Sweet honey and the rock

Aubrey is (from L to R) Paul Becker, Jon Ulasien, Robert Weinaug, Jaime Netzer and Alex Pierrelee. Photo by Nick Krug

Wednesday, August 10, 2005

“DeafCat Records, this is Paul.”

It’s 1:00 in the afternoon and DeafCat Records LLC Senior Partner Paul Ulasien is fielding phone calls from his home office. The workspace doubles as a think tank for DeafCat’s leading prospect – Paul’s 20-year-old son Jon, who fronts the Lawrence band Aubrey.

“Yeah, I want to make money,” Paul says of his motives for taking the reins of his son’s music career. “But I want them to make money, too. More than anything I just want them to be successful because they’ve worked so hard and they deserve it.”

Last December, DeafCat sent lawrence.com a couple Christmas cards; this week, VIP invitations to the “pre-show reception” for the band’s CD release show Friday at The Granada. Throw in a glossy press packet littered with quotes from our review of the band’s demo and we’ve got substantiation for a stalker case. (Note: none of which helped their cause in getting this article written; if anything, it’s almost creepy —ed.)

Aubrey’s flair for brown-nosing might be deal-breaker if the band’s music weren’t so darn scrumptious (Try cutting that one up for your next press packet—ed). Two years out of high school, the five-piece band is sitting on a remarkable debut album titled “Honey and the Shame.” It surely has flaws, but on the whole it’s a delicious journey through all things pop – the dreamy post-production of Air, the jazzy bounce of Badly Drawn Boy; and the washy Brit-pop guitars of Coldplay and/or prepubescent Radiohead.

Upcoming shows:

Friday, Aug. 5, 2005, 9 p.m. at The Cup and Saucer
Friday, Aug. 12, 2005, 9 p.m. at The Granada
Friday, Sept. 2, 2005, 10 p.m. at The Jackpot Music Hall
Wednesday, Sept. 7, 2005, 4 p.m. at Capitol Federal Park @ Sandstone
Thursday, Sept. 15, 2005, 10 p.m. at The Jackpot Music Hall
Sunday, Sept. 18, 2005, 9 p.m. at (One-off place)
Friday, Sept. 30, 2005, 10 p.m. at The Bottleneck

It’s music worth talking seriously, and that’s exactly what Paul Ulasien is trying to do for his band of merry underage misfits. His scientifically exacting field studies have generated a three-phase marketing plan: Phase 1, send 500 CDs to “Tier One” and “Tier Two” markets; Phase II, infiltrate the internets with Aubrey ammo; Phase III, search for distribution and commandeer a deal.

All in all, it’s exactly what you’d expect from a computer consultant who just wrote a book called “The Corporate Rat Race: The Rats Are Winning.”

“I wouldn’t (manage the band) if I didn’t see the potential for success,” Paul says. “Unless somebody’s in the background running the business aspect, it’s going to be hard for them to make it.”

Deaf jam

Paul Ulasien is not completely out of his head. He may come off slightly over-the-top when it comes to the music business, but his heart is in the right place.

The same can be said for Aubrey, a group of recent Free State High School grads who play ambitious pop music that aspires to be as refined as their favorite 20th century composers.

"Honey and the Shame" MP3s

More on Aubrey

“I don’t know the names of any of the composers but I really find it to be a lot more inspiring sometimes,” Jon says. “If we had the ability just to create the most obscure music that we wanted to we would, but the reason why we don’t do that, obviously, is because it’s kind of hard to do anything with that.”

At 20 years of age, Jon comes off a lot more like a veteran rocker than a budding musicologist. He sleeps late and he hates the smoking ban; he writes his best stuff in the early morning hours when he’s jolted from his sleep by a killer chorus; he wants his music to be “something new, something different” and he says the next Aubrey album “probably won’t sound anything like this one.”

Follow the Aubrey trail back to high school and you’ll find the rest of the VH1-ready screenplay.

“We didn’t have a huge social life in high school,” Jon says. “Not to say that we were huge losers, but we didn’t really socialize with a lot of people.”

Predictably, a metal band precluded the formation of Aubrey. Though Ulasien admits he “wasn’t even into metal,” he somehow found himself shredding it out with drummer Alex Pierrelee and a couple hardcore-bent friends. “Ziplok” lasted all of a year before Pierrelee and Ulasien teamed with bassist Robert Weinaug to form the first incarnation of Aubrey. Guitarist Paul Becker came aboard during the group’s senior year at FSHS, and vocalist/keyboardist Jaime Netzer joined the group during recording sessions last summer.

Audio interviews

With the quintet intact, Aubrey was ready to get out and play some shows. That’s when Paul came on board.

“We did like four Bottleneck open mic nights and he was like, ‘Well maybe you guys should play real shows,’” Jon recalls. “We were like, ‘How do we do that?’”

Smile and wave

The ensuing year has proved to be a rollercoaster introduction to the music business.

With Paul hustling 20-40 hours a week to make connections, Aubrey has taken some peculiar back roads in their quest to get noticed. The band earned a spot at the “Independent Music World Series” last May, traveling to Chicago to perform at the Discmakers-sponsored event. Though they fell short of the $35,000 grand prize package, they did learn a valuable lesson: the music business can be completely wack.

