It’s not hard to see why The Field Effect have achieved so much success in their almost two years as a band. They have a lot going for them. For instance, some very entertaining pets on social media, Bigsby (Annie/Adam), and Francis J. Maps (Doug). But beyond animal pictures and odd tweets is a band that is simply talented. Call their style of rock what you will: indie, lo-fi, bare bones, raw, whatever, they rawk (noticed I spelled it the cool, metal way). The insanely sweaty and spastic rhythm section of Adam Hand and Annie Hoffman provides the foundation for the melodic, gritty guitar attack of Nick Grieco and Doug Orey, while Orey’s room-filling vocal cords lend sincerity and intensity to meaningful, larger-than-life lyrics. An electric four piece of pure rock energy, The Field Effect are coming off of a huge year, which saw them release an LP (digitally and on vinyl), play SXSW and the Rock N’ Roll Rumble, headline their first show, and play several massive summer shows in Stamford and New Bedford. In the process of writing and preparing to record more in the fall, The Field Effect sat down with me in June (forcing me to eat sushi for the first time) to tell me a little more about themselves ahead of their headlining spot on this Friday’s monster bill at the Middle East Downstairs.
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Did you all meet at Berklee? I know Doug is from Maryland, but I wasn’t quite sure, unless you all took an oddly lucky trip to that beautiful state…
Doug: We did meet at Berklee, I was roommates with a former bandmate of Annie and Adam’s, and I had gone to some of their shows, and Annie was pretty awesome at playing bass. I had met Nick in the dorms and we had talked about starting a project and it just never panned out, and then we all graduated and went separate ways. I wanted to move back to oston and start a band, so I contacted Annie and I was like, “hey if I come back to Boston, you wanna start a band?” And she was like “yeeeaaaaaa!!!” And then I called Nick and said “hey Nick, are you busy?” Then Annie strongarmed us into inviting Adam…and we’re still not sure about him.
Nick: We started playing together end of…
Annie: End of 2010.
Doug: Yeah, end of 2010, I think I went over to Annie and Adam’s apartment in JP, and played some songs with Annie, I don’t think Adam was even there, and then this lineup sort of came to fruition in January or February of 2011.
Would you say that all of you being from Berklee influenced your sound in any particular way?
Nick: Absolutely not.
Adam: I’m the worst drummer to come out of Berklee in the last 100 years.
Doug: I think more of what helps define our sound is the fact that we all like a wide range of music; Adam listens to a lot of Steely Dan, Nick tends to listen to a lot of Pierce the Veil, I don’t even know what Annie listens to…
Adam: Annie listens to whatever I say she listens to.
Annie: Meat poetry. That’s what I listen to.
Doug: Oh, and meat poetry. I think we all listen to a lot of different stuff and we bring a lot of influences to the table.
Nick: And I would say none of those influences really have anything to do with Berklee. Like, Berklee’s a jazz school, and none of us are…jazzy.
How much gear do you actually own? Just looking at the cover of Cartography, it’s ridiculous.
Doug: We own a lot of gear. In the last two years, I’ve purchased five guitars, at least a dozen pedals, and a new amp.
Nick: Before I was in this band, I never even identified as a guitarist, I played bass and cello.
I know you (Annie) love your vintage basses…
Annie: I do, I have four basses, I’m really happy with them all, i’m not that big a junkie, although I was on ebay for a while today. Theyre all from the 70s, I love them.
In the last month, you’ve released Cartography on vinyl. Why vinyl and why now?
Annie: We’re signed to Zippah Records, and Brian, who runs the label, wanted it to be mainly a vinyl label, signing bands he was really into and releasing records on vinyl.
Adam: Separate of that , I’ve always talked about records on vinyl; since I was in high school it’s been a goal of mine to have a record on vinyl.
Doug: Especially now that most vinyl records come with a digital download. I’ve always liked having a tangible thing to hold, and with vinyl, everything is so much bigger, the artwork, and all the detail that goes into it…
Nick: It’s a real product.
