With the release of their sophomore LP Omega La La earlier this year, Rubblebucket stepped forward with a new sound that saw the band largely depart from the Afrobeat influences from which they first emerged. On the new album, the Brooklyn-based group discovers their sound while keeping intact the infectious grooves, complex arrangements and high energy delivery that first propelled them onto the scene. Just before kicking off their Fall tour, Rubblebucket lead vocalist and sax player Kalmia Traver took the time to chat with Jambands.com about the band, the new direction and the ongoing question surrounding the hippie/hipster divide.
How did you guys first come together as a band? What was the scene like in Vermont in those days?
Alex and I had already moved out of Vermont when the band started. But we would go back there all the time and we used to always go to jazz fest every year. That was our tradition…I don’t know if you’ve ever been but it’s a really fun week to be in Burlington. It’s a sort of mini-Vermont version of South by South West—there’s music everywhere at all times.
During the Burlington Jazz Fest in ’07 a friend of Alex’s—drummer Jeremy Frederick of the ‘slow-core’ indie-rock group Swale—asked him to bring a bassist, guitarist and some horns to this art party at The Hood Plant in Burlington, VT. There we joined up with Jeremy and four percussionists and we improvised lots of music with solid form—pretty fiery bag! Craig Myers was one of the percussionists and he stood out because he also played this instrument we’d never seen, N’Goni. That was our first time meeting him.
So that was the seed, but after that we got a lot more serious about it and we wrote out charts for all the songs and had massive rehearsals in Burlington. It was really a series of phone calls getting the band together and then that fall we took it a step further and went to Boston where we had more, massive rehearsals. During the few years after that, we really refined the personnel to what it is now just through connections and the community.
How did you guys decide on the band name?
I think we’re still always second-guessing it, because it’s so silly. But no one’s thought of anything better. It’s the tool used in stone masonry. Craig is a stone mason and a “rubble bucket” is what Vermont stone masons call it. On a larger scale, actual industrial grade rubble buckets are used in construction and earthquake cleanup. It has a cool symbolic meaning for me—the rubble and the earth and just being close to the earth…that’s a cool image to me.
So how did the move from Vermont to Boston and then to Brooklyn affect the band and the direction it took?
We’ve been in Brooklyn for about a year and half now. Burlington was so amazing and such a dense and really integrated community of artists and musicians—you’re always collaborating with everyone else. Boston is a step away from that because there’s so many music schools and there’s so many kids with guitars on their backs just trying to make it work. There’s way less gigs to be had, so it’s way more competitive. Brooklyn is totally a different planet. Sometimes when I go back and forth between Brooklyn and Vermont I literally feel like I’m going between two different planets—just the vibe of the people is just incredibly…Vermont is just so much slower and, in a way, more genuine…people just look you in the eye more. Then you get to Brooklyn and I can barely keep up. I think there’s a real association with Brooklyn that people have, but it’s not necessarily negative. It’s so known for its experimental music and just being a hotbed for music and art. It’s fun because we have to live up to that and we get to be brushing shoulders with a plethora of amazing artists and musicians that facilitate great art making and video making and costume making. It’s just all here.
Who were some of your biggest influences when the band was first getting started?
Back in the beginning we were totally checking out Fela Kuti. A lot of the Afrobeat and also just afro pop and traditional West African music was just bumping in our speakers a lot during that time. Pretty much all of us were jazz heads to start out with, especially Alex and I and Adam…so we had this really good foundation for challenging music and from there it’s just been a steady progression towards pop. And that is so good for me, personally. There were some pretty important rock bands that I had never even listened to, like Led Zeppelin or The White Stripes. I’ll be like, “yeah, I know that band but I’ve never sat and listened to an album before.” That’s been really fun, to realize we are a rock band and we can totally have fun in the rock medium.
Also, what we’re working on is songwriting and building structures that are agreeable to lots of people and not just indulging ourselves all the time. I think also when Ian [guitar] and Dave [drums] joined the band, they kind of brought in more of an appreciation for 80s pop that hadn’t really been alive quite yet. We just really started listening to that together—like Mariah Carey and Prince and Michael Jackson and Michael McDonald…so lots of really amazing 80s beats that started to get ingrained two years ago or so.
The new album Omega La La seems to have pushed aside the Afrobeat influence, in a sense, and in its place is a sound that is more distinctively Rubblebucket. Was that a conscious decision or did it come about more organically?
I think a little bit of both. With Alex, who’s the band leader and, I would say, the musical vision provider in general…we’ve been talking about it a lot for the past few years, just wanting to be more in the pop realm. Not necessarily being played on FM radio, but just have that sort of appreciation more than we did before. That doesn’t mean you can’t have afro-folk rhythms—not that that’s our native language anyway—but yeah, we knew after the first album that that wasn’t our sound and we knew that we wanted to keep finding it even if we had to sacrifice a few fans along the way. We just wanted to be doing what our hearts told us…and our ears. You may have noticed that there’s never been much care about fitting into a particular genre.
What is Omega La La ?