“Right when we got there they told us that what they were going to be judging most was ‘stage presence,’” Weinaug says. “They didn’t even mention ‘music’ or ‘originality.’”

A gig at “Diversifest” in Tulsa, OK proved to be equally frustrating. Jon recalls sitting in on a seminar devoted to “how to promote your band” and leaving with a strong desire to punch the keynote speaker in the face.

“Those emails that say ‘Flood your message boards!’ and all that stuff – he was the guy behind all that,” he says. “That was the whole vibe there: ‘Here’s how you get the upper hand when you sound like 20,000 other bands’ … We left and went swimming after that.”

Locally, the group has fared better with strong showings at venues like The Bottleneck, The Granada and The Replay Lounge. The band plays it casual onstage, waxing poetic with stage banter.

“We have this theory that maybe one out of ten people at our shows will like us,” Jon says. “The majority of people don’t seem like they’re there for the music; they’re there for the nightlife.”

Greased lightning

If Jon feels a little like a wallflower when he’s performing, it’s only natural considering the subject matter of “Honey & The Shame.” The 13-song disc plays out like a farcical WB teen drama, opening as a cheesy chick-flick and evolving into abstract commentary on love’s real consequences.

“A lot of it has to do with high school, I guess,” Jon says. “Young love is always kind of strange and weird and sporadic and chaotic – I wanted to do something that would comment on that.”

It’s a surprisingly cohesive narrative from a songwriter who says that lyrics are his least favorite part of writing.

“I prefer to listen to bands like Sigur Ros, where you can’t even understand what they’re saying,” Jon says. “A lot of emo music will ramble on and not have any kind of rhyme scheme … I’ve just never been into that. I like stuff that sounds cool, like the kind of stuff that Steven Malkmus does.”

Photo by Richard Gintowt

Campy couplets like “3-2-1 / Baby you’re a lot of fun” sound like they were copped straight off the oldies dial, while “Turbulence” embraces a melody similar to “You've Made Me So Very Happy” by Blood, Sweat and Tears.

“I heard that and I just kind of wanted to roll with it, so I came up with these cheesy lyrics,” Jon says. “There’s a certain side of us that we take seriously, and a side that we don’t. When we find ourselves taking ourselves too seriously we start to criticize ourselves more and we end up scrapping stuff.”

That was the case last fall when Aubrey recorded three songs at Alibi 6 studio and promptly scrapped them. The decision stemmed less from the quality of the recording than the quality of the performance, Jon says.

“We sounded tired and really bored with the songs,” he recalls. “We decided that we were going to sacrifice the sound quality a little bit and do it at home.”

Thus began the year-long basement project that became “Honey & the Shame.” The luxury of working without a clock allowed plenty of time to tool around with computers and post-production effect filters as well as basic arrangements.

“I don’t really like to just walk in and play a song and have someone mix it,” Jon says. “We cut up a lot of our recordings, a lot like Stereolab does. We’ll record something and then go back and cut it up and arrange it completely differently.”

Casual listeners may be surprised to learn that the “string sections” on songs like “Tennis Shoes” and “The Mask You Wear At Noon” are actually altered samples of popular classical recordings like Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

“We don’t really have the funding for a full symphony so sometimes we’ll just find symphony recordings and cut them up,” Jon says. “You can kind of tell but I don’t think it’s enough to get us in trouble.”

Hold your breath

In the coming months, Paul and Jon will work to expand DeafCat Records' reach. The label now offers a full line of services – CD design, marketing packages and industry consulting. Eventually, DeafCat hopes to build an in-house studio.

If Aubrey’s music career does take off, it will be a vindication of both Ulasiens’ hard work. Though the pie in the sky seems distant, each day yields its own rewards.

“We have now officially registered a hit from every continent except Antarctica,” Paul says. “We’ve also discovered that our music’s being pirated in China, but there’s nothing we can do about it.”

The endeavor marks the elder Ulasien’s second fling with the music business. A professional trumpeter, Paul toured in the early ‘70s with KC-area bands like “Freedom’s Reward” and “Cletus,” which he compares to the brass-driven sound of Chicago and Blood, Sweat and Tears.

In Jon’s eyes, things are coming full circle.

“He didn’t get to pursue the dreams that he wanted to because his parents held him back, and so with me he wants things to be different,” he says. “My mom’s coming around, though every once in a while she’ll slip in the college hints.”

Comments

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1 of 1 people found this comment useful.

Posted by ZombieRitual (anonymous) on August 11, 2005 at 11:04 p.m. (Suggest removal)

this would be cooler if aubrey wasn't the same ol' spineless indie-oid rock that has been beaten to death. teenage grindcore? teenage rockabilly? something cooler than this emo-ed out dead horse that is boring, soundalike indie rock. then again, i like to ROCK and i'm a curmudgeon, so i'm biased.

1 of 1 people found this comment useful.

Posted by knowuh (anonymous) on August 12, 2005 at 3:03 a.m. (Suggest removal)

Just for the record, I've been informed that the band Box Social has nothing to do with Aubrey, or it's recording label. In addition, please spare the comparisons to Radiohead... just ... don't go there.