Annie: And it’s the best of the both worlds, ‘cuz you get the vinyl, and the download for your iPhone, or your Zune…
How long did it take you to write and record Cartography?
Doug: It took a while honestly. The EP really came about because we got a huge show opening for the Sheila Divine at the Paradise, and it was one of those things where we didn’t wanna show up to such a big event and not have something to give people. Writing and recording it was kind of a difficult process, because we would record at Zippah and try to pick up the open sessions that were available; so like Annie would be on the calendar and say, “oh hey, such and such client canceled this weekend, you guys wanna record something?” And we would drop everything we were doing and go record. We’d get in over long holiday weekends, like Easter, we were in the studio for three days, we only left to go out to dinner with Adam’s family in Gloucester, drive right back to the studio and keep going at it. I would say start to finish, it was probably a year and a half, recording-wise.
Nick: I think cartography really is a great summation of the first two years of this band as a whole. Like you hear the development from song to song, you can kind of dive into our brains a little bit.
You open the album with Ogunquit, which is probably your best known song, but you close most of your shows with it, which is ballsy as hell. What prompted that to be the first song anyone hears?
Doug: Putting it at the end of the set was sage advice from Jim Gilbert of the Sheila Divine. People started to get to know that song, so we wanted them to stick aroud for it. I think it makes for a solid, uptempo, ready-to-go kind of track.
Nick: I think it’s one of the latest songs that we wrote as a band, and I also think it embodies kind of the general sound that we’re going for.
Annie: That was one of the songs where really we were collaborating more in the writing process.
Doug: With the whole record there, was a change in the dynamic, ‘cuz when this whole thing started I had a handful of songs that I wanted to do and they were pretty much written when I brought them to these guys. The writing process has changed a lot since we first started: it’s a lot more collaborative and it really started to emerge that way as we were recording Cartography.
The whole record kind of balances out, wth more “in your face” songs like “Headwrecked,” “Ogunquite,” stuff like that, but then you have your slower songs like “Dancing With Earthquakes,” and I mean, are you ever worried that you’ll be labeled as a certain kind of rock? Because to me it’s just straightforward rock and roll.
Adam: That’s what I’m always telling people, like, “we’re a rock band.” We have slow soft songs, we have loud, really fast songs, we have really loud slow songs. We’re a rock band, it’s as simple as that.
Nick: People can call us whatever they want honestly. We don’t classify what we do, we’re just trying to have fun.
Doug: I like the fact that any one of us can have a song idea and bring it up at practice and we’ll go for it, no matter what it is.
What made you all decide to converge on Boston? Doug, I know you went back to Maryland and then Jersey, and Adam is the only one from Massachusetts.
Doug: We all went here for school and fell in love with it here. Plus Adam was already here. It was really the only obvious place for us.
Has the whole Boston music scene contributed to your development as a band?
Nick: Not musically, but just being around everybody else.
Doug: I think I’ve seen it grow in the short time that we’ve been involved, and I also think we’ve been welcomed with open arms into that sort of inner cirlce. And it’s great, I think it’s fantastic that Boston tends to have a pretty close-knit scene.
Nick: It’s not like NY or LA where it’s competitive for all the wrong reasons. It’s a lot easier to get noticed in a city when you’re doing something to be a part of it and to create it. The scene that we’re a part of, we definitely enjoy being around the people in it, and there are a ton of bands and people, and it’s huge and it’s growing, and as long as you’re not an asshole…
So you recently headlined TT’s, and they seriously rolled out the red carpet for you guys: it was getting amazingly filmed by Strewnshank, I remember; that was your first headlining show?
Annie: I was nervous!
Doug: It was scary, you know? Especially cuz I think our original plan was to take the 11:00 slot, and we ended up taking the 12:00 slot after one of the other bands dropped out. It was the first time we kind of headlined, and it was a Bowery Presents show, it’s safe to say we were all kind of scared shitless.
Annie: Leading up to it, we’ve always been tucked kind of in the middle of bills, but the shows kept getting bigger and better, and so we were’nt sure if we could keep people there to see just us and not the big headliner after.
