| B-SIDES | ▼ Music Winding Road Post Animal has come a long way from the days when they asked strangers for a place to sleep while on tour. BY VINCENT ARRIETA O ne strange night in 2017 in El Paso, the gentlemen of Post Animal found themselves in a unique situation. They were on tour with fellow Chicago- based rockers Twin Peaks and spent most of their afternoon collectively picking away at a rotisserie chicken “like vultures,” as gui- tarist/keyboardist Jake Hirshland describes it. It was their second-ever show being on tour, and they learned to navigate the rules of the road quickly. “Back then, we really had to hustle,” Hirsh- land says. “Like, we were asking in the micro- phone if anyone had anywhere for us to stay.” That night, an audience member did gra- ciously offer up his apartment to the band, and that’s when things got weird. “He was about to go to bed,” adds guitarist Javi Reyes. “We had the lights turned out. He was in the threshold of his bedroom, and suddenly he was like, ‘You guys want to do some DMT?’ and we were like, ‘We’re good.’” And so began the touring life of one of Chi- cago’s premier psychedelic rock bands, Post Animal, who are scheduled to return to DFW for a show at Dada on May 19 with Caroline Kingsbury. The band is gearing up to release their third full-length LP, Love Gibberish, on May 13, and at the time of our conversation, the band is getting ready to play a festival in Mexico as they reminisce about their earliest days on tour, thankful they no longer have to ask the audience for a place to stay. “We’re staying in hotels now,” says drum- mer Wesley Toledo with a laugh. “We’re not old, we’re just older. Being 28, 29 is different than being 23 or 24. We need our rest.” “We’re big iced coffee drinkers though,” adds guitarist Matt Williams. “5-Hour En- ergy drinks are just flavor shots.” That show in El Paso may have been a lit- tle under-attended, but they learned another important thing that night (aside from don’t always accept offers to stay in the homes of strangers): Always play your heart out, no matter how small the crowd. “We were still kind of learning,” Williams 16 16 says. “We’re brothers with Twin Peaks, and we were kind of learning how it all goes. And it was an instance of like, ‘OK, this isn’t a very well-attended show, but this band still rocks out as hard as they can. They still want to go all out.’ And I remember learning that’s Courtney Sofiah Yates one of those things you got to do. You know, no matter how many people show up, you just got to keep the rock going.” Post Animal’s signature sound is a rich psychedelia in the vein of Australian neo- psych trailblazers Tame Impala, but with a decidedly more oblique approach to genre- mixing. One of their latest singles, “No More Sports,” is a full-on RAWK rocker that sounds caught somewhere between being a pastiche and a parody of “Cat Scratch Fe- ver,” and somehow, they pull it off. “I made the riff one morning on acoustic guitar,” Reyes says. “That morning in 2020 we were going to go in, practice and just go- ing to kind of throw paint at the wall and fig- ure out what we were going for and also to give Dalton [Allison, bassist/engineer/pro- ducer] an opportunity to experiment with some engineering techniques. I went in and started playing that, and we just kind of locked into what it felt that it should be. We were making that the week that Eddie Van Halen died, so we were definitely revisiting some Van Halen and some ’80s radio rock. It was bleeding into the writing that just felt re- ally fun to be to do something big like that.” Adds Toledo: “That stadium hard rock vibe was not something that we’d really ex- plored that much. And then ‘No More Sports’ kind of came about, and it was a good opportunity to experiment with that sound and kind of go all over the place like we usu- ally do.” Allison is not present for our conversa- tion, but his physical presence is not needed for the band to sing his praises. “We have the sound that we have, and we think that Dal- ton has been the architect of that sound,” Toledo says. “He’s produced everything up until this point.” Up until this point, the band’s recordings have been mostly home recordings pro- duced with DIY setups — a bit shocking, considering the fidelity of the recordings is much higher than a bedroom psychedelic project would normally be. “We’ve been lucky to have someone like Dalton in the band that can do a pretty world class job on our own stuff with very limited resources,” Hirshland says. “He’s very scrappy with the production. On this [album], the captures were done sometimes in [a] stu- dio, so they’re pretty great captures. But that’s not how it’s been. Back in the early days, we had these DIY setups like a lot of people do. He’s managed to make some really kind of vast feeling recordings like out of that.” The rest of the band are certainly no schlubs at their instruments ei- ther. All members of the band sing and write songs, so not only is one person relieved of the burden of coming up with material, every member of Post Animal has the opportunity to contribute varying per- spectives and sounds that the other members might not come up with. “One-hundred percent right,” Williams says. “There’s no set way about how a song might come to be. You know, we just kind of roll with it every single time. We all get to add some flavors to each song — like a flavor shot.” ▼ DEEP ELLUM M VERONICA YOUNG, DEEP ELLUM RADIO’S NEW MANAGER, AIMS TO HELP LOCAL MUSICIANS BUILD A FOLLOWING. BY ALEX GONZALEZ HOOD LOVE usic is Veronica Young’s love lan- guage. For years, the Deep Ellum resident has advocated for local art- ists, promoting and offering them a plat- form. On her Deep Ellum Radio show, The Veronica Young Show, Young keeps Deep El- lum artists on heavy rotation while sharing Post Animal comes to Dada on May 19. anecdotes about her experiences in the iconic neighborhood. Now, we’re about to hear a lot more of Young’s influence on Deep Ellum Radio. Young was recently named station manager of the web-based station, which, given her longtime involvement in the neighborhood, feels like a long time coming. Young’s earliest experiences with live mu- “I THINK RIGHT NOW, THERE’S A TURNING POINT FOR THE MUSICIANS TO DEVELOP AND THE VENUES THAT SUPPORT THEM.” - VERONICA YOUNG, DEEP ELLUM RADIO sic took place within her musical family. Both of her grandfathers were violinists. Her paternal grandfather was self- taught and her maternal grandfather was classi- cally trained. The latter led a high school music program and created sev- eral mariachi troupes. “I didn’t realize until I was much older that par- ties didn’t always include live music,” Young says. “Going from one cousin’s house on a weekend to another, when you have a large family, live music was always a part of that. Having someone pull out a guitar and write a song in front of you, or getting a few uncles and aunts together and bringing all of these instruments with them to a party, you get a jam band in your liv- ing room. That’s why I’ve always gravitated toward Deep Ellum. The live music is what got me here and it’s what keeps me here.” Young’s love affair with Deep Ellum be- gan when she was a teenager in the ’90s, as she loved coming down to the city, watching people cruise the streets in low riders. In the late aughts, she began frequenting Deep El- lum venues. She found many were struggling to pack the house and many local musicians didn’t know how to promote themselves. Having grown up around music, she used her ear to help land local acts on stages and get people MONTH XX–MONTH XX, 2014 MAY 12–18, 2022 DALLAS OBSERVER | CLASSIFIED | MUSIC | DISH | MOVIES | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | FEATURE | SCHUTZE | UNFAIR PARK | CONTENTS | DALLAS OBSERVER CLASSIFIED | MUSIC | DISH | CULTURE | UNFAIR PARK | CONTENTS dallasobserver.com dallasobserver.com
