny, yeah I remember that favor that you did for me, I'll put your shitty band on at Rare..." I don't know if that place even has shows anymore...

That place you two played for CMJ last year? That place was weird-like some kind of New Jersey cover band bar...

MJ: I'm not sure. But I know it's $30 to submit yourself to possibly play at CMJ, but I don't think that submitting yourself has very much to do with playing CMJ anymore so I imagine that's all just pocketed.

So your experience with the Quebecois music festival was better than that of New York?

MJ: Yeah, it was alright, they're really like, I don't know Montreal is very white. It's very safe. And kind of wonder about a place like that.

Well, It's kind of far up there. And in my experience, the Quebecois aren't known for their hospitality... generally... but I have always had very confrontational visits to Quebec...

MJ: Yeah, that's the story that we had up there. We ordered an enchilada for $30 bucks and you've lived in Miami for five years and we know what a burrito is. [To B Rob] You ordered a beef burrito, or what?

B Rob: Yeah, I ordered a beef burrito and they served me a chicken enchilada.

MJ: And then you complain and they say, "Oh, I don't think you don't know what a burrito is." Or, the hot water didn't work in our hotel room and the guy told B-Rob's girlfriend that maybe she didn't know how to use a faucet.

Sounds charming. So that coupled with not having played in six months must have been a little unsettling...

MJ: No. Playing was really fun. Playing is always fun. That's the one thing that's always been great in this band.

So you just picked up right where you left off?

MJ: Yeah. For sure. No problems at all. I think the energy made up for the lack of practice and it was really easy... just 1234 and we're back into it. We're really psyched, this is actually our last show as just the tow of us. We're getting our old drummer back, who used to play in our first band in Miami. Then he played with ANR for a summer... right when we graduated from college, just the three of us had a few recording sessions and he plays drums on 2000.30.12 and a few other tracks on our demo. And he's just a monster. A jazz drummer, soul drummer. Really just holds it down with every genre and has a great singing voice.

So you think that can free you up a little bit?

MJ: Yeah, totally.

B Rob: The only problem with out live show no is that you can't really lay back. You can do it once or twice in the set, but you can't bring the dynamic way down for too long. Your just concentrating on fifteen different things at once and you know that you've got to go to the next part of the song and form my point of view, I mean I'm used to playing barefoot, I can't really do that any more because it's getting cold, but trying to turn knobs with my feet and negotiate through keyboards and patch changes and filter sweeps and stuff. You start the set and three seconds later it's over. There's no time to enjoy it really...

MJ: Or to take a sip of water...seriously. If you want to take a sip than nothing's happening on stage and that's the way it is when you're doing it like this. And it's been a good run, but we're going to be able to do a lot cooler stuff now. In this format is all on... it's hyper. It's all anxiety and panic. The slow jams are nice, but I don't know too many beats on the drums. I don't know all that cool jazzy stuff so we can't really jam as much as we'd like to. We can play a song for longer, and he can take a really wicked solo for a couple minutes and I can mess around with the toms a little, but I'm never going to swing it or anything. We can't take it from a slow jam to a big rock sound and then all of a sudden we're playing a mambo, rhythmically I mean. Maybe now, more in keeping with we can experiment with some more ethereal, very dynamic stuff

Because you didn't play drums at all originally, right? You taught yourself to play so you guys could gig?

MJ: Well, yeah. We were playing with five people and they all sort of disappeared. We had all these shows booked, we were going to put out some records and we were going to go on a tour, and we didn't have a drummer. And so, I tried it out. We actually thought of calling Noah, who's going to play with us now, but it didn't fall into place at the time.

So B Rob, you moved to NYC and then you guys to break and did your own thing? Is that what happened?

B Rob: Yeah... kind of... yeah.

MJ: You could say it was all these different things, you know, just taking time to focus on... moving is a big thing. But we just weren't feeling it. That's the truth of it. We were just not really feeling the way the band was going. Feeling the musical direction, but not really feeling being promoted as being a hip indie band and not satisfied with the way things were being handled in general,

B Rob: People were expecting us to blow up real quick or something and instead of getting some huge promotional machine behind us, we decided to take a break.

MJ: Not even a promotional machine, sort of a haphazard mess. We had always been into writing tons of songs and recording tons of songs and just letting it all out there. Just making music, just being musicians. Not having a goal. If we had an idea we would just do it, and then let people hear it.

So you weren't very project oriented, it was more just going for it.

MJ: Yeah. So we had this album called Witness Now The Birth of An Awesome New Republic and we sat down with this idea and put a lot of effort into it and within a month it was done. And in a way, that's our only album. Because the other album that we had, Courageous, was really just a demo that we made to get gigs. And that was kind of us joking around and having fun with the eight track. I mean some of the songs we put a lot of time into, like Wheels No Engines...

That was a long demo though; that record was ten songs.

MJ: Yeah, well... we thought it would help us get gigs. If you're going to give somebody a CD you might as well fill it up, you know? And that was a culmination of two years of recording and writing... maybe twenty percent of what we recorded over those years. But we have a sort of quality level that we were trying to maintain. We would make these albums by hand and glue them together, and we put a lot of time into the artwork and we just started to feel like we were rushing to get stuff done without maintaining that level of quality. We ended up putting together a compilation, a sort of mish-mash of old and new stuff called ANR So Far.

Which was weird, because Witness Now The Birth is such an ethereal strange listen, but I hadn't listened to ANR So Far, or rather, your songs in that order, and it doesn't have the cohesion that Witness Now the Birth has. Some of the ambient Miami/south Florida noise on that record unites the tracks and gives it a feel of being a whole piece and that gets lost when you start intermingling some of the newer more dancey tracks...

MJ: Hindsight is always great, but it probably would have been a good idea to repress Witness Now The Birth so we didn't get glue on our hands before every show. But we needed something because, we would have a show and we would say, Oh shit we need 20 more CDs because we're sold out and we'd get the spray adhesive and spray it all over ourselves just before the show so we could sell CDs and your hands are really sticky and it's really hard to get that stuff of your hands. It's really as basic as that. Miami has that vibe to it. Where it's easy to get sucked into a whirlwind of sloppiness.

Where do you want to take ANR now? Where do you see things going from here?

MJ: We haven't really gotten a chance to sit down together to sit down and write some new stuff, but we have a whole lot of stuff we haven't recorded. I wrote a lot this summer and I know B Rob wrote quite a bit while we weren't playing together... like 50 or 60 songs that haven't been recorded yet. So we're just going to get in there with our new drummer and record that so we can document it. Otherwise we'll just move on and write new stuff and forget it...

So you want to regroup start playing with Noah and just see what happens?

MJ: We want to do that and play locally... not over saturate ourselves and really make ourselves available as a truly enjoyable entertaining evening. In Miami we played 48 times a week and that helped us get big because there just aren't a lot of bands. But here we're looking to handle our affairs more conscientiously.

You used to play in only sweatpants. Topless in sweatpants. Is that trend going to continue?

No.

And no more creative face painting for shows?

MJ: Nope. Just get up there and play, Just have a lot of songs and rehearse and refine our abilities to improvise between those songs and see how many minutes or hours we can keep people engaged and enjoying the evening. I think that's really the healthy thing to focus on when you're making music, is just becoming a great professional musician. Not trying to play with these bands because they're crazy, or at these clubs 'cause they're cool, or getting your song on this radio station because it's the one... but work on your chops first.

Are you going to record exclusively in your bedroom again?

MJ: We're going to have to record the drums at a rehearsal space maybe at Noah's parents house... so we'll track drums there, but everything else is DIY.