There's only one song on Philly quartet Brothers Past's album This Feeling's Called Goodbye that hits the six-minute mark; the 11 other tracks average around four. There's nothing either rootsy or psychedelic about the band's ambitious aural palette. There is a certain progressive element to its wide-ranging, atmospheric sound, but despite its plenitude of original arrangements and electronic-music accoutrements, the Brothers Past vibe is firmly rooted in resonant, palatable modern rock 'n' roll.
So why does the group keep getting called a jam band?
"It's not a very well thought-out label these days, I think," says singer/guitarist/laptop jockey Tom Hamilton with a laugh. "It has less to do with the music than it does with the lifestyle, as far as us having a loyal fan base that travels to see us, and playing 150 shows a year. That's what makes a jam band these days, because obviously it's not the music. There's no way Brothers Past and Yonder Mountain String Band are related, other than in those ways."
Definitely not. But were one looking hard for another reason to fit Brothers Past under the jam-band umbrella, it might be said that the band shares at least one musical trait with more contemporary rock-infused acts like Phish: an adventurous willingness to approach songwriting from an astonishingly wide variety of angles, confident that its members' personalities will provide enough of a common thread.
The self-produced This Feeling's Called Goodbye — recently re-released with national distribution following a deal with independent label Sci-Fidelity — features tunes from all over the rock, pop and electro maps. The obvious single, "Too Late To Call," evinces more than a little indie-rock influence; "One Rabbit Race" incorporates quirky, melodic jazz; "Words Like Weapons" is built around a quietly ominous tribal dance-floor beat. By turns, the album recalls everything from the ambitious, melodramatic prog-pop of Muse, to Frou Frou-esque light electronica, to NRBQ's eccentric white-funk grooves, without ever splintering into incoherence.
"There was never really a mission statement," says Hamilton. "Everybody does their thing, and whatever it happens to turn into is what it is. As you get older, it gets a little more eclectic, because it's four men who started out as boys in their early 20s, and are now in their late 20s, and there's a lot of life in there, a lot of other music you listen to, shit like that. The bag is always going to get bigger and bigger. It wasn't necessarily, 'Let's be able to write rock songs and jazz standards'; that was never the thing. Music's music, you know."
In a national music scene ruled by trends and genre associations, where many new rock bands deliberately try to ape whatever the current sound may be, such disregard for identity or branding can be a dangerous thing. But Hamilton shows a distinct disdain for those who view music as a means, rather than an end.
"I just want to be a musician, whether I'm writing country or I'm writing electro-pop," he says. "It's all music, and it's all coming from the same guy, so there's that continuity to it. When the Stones got into their country phase, nobody mistook them for Johnny Cash. Radiohead went from the band that did 'Creep' to the band that wrote OK Computer. They're not any less of a rock band because they wrote a weird album.
"There are two types of musicians: People that are out there trying to get the chicks and the cash, and people who just want to make music. I happen to fall into the latter category."
Hamilton and the rest of Brothers Past — drummer Rick Lowenberg, bassists Clay Parnell, and keyboardist Tom McKee — know well the difference between making music and just playing it. They're sonic craftsmen; though the songs on This Feeling's Called Goodbye were written before the band headed into the studio, and basic tracks were laid in two to three weeks, the foursome spent the better part of a year in post-production, mixing and fine-tuning the material's various sounds and sequenced elements.
Despite the album's ornate whole, however, the tracks possess an inherently organic feel that sets Brothers Past apart from so many other digitally obsessed rocktronica acts. Strip the admittedly interesting layers away, and the songs remain. They were obviously written rather than built, emerging from simple melodies and engaging progressions instead of some software program loaded with loops. Hamilton, the band's primary songwriter and a man proficient on any number of musical instruments, wouldn't have it any other way.
Though he's an admitted tech-head and studio junkie, he knows from inspiration, and speaking with him one gets the feeling that no matter how eccentric, textured or just plain weird Brothers Past ever gets, it will always be first and foremost about the song.
"The bar that I set, not just myself but for anybody, is that a song isn't gonna be great unless you can sit there and play it with one instrument and your voice, whether it be an acoustic guitar or a piano or whatever," he says. "You can sequence and produce and overdub all the crap you like, and it's still gonna be a dumb song if you can't play it that way.
"It's like something my old man told me: You can spray perfume on a turd, but it doesn't make it any less of a piece of shit."
This article appears in Dec 7-13, 2005.