Oregon Music News

Sunday’s PDX Songwriters in the Round at Rontoms was an experiment in collaborative presentation, one with mixed results.  Each of the eight featured songwriters played a single song in each of the four rounds that spanned the course of the night.

There were excellent moments throughout.  Kyle Morton, of Typhoon, gave consistently standout performances.  His songs had a flair for the dramatic, accompanied by hand-clapping friends singing backup vocals.  Kelly Blair Bauman also opted for accompaniment, and his lead guitarist’s tasteful solos gave Bauman’s set a Band-era Bob Dylan vibe.  Leonard Mynx likewise succeeded in channeling Dylan.  Grey Anne’s a capella duet with Ryan Giles was a highlight–experimental, beautiful and playful.

Noticeably absent was Ritchie Young of Loch Lomond and The Brothers Young.  He was slated to play.

Rontoms was rough for the songwriters who performed acoustic and solo. The setting, with the songwriters almost sitting in the audience and playing in front of a fireplace, was warm, personal, and inviting.  Unfortunately, the large crowd drifted in and out of attentiveness.

Conversation drowned out the more sensitive performers like Sean Battles.  His Name Shall Breathe was also an act that suffered.  His tender, honest, and unassuming performance was frustratingly unmatched for the crowd in the back.

It was interesting, though, to see seasoned performers like Grey Anne interact with, and play through, the talkers.  Her performance was beautiful and engaging, with a charming awkwardness to her lovely songs. Bud Wilson, of Aan, was also bluesy and ear-catching.

PDX Songwriters in the Round was a good, if imperfect, introduction to some of Portland’s song masters.  Grey Anne, His Name Shall Breathe, and Kyle Morton are acts to keep an eye out for.  To see Morton play in the sprawling band Typhoon, check out “Spin the Wheel Night” at Holocene, for another unorthodox show from Portland labels Tender Loving Empire and Bladen County Records, January 21st, 8:30pm (21+).

The musical landscape is littered with family music acts, some brilliant (The Jackson 5, The Pointer Sisters, The Everly Brothers), some less so (The Osmonds). Thankfully, the sibling band we have in Portland, The Brothers Young, falls squarely in the former category. Formed by brothers Dustin, Dillon, Ritchie (also the front man for Loch Lomond) and Michael Young, the group (which also includes Levi Ethan Cecil and Trevino Brings Plenty) play the cut up method with their sound, letting lazy programmed beats carry folk guitar picking and precise, unforced singing. Their latest album, the recently released The Sun Says He’s God, puts all of these aspects on display, rolling along with an unhurried grace that only the most assured musicians could pull off well. Oregon Music News spoke with Dustin Young via e-mail.

Were all the brothers in the family particularly close growing up?
I would say that we’ve had (and still have) our battles, but I can’t imagine not being close. We don’t really know what that feels like. “Time is the Killer,” is a track off the new record, and it has a lot to do with those daily annoyances we go through that end up creating a love song for each other.

Did one of you show a musical interest before the rest or did you all come of age musically at the same time/age?
Ritchie (our oldest brother who’s not technically in the band) is eleven years older than our youngest brother Dillon. Because there are so many years between us, Ritchie started playing music long before some of us. But younger siblings tend to have a fascination in their older siblings interests. It’s a question I have myself: would we have gotten into music if he had not?

Did you live in a very musical household? What sort of stuff would you all listen to when you were growing up?
My dad played guitar and sang old John Denver songs, and my mom pretty much listened to oldies. She swore she had soul music in her genes. The Nelsons, her large, close-knit family, spent most of their free time playing music together. Her father actually owned a music shop.

Your sound is an interesting amalgam of genres – with these downtempo beats coming up against more folk and country stuff – is that just a reflection of your varied musical interests?
I would say that although we each have our own musical interests, I think that on our own, our individual music would still end up having those same overtones.

Is there one of you that leads the songwriting more than the other brothers or do you all share a role in shaping the songs equally?
We all take equal part in writing. We bring songs to each other, and then collaborate to build on those foundations.

There are plenty of bands with siblings in them – and it is something that seems to cause a lot of interesting tension within the group dynamic – do you experience that within the group?
Yes. But we know each other well enough that we tend to be able to work things out.

You were playing with Ritchie for a while but he is no longer a part of the project – why is that?
We originally created Brothers Young so two of any of the four of us could play under that name at any time. Foureveryoung has four in the name, so it’s really hard to constantly explain to people that there’s only three brothers playing that night. I would say that Foureveryoung is still very much alive when Ritchie is not so busy with Loch Lomond.

What can you tell me about the new album?
This album has more of a live-band feel, and more worked out song structure than anything we’ve recorded collectively before now. Also, the packaging is very special. I don’t know if you know much about letterpress, but each color layer has to be individually designed and then pressed by a human, using, in this case, over a hundred year old equipment, which can’t exactly be run by a hamster in a wheel. We hired trained pugs to fold and hot-glue all the cases though.

What is next for the band?
The Sun Says He’s God was meant to be recorded and put out in a month, but took over a year when all’s said and done. So although we’re very proud of the album, some of the songs have a newer, fresher feel in the direction that we want to go. And so we’re really excited about writing and recording our next album, maybe this time we’ll try to be more realistic about our recording time. There’s three of us writing songs, so we’d like to put out multiple albums a year.