LINK HERE (Re-posted from Performer Magazine Online): Feral Children
By Bob Ham
Photo by Anna Knowlden
"It's true. We grew up in Western Washington and practiced in a doublewide trailer for the first couple of years,” says bassist/vocalist Jim Cotton, of the Seattle quintet Feral Children. “It's very much a backwoods thing."
Considering the tales of the band’s members playing grunge songs to cows and horses, and of their youthful pranks often involving other livestock, one would say so. Since the group's emigration to Seattle, however, Feral Children have pursued a dramatic and melodic rock sound that emphasizes emotional atmospherics and misshapen song structures. Their untamed youth and unruly past is still evident in their unbridled energy: the tribal pulse of the band's two drummers Jeff Keenan and Bill Cole, Keenan and Cotton's pained vocals, the wiry assault of Josh Gamble's guitar and Sergey Posrednikov's trilling washes of keyboard and synthesizer. It’s a fresh and invigorating sound, but one that took over a decade to cultivate.
Bonding during their early high school days in Maple Valley, Wash. over their outcast sensibilities and love of grunge rock, the four core members of the group (the current lineup minus Cole) decided to combine their restless teenage energy and form a band.
“It was very generic alt-rock,” says Cotton of their early musical efforts. “It wasn’t good. I’m sure there are some people in bands that are 15 who are amazing and can pull it off. We couldn’t.”
The young band did its best to get gigs in coffee shops and any all-ages venues it could find, but when it did play, the reception was often less than welcoming. "We'd be playing these blue collar towns," recalls Cotton, "and there'd be 15 people there and they hated us. Sergey was almost beaten up a few times."
"I felt like there was this other world that I couldn't see that was just outside of where I grew up," Keenan says of this time. "The music scene seemed like a mystical place that didn’t really exist."
As with most high school garage (or, in their case, trailer) bands, the project didn't last beyond the boys' graduation dates. "I'm kind of glad we failed for so long," Keenan says, "I think it gave us a realistic point of view about things."
More or less starting over from scratch in Seattle, where its members reconvened in 2002, Feral Children has made every effort to, in Cotton's words, "do our own thing and not try to follow any mold." Everyone in the group readily admits that what really helped this process was the period of time they spent away from each other. Most went off to college, but all of them spent the interim years finding new sounds to listen to – Liars, Animal Collective, Arcade Fire and Kate Bush, for example – and honing their own instrumental skills (apart maybe from Posrednikov, who was classically trained in piano). They then accomplished this differentiation by simply emphasizing the strengths of each individual player. “We’ve played with each other long enough to know what each person is good at,” says Keenan. “So we wrote our songs around that rather than any specific style.”
With more appropriate stages to play and the resources of an actual “music scene,” Feral Children quickly made a name for themselves through their unique sound and near legendary live shows – shows that often feature toppling equipment, flailing limbs and the occasional bit of bloodshed. "When we started, we would just stare at our shoes and play this music,” Cotton recalls. “But we decided that we want people to devote 100 percent of their attention to us. I mean, if there's 100 people at a show, chances are 10 of them are paying attention. So we found a way to say, ‘F*** you, pay attention.’ Plus, it's just fun."
It was this live show that caught the attention of local producer and audio engineer Scott Colburn (Animal Collective, Arcade Fire), who helped the band capture this frenetic energy on its debut album, Second to the Last Frontier (re-issued last month on Sarathan Records).
Although Feral Children have gained a foothold in the city, receiving a healthy amount of airplay on KEXP, accolades from local Seattle weeklies and higher profile festival gigs like last month’s Capitol Hill Block Party, they haven’t abandoned their roots days of wild youth, with Cotton and Keenan, the principal songwriters for Feral Children, drawing from those experiences as lyrical material.
"I dug into my childhood for this record," says Keenan. "Especially the frustrations I had back then and how they related to where I'm at now and what I'm doing now, which are kind of the same frustrations."
Further, Feral Children still feel a bit like outsiders to what Cotton refers to as the "mainstream Seattle scene” or the current folk- and roots-based sound that is running through some of the city’s most prominent artists (see Grand Archives, Cave Singers, Fleet Foxes). Keenan echoes these feelings: "The scene that's getting supported really isn't our scene. We fit in with the weirdo arty scene.”
Feral Children don’t have much time these days to fret over their status in the marketplace though, as they are busy rehearsing for their upcoming U.S. tour and furiously writing songs for their next album, to be recorded this coming fall. So far, according to Cotton, this new material promises to be a lot bleaker than their previous work. "It has a dark and creepy feel to it, which I'm really into right now," he says. "We're taking some aspects of the first record with us, but it is a little bit less of a pop album and more of an experimental thing."
Keenan, excited about getting into the studio with his bandmates again, is already looking beyond this album to the third Feral Children album, feeling that they are just a few years away from hitting their stride. “We’re coming up on our prime pretty soon,” he says. “I feel like the album after the next one will be the Feral Children album.”
www.myspace.com/feralchildrenseattle
