E-Mail This Article to a Friend Heavy rotations Apollo Sunshine’s new CD takes them back to Berklee BY JONATHAN PERRY
	Related Links Apollo Sunshine's official Web site Brett Milano writes about Apollo Sunshine getting signed by German label City Slang .

The tiny (pop. 2000) Western Massachusetts hill town of Leverett is a bucolic enclave marked by rolling meadows, ancient lumber mills, humble farmhouses, and such Thornton Burgess–esque street names as Rattlesnake Gutter, Teawaddle Hill, and Rat Hollow. This pastoral hamlet, which lies just north of Amherst, boasts on its modest Web page that it’s "the only town in the United States of that name!"

But in keeping with its post-hippie past of back-to-the-land communes, Leverett is also home to the first Buddhist Peace Pagoda in the United States — a tranquil symbol of the small-town stillness — and, now, the decidedly less still, Berklee-bred avant-pop outfit Apollo Sunshine. The low-profile locale may seem self-sabotaging for a band riding a crest of commercial and critical momentum, a band who’ve opened for the Walkmen and Hot Hot Heat, pulled house-band duty for Last Call with Carson Daly, and read the mailbag on Fox Morning News. Then again, Apollo Sunshine rarely do the expected.

"It’s beautiful here," explains singer-guitarist Sam Cohen, who founded the band several years ago with fellow music-school students Jesse Gallagher and Jeremy Black. "We don’t have much money, but were able to get this big five-bedroom farmhouse, and we can play our music, day or night, as loud as we want and nobody hears us."

Gallagher, Black, and their band return to these parts this Friday to headline a CD-release show downstairs at the Middle East. Apollo Sunshine (spinArt/Heavy Rotation) follows up 2003’s left-field Katonah (spinArt) by reinforcing and expanding on the foursome’s sharply skewed melodies, shape-shifting arrangements, and fierce precision. (Since their debut, the one-time trio have added second guitarist Sean Aylward to the line-up.) The new album is all mutating soundscapes of topsy-turvy splendor, where sinewy jazz-rock instrumentals (the King Crimson–ish "The Hotter, the Wetter, the Better") nuzzle up to Apples in Stereo candy-coated party favors ("Eyes") and pastoral country pop ("Phone Sex"). The faux roadhouse shitkicker "Magnolia" is all sour-mash stomp, an indie update of "Sweet Virginia" torn from the Stones’ playbook that saunters into the fuzz-and-scuzz jam-heavy wipeout of "Phyliss." And those are only tracks six through 10.

The entire album was completed in a mere three weeks at a variety of locales — Philadelphia, Hoboken, Boston, and Leverett. After more than a year spent on the road playing some 300 shows, the band followed their own rule of thumb. "Once we get to the point where we’re sick of the songs, that’s where we’re like, okay, it’s time to stop and write and record some new stuff," Cohen says. "But live, we do play with the arrangements a lot, and there’s definitely room to express ourselves in new ways. I rarely walk off stage feeling like we didn’t add something to a song."

Expect to see — and hear — something different when the band tour this time around. In addition to having Aylward, Apollo will on some dates perform with two drummers. This Allman Brothers–esque approach took hold earlier this year, during a seven-month club residency in Amherst. "That has really shaped us more than anything else over the past year," Cohen says. "One of the goals for this new record was to lay down more grooves than we had on Katonah and make something truly danceable. Having two drummers on stage will reinforce that element for us."

Apollo Sunshine is being released by the NYC indie spinArt in conjunction with Heavy Rotation, a student-run Berklee label overseen by Berklee teacher Jeff Dorenfeld, who once tour-managed Ozzy Osbourne and Sammy Hagar and now co-manages Apollo Sunshine. "We kind of ran out of money from spinArt and needed some extra help, and they were interested in doing this project," says Cohen. "It’s added a whole new bag of resources, which is cool. For them, the advantage to working on this album is that it’s a real CD, not an imaginary thing. And for us, it’s like getting a scholarship. From our perspective, it was like, ‘How can we get this made so we can go on tour and get paid?’ "

"The label is a launching pad," Dorenfeld says. "The idea behind the label was that students listen to music and buy music — this is a music school, so why not give them a shot at finding music too? There are other student-run labels, but I don’t think anyone’s doing it on this scale. And it’s something that all the students believe in. Apollo are a very special band."

The label is set up, he continues, as a practicum course where the students promote shows, organize street teams to get the word out, and work on marketing projects aimed at press, radio, and retail. Co-releasing Apollo Sunshine stemmed from a conversation he had with spinArt founder Jeff Price. "I invited Jeff to come talk at the college — we were doing a panel on independent record labels — and when he was here we talked about Apollo Sunshine, and I said, ‘Why don’t we co-release this record? We’d really like to get involved.’ That’s how it started." Heavy Rotation will receive a return percentage based on sales of the album from spinArt. But the project is not financially driven.

"Apollo have done so much with us," Dorenfeld says. "They’ve performed at Berklee for the label four times over the last couple of years. They like to play, and they work well with the students. It’s a nice marriage."

Apollo Sunshine + Mazarin + Self Righteous Brothers | Middle East downstairs, 480 Mass Ave, Cambridge | Sept 9 | 617.864.EAST