Bend’s Heavy Light celebrates new album at Silver Moon

Published 3:30 pm Wednesday, October 18, 2023

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It is certainly common for rock bands to write songs collectively and collaboratively, often by jamming together in a room or piecing together different musical parts into a whole.

Heavy Light went a different route. After releasing its debut album “OHM” in 2019, the Bend-based band wanted to explore not only an expansion of songwriting duties, but also new ways of composing together — ideas spurred by creative ambition and accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We’ve always kind of collaborated over the years and we knew that each other could write,” said drummer Jarred Schwake. “But we really did want to build off the sound that Tyson had achieved with the first album.”

The Tyson he’s talking about is Heavy Light guitarist Tyson Vandenbroucke, a longtime local musician who penned most of the material on “OHM,” but also willingly handed over some of the band’s songwriting reins for the band’s follow-up full-length, “Frames.” To accomplish that, Vandenbroucke, Schwake and guitarist Chase Mersereau beefed up their home-studio capabilities and built an online storehouse of 60 to 70 song ideas — a drum track here, a synth part there, guitar riffs and so on — that was easily accessible to all three members.

And then, on their own time, following their own instinct and staying in close communication with each other, each of the three worked to develop the ideas into songs, using a green/yellow/red color-coding system to rank them and track their progress.

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“Some of these ideas are from 10 years ago or five years ago, or they’re brand new and we worked on them together,” said Vandenbroucke. “Because we had access to the right gear and the files, we really got to spend a lot of time engineering everything. It was pretty seamless.”

When they had enough tracks finished, Mersereau, Schwake and Vandenbroucke doubled down on the democratic nature of the creative process by each writing and recording lyrics and vocals for each song, then choosing which version they thought was best.

“It wasn’t easy,” Vandenbroucke said, “but the idea was to really try to set aside our preconceived ideas of what we thought we wanted this thing to be.”

When they needed help — a new perspective, or simply a tie-breaking vote — they brought in Portland-based musician Kyle Morton of the band Typhoon to produce “Frames.” Over a couple of days in a cabin near Mount Hood, the group dialed in arrangements and recorded basic tracks that formed the core of the album.

The result is a collection of modern and melodic indie-psych-pop built out of crisp rhythms, elastic grooves, prickly guitar licks and softly glowing synthesizers that sparkle and drift, depending on mood. On “Frames,” Heavy Light sounds like The Shins playing inside Tame Impala’s arena-sized dreams, or The 1975 all stretched out and sleepy in a sunbeam.

Or, you could say, it sounds like what happens when a band works relentlessly and intentionally at discovering its whole self, and it turns out that whole is greater than the sum of its parts (which now also includes bassist Skyler Kruger).

“The way we’re evolving and we’re using everything we have, it’s just so much fun, you know?” Mersereau said. “There was a Heavy Light LP before this, but this is our first one truly together and we just wanted to put the time into it to do it right. It took longer than we expected, but we’re super proud of it.”

What: Heavy Light, with Palo Sopraño and Denver Says

When: 7 p.m. Saturday, doors open 6:30 p.m.

Cost: $13

Where: Silver Moon Brewing, 24 NW Greenwood Ave., Bend

Contact: silvermoonbrewing.com.

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