Good question! Omega La La is a world that we all kind of made up together. One meaning that I translated is that ‘Omega’ is the ultimate and ‘La La’ is like a song. So it’s like the ultimate song. That’s a thing that’s hard to describe, so I made a word for it. It’s being full of attitude and containing lots of motion and change. It’s like a still frame of someone dancing wildly with confetti all around and a spark plug coming out of their nose, and one boob falling out by accident. That’s Omega La La.
*On this album, there is a strong French influence on some of the lyrics and song titles. What is your French background? *
I lived in France as an exchange student right after high school and I was there for 10 months. There’s nothing more than that—I don’t have any family background—but I really, really got into the language and read a lot and talked a lot and it affected me. It still does…I mean I dreamt in it for years after I left and had these recurring dreams of going back there. They were always really unsettling. I think there’s some part of me that developed when I was in France that was pretty subconscious and intense. Maybe I did spend a lot of time alone at the time, it was right in Paris and it was kind of hard to make friends. I spent a lot of time writing, journaling, drawing and for whatever reason it was, that stuck with me deeply.
Rubblebucket has developed a reputation for these high-energy live performances. How do you translate the songs from the studio into that setting?
Well, it’s kind of the other way around. We spend so much time on the road and, unfortunately, at least for me, so little time in the studio. I think that’s going to change with this next cycle that we do. Alex and I and all the other guys feel our music deserves a little more and we want to do something exciting and risky. It’s just because all of us are trained musicians, we really just have a habit of judging ourselves based on how we perform in the live setting. So, obviously, more energy goes into that. It’s one of our strengths, but it’s one of our weaknesses too.
Partly as a result of Rubblebucket’s powerful live performances and the complex musicianship, the band has been lumped into fringes of the jamband scene. What are your thoughts on that and were you fans of any jambands growing up? I mean you are from Vermont…
I think all of us appreciated Phish on a certain level. We just played with Dave Matthews at his Caravan and it really stirred up some awesome conversation. We’re all sort of passed that stage of really listening to Dave Matthews Band, but we can all totally appreciate the amazing musicianship and we were just like, “Wow, he’s such a high grossing tour.” I don’t know, it was just cool. I think it’s funny.
You’re right that our musicianship is sort of why we’re in the jamband world, but I don’t think that our music is really “jam music,” per se, especially because we hardly ever improvise. There’s never a point in our set where there’s a big open “hey, go play whatever you want.” That never happens. I think we’re happy with that. We like the tight arrangements and executing it right, and I think there’s so much room to sway within these arrangements to make them fresh from night to night. I would hopefully like to, one day, be appreciated by a broader audience.
Not to say that the jam people aren’t awesome—they really have some great ears. People really compartmentalize the hippie and the hipster thing, but I feel like I see so many parallels. I get to be on both sides where I’m living in Brooklyn going to these warehouse parties and then I’ll go up to these festivals and everyone is scantily clad, on drugs and having an amazing time. Then they all wake up the next morning and eat at Denny’s…there’s a lot of similarities.
I think one of the aspects of your show that attracts the jam crowd is the visual element which incorporates lots of bright colors, lights and imagery. I’ve noticed a common theme in your videos as well. Do you feel there is a visual element to your music that relates to bright colors and things of that sort?
Yeah, absolutely. That’s been a goal of mine since the very beginning and it’s still a work in progress—bringing in the visual elements to our whole package. I’ve sort of been the visual director all these years and that’s probably why there’s so many bright colors—because I can’t do anything but that. I would like to one day do a project where I don’t incorporate tons of bright colors, but I think it’s just a subconscious thing. I really give my synesthesia plenty of fodder and let it live as robustly as it wants to. The result is lots of crazy bright colors and shapes.
You guys recently hosted a flood relief benefit in Vermont. How did that turn out?
Oh man, it was one of my favorite shows in a long time. We’ve had some pretty awesome shows this summer, but it was just so…I think every time I’m in Vermont I just get so happy, unexplainably. The whole scene was like “We love Vermont, we love community support,” and we had so many friends and family in the house that it felt more relaxed than our other Higher Ground shows. It just felt like a big sharing, it was great.
Who are some of your personal favorite artists coming out of the Brooklyn scene these days?
We just made friends with this band called Friends and they kind of embody the really detached, but also hippie-ish, but also hipsterish Brooklyn feel…and their music is pretty interesting. I love Nomo, they are always a favorite. I can’t speak highly enough of them. They’re from the Midwest but we always see them around. They’re an Afrobeat band that Pitchfork writes about. They’re really cool…they haven’t been touring as much as of lately as the sax player and the trumpet player are playing with Iron & Wine. Superhuman Happiness also and Antibalas, of course.
And then we’ve got a few of close friends that have a little network of bands and we all go to each other’s shows. Those bands are Cuddle Magic, if you haven’t heard of them go hear them right away. They’re like orchestral brainy-pop and they all sing and play a million instruments. There’s also two other bands The Rex Complex and Railbird. We do shows together every once and a while.
How do you see the Rubblebucket sound developing on the next album?
I personally want to write more songs. There’s a few songs on Omega La La where I’m like, “I want to write another one of that.” I think it’s exciting for the first time to have a sound that we are excited to keep replicating and expanding upon, rather than always moving. So finally, we’re in our sound home.
