Rockin' in the region
Orange Opera going ‘hungry'
Foot-tapping tunes akin to Beatles - they don't mind
Kevin Hambrick, songwriter for the local pop/rock band the Orange Opera, has a name for the music he makes. “Hungry tap-your-foot music,” he calls it. And, to be sure, you can hear the melodic influences of the great hungry foot-tappers of the past – the Beatles; ELO; T. Rex. But the Orange Opera is a far cry from just imitative. Multilayered and relentlessly experimental, the band picks up where “I Am The Walrus” left off, creating a perfect pop synthesis of guitar, bass, drums and piano. The result is both ambitious and completely irresistible.
“We get compared to everything – Supergrass, T. Rex, the Beatles, of course,” Hambrick says. “As long as we’re not being told we sound like Rush or Boston, we’re happy.”
Although the Orange Opera has been a musical fixture in Fort Wayne for six years, it was only recently that the band began touring, swapping gigs with bands on the East Coast and bringing national acts such as Dr. Dog to our humble ’burb. Why the change?
“I got fired,” Hambrick says. “But it got me out of that daily routine and got me heading in the direction I need to go. And it’s made everything better. Gigs got better, touring picked up. We got a new guitarist.”
The band – Hambrick, bassist Bryan Brubaker, guitarist Michael Ostermeyer and drummer Kevin Hockaday – will leave for another East Coast tour in November. But while they’re here, they’ll be promoting “Ant Muscle,” a six-track EP recorded with financial help from Rob Wood of the local radio show “Little Brother Radio.”
“He really believes in what we’re doing,” Hambrick says. “And we appreciate that.”
The handful of tracks on “Ant Muscle” experiment with everything from fuzzy guitar rave-ups to jaunty piano and trumpet ditties, paying tribute along the way to the symphonic pop vocal sound of the ’70s – percussive panting and undulating and dissonant vocal harmonies.
“I try to write music that I’ll like 10 or 20 years down the road,” Hambrick says. “It doesn’t always happen, but I try. I don’t make straight-genre music. Genres – and genre-rific bands – tend to die quickly.”
The album is a place-setter of sorts, something to whet fans’ appetites until the band’s next full-length album is released in March. (Tentative title: “The Year of the Beard.”)
“We needed to put something out there now,” Ostermeyer says. “Mostly because we were getting sick of sitting on these really great songs. Kevin’s songs have the ability to stick with you. Even before I was in the band, I would see them play and wake up in the morning with the songs in my head. I think that’s rare.”
Hambrick pulls lyrical inspiration from muses as varied as his guinea pig and his border collie. In fact, his songs – quirky lyrical gems, happily left open to interpretation by the listener – often seem deceptively simple. For instance, the song “Ice Cream Store” – an organ-infused galloping melody – is about “I don’t know … a cool little ice cream shop,” he says.
“I write about everything but politics,” he says. “Right now, I’m writing one called ‘Hickory Hen,’ which is just about a hen that sings in a tree – and he puts on a really great show for all of the other animals. But, it could also be about a transvestite hen. I’m not really sure which direction I’m heading with it yet.”
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