Let Them Rock

CAPITOL GAINS: "People have heard everything under the sun now," says Shai Halperin (second from right). "You have to really position yourself."

The Capitol Years get drunk on their first full band full-length.

by Michael Pelusi

As the story goes, one day in the mid-'90s, Shai Halperin, then an undergrad at Rutgers-New Brunswick, went to his regular college radio gig, all prepared to spin his usual assortment of indie rock. But fate got him to the studio early that day.

"The DJ before [me] was just playing one tone for 20 minutes straight. I had some kind of an epiphany," he remembers now, while nursing a glass of merlot at Tavern on Green. After that moment, Halperin's radio show would no longer be a mere vehicle for the latest Guided by Voices. In the ensuing weeks, he'd plunder the station's archives. "The library had lots of sample records, like noise, sound effects and spoken word. So I started mixing all kinds of weird stuff."

At face value, juxtapositions that seek out the sublime within cacophony are far away from the anthemic, good ol' rock 'n' roll Halperin's band The Capitol Years is best known for. Or maybe not: Look closer and you'll find there's a lot about The Capitol Years that isn't so "ol'." They revel in strange corners and unlikely pairings. Their boisterous melodies are most happy when they get to switch gears midway through, skidding off into a different tempo, a new riff. The lyrics shake and bake rock cliches. "I'm lucky like a piece of wood / I'm lucky at the bottom of the lake," they'll sing. "I'm lucky, so lucky to be loved." Their three albums and one EP feature enigmatic lo-fi, Who-like whirling and fragile country whispers.

Oddly it's the EP, Jewelry Store (2003), that is probably the band's most well-known effort — the one that garnered them favorable notices from Rolling Stone's David Fricke and others, and their first stint playing house band last year for Last Call with Carson Daly. (A second go-round just aired March 1-4.) Jewelry Store was, until now, the only release to feature the full band — Meet Yr Acres (2001) and Pussyfootin (2003) were largely solo Halperin efforts.

The new Let Them Drink (Burn & Shiver) is the first full-length with the complete Capitol Years lineup: Halperin, bassist Dave Wayne Daniels, guitarist Jeff Van Newkirk and drummer Sir Kyle Lloyd. Drink's mix of the high energy and the contemplative, Halperin says, is an attempt to craft a more balanced presentation of the band's various moods and shades. Just as Halperin once got joy out of radio sound collages, on Let Them Drink, The Capitol Years' combinations, if less outré, are just as high-spirited.

For audiences whose impressions of the band largely derive from Jewelry Store, Let Them Drink gives a better indication of their range, letting in more of the intricate vocal harmonies and textures of Meet Yr Acres. "This is where you want to show some more vocal melody and harmony," says Halperin, "which is what, in the end, I like hearing in records."

The band is still striving to craft a stage act more representative of their eclectic recorded output. They've got the rock-energy, raw-power element down — the effortless high kicks, joyous windmills and all. But the band would love to be able to start incorporating its quieter side. (For more of that, see the offhandedly lovely, quiet Pussyfootin, a collection of Halperin's home recordings.) "That's partly our responsibility to get [the audience] quiet enough just by the material," Halperin says. "But I'd be thrilled to have a room where you can play beautiful quiet stuff and stretch out and also explode into really loud, noisy [songs].

"It's not like the '60s, where people were mesmerized by this new thing, rock 'n' roll," he muses, "their bodies spazzing out because they've never heard anything like it before. People have heard everything under the sun now, and you have to really position yourself to be able to have that sort of concentration from the room."

But, he reconsiders, "Even in the '60s, still, Pete Townshend and The Who played insanely loud because they must've had that problem too."

Halperin, who moved with his family from Israel to New Jersey as a boy, first found music through his father's Supertramp and Queen albums. "I used to think the end of "Bohemian Rhapsody' was the heaviest thing I ever heard in my life. Then I got into the Beatles really, really young and got obsessed."

While at Rutgers, Halperin led a band (featuring Daniels and, later on, Lloyd) called Mastercaster — "Sonic Youth-y with worse vocals," he says now. After college, the band moved to Philly, got a loft in a terrible neighborhood and eventually broke up. Soon Halperin was assembling demos for what would become Meet Yr Acres, not entirely sure what it was he had. "This is in the wake of Mastercaster, which really, despite its not making an impression on too many people, for us who lived through it, it was an intense time," he says matter-of-factly.

Over the phone, Kyle Lloyd theorizes, "The thing about Mastercaster was just a certain tension. I don't know why. It was just the way it worked. We needed to break up to make it work. And then The Capitol Years was just focused on, "let's play, let's make good albums, let's tour.'"

Now on their fourth release, The Capitol Years are among Philadelphia's most promising and hardest-working rock bands. Like many other local musicians, Halperin is a tireless booster of other Philly acts, waxing enthusiastic about the likes of National Eye and Mad Action. "There's people making really good music around here. Eventually the [national] media will come around Philadelphia and make it their little spot for a year or a year and a half or two. It might happen within 50 or 100 years, but it'll happen eventually. It'll happen for a year or two and that'll be it. What we have here is great anyway. Enjoy it while you can."

Touring, Halperin says, is key to breaking into the world outside Philly. "I know a lot of people who simply can't allow themselves to do it. And they really should because, you know what? They're not living in New York. Even though it's getting more expensive to live here, rent is not astronomical. You can still live in a house with people and do it and go on tour."

Not that the band isn't cognizant of the touring life's many pitfalls. "It's probably the best way to travel but it's also the worst way to keep your life straight and keep your bank account straight," says Lloyd. (For the current U.S. tour, Adam Granduciel of War on Drugs is subbing on bass for Daniels.)

There are matters like finding a place to stay at each tour spot. "We do have friends around the country, but other times we have to make friends," Halperin says. "And I learned this from Dimitri [Coats, of Burning Brides]. You call out from the stage when you're almost done. "Alright, thanks for coming out tonight. Listen, if anybody has any space on their floor tonight, we got some crack band people to do the dishes, make you eggs in the morning.'

"That lifestyle is rough. But there are definitely some great elements of that — meeting interesting people, meeting interesting, great pets. Traveling the country to get to meet all kinds of different dogs and cats, it's pretty cool. You know that you're alive when you're meeting all kinds of different dogs."

The Capitol Years
Let Them Drink (Burn & Shiver)
Opening with shots of warm vocal harmonies and a clipped "I'm Waiting for the Man" rhythm, Let Them Drink offers arguably the most fully realized distillation of The Capitol Years' many, varied talents. The band and longtime producer Thom Monahan temper the bombast that occasionally dragged down Jewelry Store with some well-placed acoustic ballads, like the whimsical title track or the short-and-sweet "Going Down." This means they really earn their fist-pumping, air-guitaring moments — the killer "what about your friends" hook of "Mounds of Money," the broke-down chorus of "Solid Gold," the Marshall-toppling flourish of "Lucky." —Michael Pelusi