Nathan Pemberton and his band — Holiday Shores — once got kicked out of a hotel. While this might suggest he's some sort of delinquent who happens to write pretty songs, a short phone conversation with the frontman of the Tallahassee-based alt-pop outfit quickly proves otherwise. He sounds easygoing, seemingly indifferent to the extremely bright future his band faces. Pemberton, 23, gives thoughtful, earnest answers to all questions and even sheds some light on the whole hotel ejection story.
It happened the last day of a tour with fellow up-and-comers Tennis and La Sera, when a hotel manager didn't like the sight of 32 Budweisers being carried into her facility. Later on in the room, someone accidentally bumped into a picture frame and knocked it off the wall, and as Pemberton & Co. tried gently placing the broken glass into a trashcan, they looked up to find the aforementioned manager staring through the open sliding porch window.
"That was the moment she evicted us. It was no one's fault," he told CL, refusing to lay blame on any of his tourmates. "The place had a little too strict of a guideline going — we can get a bit rowdy, but we in no way initiated this."
What Pemberton and his merry men have initiated for themselves, however, is the kind of buzz that usually lands bands on critics' must-see-and-hear lists. Their debut LP — 2009's Columbus'd The Whim — is instantly likeable and loaded with twinkling guitars, layers of organs, and ethereal vocals. It's "beach music" in the vein of fellow Floridians Surfer Blood, but unlike the Bloods (who still haven't released a follow-up to their own nearly two-year-old breakout, Astro Coast), Holiday Shores have no desire to rest on their comfy sun-kissed laurels.
Their sophomore full-length — New Masses For Squaw Peak — is due out in September, and the effort finds Holiday Shores duplicating the intricacy and laid-back vibes of Columbus'd all while crafting a 41-minute, wide-open aural joyride that begs to be listened to as a whole. From the strange keyboard samples and tribal drumming of opener "Airglow" all the way through the off-time surf licks of album bookend "Shadie Spun Gold," New Masses is a breath of fresh air in an industry landscape seemingly obsessed with "the hit single."
"It's a hard record to skip around on, which maybe some people don't like in the day and age of iPods and shuffle," Pemberton says, "but I do think it's important to have records that are records instead of just groupings of songs."
According to Pemberton, the cohesive nature of New Masses can be directly attributed to the way it was recorded — in Philadelphia at American Diamond Studio under the watchful ear of long-time Dr. Dog engineer Bill Moriarty. For eight days, the musicians found themselves tracking "all day, every day" in a situation they'd never experienced before: standing, all together, in one place, at the same time.
Columbus'd, as Pemberton explains it, was mostly tracked in a bedroom with players adding parts here and there. He's proud of the effort, but he still feels as if his band's debut was "kind of same-ish throughout without any huge dips in intensity." So instead of putting together another record that sometimes "plodded at the same pace all the way through," Holiday Shores collectively went into the studio with certain ideas, executed almost all of them, and pieced together an LP that saw them push their music into a lot of new directions they didn't exactly plan for.
"It was kind of exciting," explains Pemberton. "Things happened that we didn't plan for, and there were a few things planned for that didn't happen." He also expresses his hope that the few songs that didn't make New Masses will see the light of day. Holiday Shores might even play one live at Summer Jam 7 on Saturday night. "It's about 75 percent written," he says. The band starts work on new material next month.
It's exciting to learn that Pemberton is already writing new songs when the public has yet to hear the ones on his band's stellar new album. Still, it makes sense when you consider the leaps and bounds Holiday Shores have taken on their sophomore effort. They are a band in bloom, with no limits on what they can achieve, no time to start being has-beens.
"We still wonder if [the lost songs] should've been on the record, but it is what it is," Pemberton says, unconcerned. "I'm pretty happy with it. There's no looking back."
This article appears in Aug 25-31, 2011.