Outside of Kindling’s Easthampton practice space, a stretch of fresh asphalt under the sweltering July sun and a couple hundred yards of woods separate us from the impossibly tall Pioneer Valley mountain range.
The instinctual reaction upon leaving the city for a view like this is to breathe in deeply as soon as the trees outweigh civilization. Clean air feels more like a given and less like a commodity outside a city, even if Boston is under a hundred miles away from Western Massachusetts.
Anyone that’s lived a few years of young adult life in rurality knows, though, how quickly the air can stale. The mountains become imposing rather than awe-inspiring, the long winters are almost always a test of sanity. If bigger cities sacrifice nature for a wider spread of culture and voices, the woods are where solitude distracts from bubbling anxiety and fading localism.
Stephen Pierce reminds me of this in the way he points out where the independent cinema used to be as we drive through Northampton in bandmate Gretchen Williams’s car. It’s in his mention later on of a big box store going up in Hadley at the expense of another mom and pop shop closing in town. While Kindling are by no means dour company (even though they jokingly attesting they “were through with sounding fun” after the first demo), it takes a layered kind of love/hate relationship between a band and their surroundings to make a shoegaze album as aggressively present as their upcoming debut, Everywhere Else.
Despite what the layers of menacing guitar and anxiousness of a Kindling record may suggest of its creators, the band are cheerily assembled in their practice space early on a Sunday afternoon.
Williams is behind the kit, leaving her post on guitar and vocals to play the opening of The Jesus and Mary Chain’s “Just Like Honey”. Co-vocalist/guitarist Pierce comes in, mimicking the original’s chiming guitarwork flawlessly as the rest of the band sets up around them.
Their next album is already graphed out on a whiteboard. Past show flyers are framed in a Christmas light shrine. The studio where both Everywhere Else and the next album will be recorded is a couple doors down. Kindling’s operation is concentrated, but intentional given the five-piece have been involved in each other’s lives and bands long before this band was even a thought.
“I was the last in a long line of bassists for the band The Last Forty Seconds, which is how I met Andy [Skelly, drummer],” Pierce recalls. “Yep, Stephen was maybe number seven or eight at that point,” Skelly adds. “He lasted longer than any of the others though.”
Upon The Last Forty Seconds’ eventual dissolution, Skelly and Pierce formed a handful of bands separately, but found regional notoriety together when joining revered Northampton screamo outfit Ampere. The four piece, rounded out by scene veterans Will Killingsworth and Meghan Minior, amassed a legion of fans and toured internationally, but Pierce still had an itch to defy his hardcore background.
“I think I just wanted to play some Superchunk-y guitar parts and just fart out songs like Guided by Voices does. Like, every half thought, for better or for worse,” Pierce recalled. “I had never not played in a hardcore band, so it was about trying to figure out how to write music that isn’t outwardly angsty or aggressive, that has more of a vibe to it.”
Upon briefly moving to Cambridge, Pierce met guitarist and singer Gretchen Williams. “It was winter and I just recorded this shitty pop song, like a minute-and-a-half, three chord song,” Pierce recalls. “Stephen asked me to sing on it and I had never sang in a band that had formally played any shows,” Williams says. “Like, never anything that got to this level.”
In a spurt of Robert Pollard-esque inspiration, the duo wrote and recorded nine songs in a little over two weeks, releasing the Spare Room demo as Kindling in February of 2014. Room is as intimate, but spacey as its name would suggest, tucking its bedroom power-pop under a blanket of distortion in a style the duo affectionately call “throwaway pop”. Even then, both Pierce and Williams began recognizing their shoegaze tendencies as the subgenre was entering its revival phase. Pierce joked that he “doesn’t want to be a guided tour of his pedal board” by identifying as a shoegaze band, but more than that, Kindling doesn’t necessarily want to be pigeonholed as a band doing, as Pierce refers to it, “My Bloody Valentine’s thing.”
“It’s not inaccurate, obviously. I heard Loveless when I was still solely into punk and hardcore and I couldn’t imagine a guitar could make those noises. I’ve spent pretty much my entire adult life with that record, so its influence would be hard to sidestep. At the same time though, I think their more song-driven stuff on the You Made Me Realize EP was more of a jumping-off point when we started playing together as a full band. There’s, like, a certain danger to those songs that we looked to.”
As Pierce and Williams decided to let Kindling out of its spare bedroom, the duo sought a band of trusted friends that would understand Pierce’s shift away from hardcore. Andy Skelly was the only choice for drummer because, according to Pierce, “he just plays the shit I have in my head.” A handful of bassists and guitarists rotated in until the band settled on Aaron Snow of prolific ambient pop act Landing and Grist’s Jeff Stevens, who, in standard Kindling fashion, was found a few doors down from them.
“Grist was neighbors with them at [our practice space] Sonelab, so we just stopped in on each other’s spaces all the time,” Stevens says. “I joined days before we went down to Florida for Fest and I remember being nervous because, like, we had only hung out before and being on the road with a band’s a whole different thing than just hanging out. It was just very fun and very positive though; it felt like where I wanted to be.”