They are trying to break indie rock’s heart
By JENNA DUNCAN
Get Out

Tucked into a small industrial park in west Tempe, the practice space is dimly lit and trapped between tiny rooms where the rumblings of East Valley bands practicing alterna-pop jams and trash-metal riffs are invasive.

More than a dozen guitar pedals sprawl across the floor in half-moons, and an expensive-looking drum kit is wedged between two raised amps.

The three former members of the Tempe band Posture stand or sit at their stations and pause mid-song to discuss technique.
“It’s not sounding good. Can we try that part again in 6/4 time?” asks bassist Michael Dunford, 22.

On first listen, the music of A Soft Heart Break Beat seems thrashing and sporadic. No metronome could keep time to the “song” the three are fleshing out. They play around with phrasing, rhythmic counts and time signatures — bending chords into caustic mirrors of themselves and never allowing the listener to get comfortable.

“We have short attention spans,” says guitarist Kortland Chase, 22. “When we first started writing songs we’d have 15 different parts we’d try to squeeze into one song.”

Chase, a server in Tempe, says his band mates have left behind their former epithet and purely instrumental math rock style to “work out” a new sound. The new songs are shorter and more concise and Chase’s vocals have been incorporated.

Often described as precision guitar-based rock, or compared to free jazz and nu-metal, math rock is a veritable melting pot of music theory. Math rockers resist definitions, but the thing they have in common is the deconstructionism of songforms.

“We’re coming to terms with being considered a math rock band,” says Dunford, who doesn’t care for the label because of its connotations of prog-rock and “butt rock.”

“That label leaves no room for passion or emotion, ” he says. “We never wanted to be just a band of jerk-offs.”

Though it is assumed to be brutal and confrontational, math rock retains the capacity to turn on its head and also be dreamy and abstract. As improvised and spastic as it may seem, the songs rely on precise, intricate and calculated timing; players give cues and rely on counts and signals to embark on their changes.

Drummer Sean Meltzer’s beats form the backbone of the band’s tunes. When asked who in the band has had formal training, both Dunford and Chase point to Meltzer, 21, who teaches music at Gilbert and Chandler high schools.

“I started on piano when I was 6 (years old),” says Meltzer. “I was able to read music and I took private lessons for a lot of years.”

Meltzer got his fundamentals on piano, but switched to drums early on. It is clear that drumming is his life’s passion; he shows up to practice for more than five hours at a time. He’s darkly tanned and his nose is peeling, having just returned from two months of touring part of the country with Drum Corps International where he competed against other pro-level drum lines with Concord, Calif.-based The Blue Devils.

Math rock describes something postmodern composers have been doing for decades — looking at the science of music and trying to tweak its DNA. In the 1970s, bands such as Wire, and even pop pioneers The Police, began to examine songforms numerically and to experiment with structure. In the 1990s, a wave of experimental bands such as Breadwinner and Ladyfinger took the reins and drove math rock into virtual obscurity.
Current math rockers Don Caballero and Shellac have opened doors in some scenes, but the majority of their records remain inaccessible to the ears of mass audiences.
While not solely math-reliant, these bands have worked like the LSD of indie rock — expanding minds in directions never anticipated by those who have rejected or had no backgrounds in classical composition.

Posture’s foundations were in experimentation so it is only a natural progression for them to evolve.

“We’re so much more serious now and we’re all changing our attitudes about our instruments,” Dunford says of A Soft Heart Break Beat.

Like the engine of a car, sometimes the best way to keep things going is to take apart the pieces and then put them back together.