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93 South
The Glow and Bugs and Rats come straight outta Quincy
BY WILL SPITZ

After a practice session that culminated in a 30-minute dub jam, the Glow showed up at my house some time after midnight on Cinco de Mayo packing a case of Corona. Drummer Mike Kelly — "Kellzo" — walked in blasting Ol’ Dirty Bastard on his headphones and went straight for my dad’s old vinyl. Like a DJ version of an excitable kid hopping from present to present on Christmas morning, he bounced from the Beatles to Thelonious Monk to Hendrix, barely waiting for a song to end before switching LPs. Kellzo’s auditory ADD seemed appropriate after a few listens to his Quincy quartet’s debut full-length, The Ghosts Are Out, which doesn’t exactly span genres but is nevertheless difficult to pin down. They’ve been compared to everyone from Elvis Costello and Hot Hot Heat to Booker T. and the MG’s and the Specials to Billy Joel and Rancid, and it’s in this elusive familiarity that their appeal largely lies. Principal songwriter Ben Kettleson’s whirling Leslie organ evokes a bizarre sense of nostalgia for an era that may never have existed. Their sound balances common but contrasting musical idioms, with the classic pop progressions and melodies pile-driven by Kellzo’s Bonham-esque drum bashing and Kettleson’s nasally punk-rock sneers tempered by guitarist Josh Smith’s shimmering open chords and Chris Ayer’s tuneful bass arpeggios.

This all starts to make sense when you delve into the young musicians’ lengthy and diverse musical CV. All four graduated from North Quincy High School — Smith in 2000, Kettleson, Kellzo, and Ayer in 1999. Throughout high school and afterward, they played, in punk bands, ska bands, pop bands, hardcore bands. You name it, one of them has played it.

In late 2001, Kettleson decided to start a new band, and the one thing he knew about it was that he wanted to play organ. "Organ was always my favorite instrument. Any time I would hear a band that had an organ, I would love it." Armed with just a Casio keyboard, he joined up with a childhood friend, bass player Mark Peterson. They recruited Kellzo to play drums; Ayer joined when Peterson moved to New Hampshire. Shawn Martinson, who was playing in a hardcore band with Kettleson and Kellzo called Brando, was the first of a rotating cast of guitarists. "We had every kid we knew who played guitar play with us for a little while," Kettleson explains.

Then he spotted Smith playing with a short-lived band called Animalizer at a MassArt show. The two knew one another from school but hadn’t hung out much. "I was watching Josh play, and I was like, ‘This kid will be perfect for it.’ " Not only did Smith have the crystalline tone, tasteful technique, and manic stage presence they were looking for, he also had a vintage ’70s Yamaha YC-30 organ with a Leslie speaker cabinet, courtesy of North Quincy High. "I went into the band room because my brother was in school, and I saw all this old shit just sitting there, and I was like, ‘I gotta take this.’ " Smith simply asked the band instructor if he could "borrow" some stuff, and the instructor obliged. Smith made off with the organ in addition to an 88-key Fender Rhodes, which makes a couple of cameos on The Ghosts.

After Smith joined up, the band recorded a six-song demo, started playing shows, and got serious. A show with the River City Rebels led to interest from Brooklyn’s Bankshot! Records, formerly home to Leftover Crack, who’ve since moved on to Hellcat. "One day I was talking with [Rebels saxophone player] Rylan Perry and he asked if I had heard the Glow," recounts Adam Bankshot, who runs the label. "I went and checked out the tracks they had on their demo, and I was hooked."

Bankshot calls Kettleson "one of the greatest singer-songwriters to come out of Boston since Jonathan Richman." But Kettleson doesn’t approach writing in a traditional singer-songwriterly way. "I write most of my songs in my head. Most the time, I’ll come up with songs when I’m driving around or in the shower or whatever. I know people that’ll say, ‘All right, I’m gonna write a song,’ and they’ll sit down with a guitar and they’ll try and write a song. I can’t do that at all. It has to just come to me. Most of the time when I write a song I don’t have any instrument in front of me. It’s not even a melody or a progression, it’s just like an idea, a feel, and usually a rhythm, and it builds around that."

That may explain why a lot of the songs on Ghosts aren’t verse-chorus-verse structures. "5 Pints" starts with a subdued, two-chord, minor-key guitar progression and builds incrementally to a cacophonous conclusion, never straying from those two chords. "Son of a Bitch," the album’s most raucous number, opens with a Slackers-esque organ riff and a brief Jamaican-flavored jam that segues into a fast-paced punk freakout with Kellzo pounding out straight eighth notes on the bass drum and crash cymbal — a technique used by Dave Grohl in Nirvana’s "Territorial Pissings" — underneath Kettleson’s strained wailing. It could be a chorus or a verse, but it isn’t really either. Just as the Glow are somewhere between original and derivative. That’s their strength: there’s something oddly placeable about their music, yet it doesn’t quite sound like anything you’ve heard before.

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Issue Date: May 27 - June 2, 2005
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