21 December 19 - 25, 2024 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents Soft Reset The Robot Bonfire’s Fever Dream is a lucid evolution in the face of adversity. BY SEAN STROUD A lmost five years ago now, as the world hit a soft reset and everyone’s lives became de- railed, The Robot Bonfire had to discard rollout plans for their Circuitry EP and release it online with no foreseeable way to perform it live. Their bad luck didn’t end there, either, but they pushed through the adversity and came out on the other side as a better band, and their new record reflects the path they took to get there. “Fever Dream is kind of a metaphor for that time period to now,” guitarist/vocalist Josh Watkins says about their upcoming al- bum. “That led to this journey of going from ‘comatose’ to ‘awakening.’ This is a journey to find solace in music and playing.” The three guys have been making mu- sic together for almost 12 years, but the band’s roots go back further than that. Watkins and drummer/vocalist Jason Da- vis played together in a band called Be- tween Thieves when they were younger, but then life happened; they both started families and Watkins moved to Amarillo for a while. He eventually made his way back to the Dallas area, and once they were both in a more stable place and had taken care of their priorities, they began to feel that creative itch creeping back. “We started to hang out again and it was just kinda natural because we’d played to- gether for so long,” says J.D. (Davis). “We both wanted to make music and get going again. The weird thing is that both of us knew [bassist] Jimmy [Huckle] indepen- dently of each other. Josh brought him in, and I was like, ‘Dude, I know that dude!’” The guys hit a roadblock early on after getting together in 2013. Some groups strug- gle with financial or creativity issues, but they were faced with the most modern prob- lem imaginable — they couldn’t come up with an original name for their band be- cause all the ones they tried out had already been taken. They spent the first year and a half of their time together doing a lot of brainstorming and Google searches. “We tried like 150 names over the course of a couple of months,” Huckle says. “Every time we thought, ‘No way this is taken,’ it was always taken.” After scrapping tons of ideas, the guys fi- nally landed on “Robot Bathwater” based on a scene from Parks and Recreation, the pop- ular sitcom that was airing at the time. In an episode from Season 6, Aubrey Plaza’s char- acter, April Ludgate, attends a wine-tasting and describes a wine’s flavor profile as “old, dirty cashews and just a hint of a robot’s bathwater.” But an act of either divine intervention or technological randomness dictated a differ- ent moniker for the trio to bear. “We were typing ‘Robot Bathwater’ and it auto-corrected to ‘Bonfire,’” Watkins says with a chuckle. “People will speculate, like, ‘That’s a cool name. Is that talking about get- ting back to organic relationships and con- necting with people outside of technology?’ And we’re just like, ‘Oh yeah, totally.’” Given the trouble they’d had settling on a name, the guys jumped on The Robot Bonfire the second they discovered it was available. “We googled TRB and it wasn’t a band, so by the next morning we’d created a Gmail and Facebook account,” Huckle says. “We hadn’t even officially agreed on it yet.” With a name finally locked down, all the creative energy that was going into churning out band names could be put toward some- thing more productive, like songwriting. Luckily, they were sitting on a secret weapon that gave them a leg up on every other band that struggled with production or finding a space to record in. “J.D. built a recording studio from the ground up behind his house,” Watkins says. “That’s where we go, so we can take as much time as we want to write and record.” “I’ve always joked that the studio’s be- come our fourth member,” J.D. adds. “It’s very freeing to be able to just go in and try something when you have an idea.” Having a studio in their backyard has been invaluable to The Robot Bonfire. It has saved them an incalculable amount of money in studio time and gave them the freedom to experiment with new produc- tion techniques and develop their sound. The band also went through a brief lineup change but used it as an opportunity to re- structure themselves sonically. “We wrote for a year or so, and then my brother quit because we were taking so long,” Watkins says jokingly. “We thought, ‘Now that we’re a three-piece, what can we do that doesn’t sound like everyone else?’ And that’s when we started getting really creative and did one song after another, then put out that debut album.” Their self-titled debut is a strong show- ing for The Robot Bonfire’s first release. “Retrograde” starts with Watkins and Huckle playing repetitive licks that weave in and out of J.D.’s spacey 3-3-2 groove then ex- plodes with synth and distorted vocals in the chorus. The track also features a gnarly half- time breakdown. “You Are Haunting Me” is like the lovechild of TOOL’s “Parabola” and Deftones’ “Passenger,” and, ironically, “Rude Awakening” is one of the best songs to groove to thanks to J.D.’s tasteful drumming, Huckle’s driving bassline and Watkins’ higher-end riffs. TRB took their new music on the road and played a string of gigs including some South by Southwest side shows. They were also focused on their next EP, Circuitry, which was all set to come out until life got put on pause in 2020. “We were supposed to go to South By the year we were releasing Circuitry, and we were super pumped about it,” J.D. says. “Then COVID hit, and they canceled it. We had this big plan about how we were gonna play there, then play a few release shows around here, and then everything shut the hell down. No one knew what to do because we couldn’t play anywhere, but we had all this stuff we’d spent all this time on, so we just decided to put it out there and see what happened. It’s a really good EP, but we just couldn’t support it anywhere.” Circuitry is solid considering the unfavor- able circumstances surrounding its release. “On the Other Side” is a slow burn that opens with a repeating 808 that’s joined by drums and low, ethereal vocals from Wat- kins. Watkins’ riffs coast over J.D.’s heavy halftime groove while Huckle holds down the low end on “Binary Lives.” All-in-all, the EP is a nice 20-minute-taste of how the band had grown over the last three years. In the post-pandemic struggle, the trio found solace in creating music together. It was a common occurrence for them to meet up in the studio just to vent or turn the lights off and jam aimlessly for a while. They made the best out of a bad situation and ended up using this forced downtime to develop their sound and their approach to writing and re- cording as a group. “Honestly, COVID led to a lot of the stuff that’s on the album,” J.D. says. “We spent so much time thinking about how to rebuild what we were doing. We had a lot of nights where we just sat on my patio with nothing to do, just smoking cigars and trying to de- cide what we were gonna do when we could play. Our live show morphed a lot through those ideas and that also played into how we were starting to write differently.” “It was a weird time for everybody,” Huckle adds. “Our band was like our lifeline, because it was lonely. I didn’t leave my house until I went to band practice.” When things started to return to normal for everyone else, the shit just kept on hit- ting the fan for The Robot Bonfire. Things have only just recently started to level out for the group. Their studio acted as a place of refuge for the band during hardship and gave them a place to briefly escape the trou- bles they were going through. “It was tough coming out of COVID,” Huckle says. “Going right into ‘Everything’s going back to normal now,’ only for 50 other things we weren’t expecting to go wrong all at the same time with all of us.” “Last year was a tough one,” J.D. adds. “We all went through a lot of personal crap. I guess the silver lining in there is what it led to musically and lyrically within a lot of the stuff we were doing.” Fever Dream is the band’s best work yet. It’s designed to be listened to all the way through in one sitting, so all the tracks flow from one to the next. At around 30 minutes in length, the album isn’t asking for too much of a time commitment. The produc- tion is simply amazing; the drums are crisp from front to back and the guitar and vocal effects are elegant and well-balanced. “A lot of this new record was produced on the spot,” J.D. says. “Everything was happen- ing really organically in our practices, so if we had more ideas that come from that, we had the freedom to do whatever we wanted to.” J.D.’s drums are heavy and upfront on “Ghostly,” and Watkins and Huckle’s highs and lows contrast nicely over the top. “Wait- ing” has a slow buildup with Watkins noo- dling in the background as J.D. lays down a halftime groove and Huckle shifts chords to match, then breaks into a dreary, headbang- ing shoegaze chorus. The album’s closer, “Awakening,” is its most intense song and was almost fully im- provised all in one night. Each member shows off impressive range as the instrumen- tal track transitions from one pattern to the next, showing off flares of prog influence along the way. The track’s liveliness repre- sents the band’s emergence from their own Fever Dream and the feeling of finally being back on solid ground. The Robot Bonfire hopes to get back on the map with their new record and start play- ing more concerts, but they want to go all-out when they finally have the chance. The guys have plans for a more immersive live show with cool visuals to accompany their music. “The goal is to build content for this entire Fever Dream idea and have that running be- hind us when we get to play live again,” J.D. says. “It’s just a matter of finding the right place to be able to utilize that.” John Erwin Members of The Robot Bonfire find solace in making music. | B-SIDES | t Music
