Butte's I Don't Want To Complain To You: Power-pop with a two-man advantage
Like the proverbial fishes and loaves, Butte multiplies into a four-piece rock band.
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A band with only two guys in it can enjoy a lot of freedom if both of them play it the right way. John Schuppel and Mike Grunder, the two members of local band Butte, bounce all over the power-pop songbook on I Don't Want To Complain To You, and the moves never feel weighed down by self-consciousness or some kind of intra-band democratic process. That's not to say these aren't well-arranged tunes: At its best, Butte's got all the advantages that come with tossed-off spontaneity and few of the defects. In a twist that matches the resourceful catchiness of the songs, they'll both pick up guitars and play along with pre-recorded DVD projections of themselves playing bass and drums this Friday at Inferno.
"Ampersand" by Butte
I Don't Want To Complain To You's second and third songs offer the strongest hints at Butte's sneaky versatility. Schuppel and Grunder take a controlled drift through clean-toned guitar chords and a low-key but memorable vocal melody on "Turn The Night Down." Then they pound the slack away with "Ampersand," yelling either joyfully or angrily—hard to say—in between a guitar-vs.-drums lurch that recalls the pissy hook of The Buzzcocks' "Ever Fallen In Love?" Still, Butte's more about mixing some gentle noise with playful pop in the style of professed influences Superchunk and The Flaming Lips. Half the pleasure of "The Takeoff (Not The Landing)" comes from hearing certain words bounce off of each other like fireflies shaken up together in an unassuming little rock jar: "When you say it's the journey, not the gettin' to / I don't ever see us getting to the attitude / I want to feel what the silence got us to / I never want to feel I've got the aptitude."
Butte refuses to put up a wall between sincerity and goofiness. Near the album's end, the gloriously daffy surf-rock tune "Boobs And Doobs" (about "touchin' boobies" and "rollin' doobies," of course) gives way to the frustrated (but still rather surf-rockin') sweetness of "Never Feel It (B.F.O.)." For a band that started with casual basement jam sessions and still keeps it simple, Butte's certainly got its ways of catching us off-guard.