Doug: And not only did we do that, but we ended up getting our first encore ever.
Nick: We played a brand new song too! First time anyone’s ever heard it!
You’ve performing a decent amount of new stuff, “Lions,” “Whiskey/Whiskey;” obviously you’re always writing more and coming up with new songs, but how much new, set-ready material do you have?
Doug: I’d say we now have four complete, and we have a brand new one that has a really bassy riff, so that’ five, and I think the plan is to go back into the studio by the end of the summer. I think we’re going to start working on another LP, but Idont think we’re in any rush.
Your name. I know it’s a weird electricity thing (sounds like moron), but where does it actually come from?
Doug: The real source of our name can be found on urbandictionary.com.
Adam: It’s a very common transistor; it’s better than calling ourselves the Bi-Polar Junction.
Doug: That sounds edgier, we should probably change our name.
Mmk. The hoodies (Doug). Myself and everyone else who’s seen you play have been trying to come up with theories about why you always wear them.
Doug: I think as my hair got longer it became less and less manageable so the hoody just kept it in place, and it always stayed in the exact same middle spot on my head.
I think I talked to The Deep North about you coming out with your own line of designer hoodies.
Doug: I’m gonna buy a bunch of hoodies from American Apparel and sell them…for way more expensive. I have a powerpoint presentation I’m working on.
This has kind of been a huge year for you, you were at SXSW, you were in heavy rotation on FNX, you played the Rumble, how did that start and how did that keep going for you?
Doug: I think it all started with the Sheila Divine show at the Paradise in February of last year. Richard Bouchard was there, Boston Band Crush was still around. I remember standing at the merch table after our set and richard walked up in his little hat, gave me a business card for Boston Band Crush with a unicorn on it, and I guess that was the thing that kind of springboarded us. From there the shows kept getting better and better. We got played at FNX when it was still terrestrial, Michael Marotta played us on Boston Accents. And that summer, I remember being out at a bar with Jim Gilbert and he was like, “hey so there’s this band that’s coming to the Paradise this summer, and there’s no opener and I think you guys would be a really great fit, I’m gonna do everything I can to get you on that bill, they’re called The Promise Ring.” I was like “holy shit, that would be awesome.” That was huge. I think with those two shows it really turned it on our heads. It’s these small stepping stones, and we’ve been fortunate, and all of us work our asses off. We all have regular jobs and we all very much put as much time and effort into the band as we do into our normal day jobs that pay our bills and rent, but for us it’s super fun and something that we absolutely love, and like I said, usually helps make it feels less like work…
Adam: It never seems like work. I absolutely love my day job, but it’s work. I’m doing things that I love but I mean recapping a console is work, it takes forever. Spending a day in the recording studio, playing drums and trying to drink more beers than Doug, thats not work.
Doug: Yeah and like I said we’ve been really fortunate and people have been really good to us, and I think its painfully obvious how much we love doing this, and I think that appeals to people. At any given point in our set you’re gona find adam sweating thirty gallons of sweat
Nick: You’ll never see Annie standing still on stage.
If you guys could write any jingle for any product, food or otherwise, what would it be?
Nick: Altoids
Doug: Beer
It can’t be beer because we already know you endorse beer to the fullest. Side note for readers, noone is ever sober by the end of a show where The Field Effect are playing.
Adam: What would a Heady Topper jingle sound like?
Doug: You know what a really awesome product that is really underused but I really like using it? Those little toilet gels in the wand that you just stick on the end. They’re the only way to combat the Hoffman Bomb.
Annie: You guys are assholes.
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It’s almost time for Friday’s show, and I am as giddy as a schoolgirl with excitement. Grab the Field Effect’s LP, Cartography, on any magical audio format (digital or vinyl), check out some of their videos on Youtube, especially their Strewnshank-produced one from TT’s (my hand is taking a picture at about the 2-minute mark), and get your ass to The Middle East on August 23rd for The Field Effect, The Susan Constant, The Deep North, and Velah. No excuses you turkeys.