Consider the golden years of a beloved band.
The “early years,” when the option of selling out is but a twinkle in a hopeful guitarist’s eye. That is where we find LA’s own Division Day, a band just on the cusp, which is the right place to be, creatively.
Division Day has paid its dues at intimate (read: tiny) venues like the Echo this past year. But in the space of the same year, the quartet has begun to move on up to such stages as the notorious South By Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas, and will grace the Music Box at the Fonda this Sunday with Voxtrot.
While the band has access to these venerable venues, actually playing them does not yet feel normal.
“It’s surreal when you are playing a larger show. Everyone is farther away, and the audience becomes one big person,” said Division Day guitarist Ryan Wilson, who can appreciate the “charm” of smaller shows.
It was not so many years ago that Division Day played at UCLA’s own Cooperage, a show that Wilson, a proud UCLA alum, recalls endearingly.
“I was really involved in school. I was on the Campus Events Commission and knew a lot of people who were still at UCLA. It was great then to be playing where I had once watched other bands,” Wilson said.
This full-circle type of fulfillment seems to be part of the territory for a group of musicians who can still relate to being ordinary audience members and just plain lovers of music. And their music has only to gain from this vantage point.
After a small initial self-release of their first LP, Beartrap Island, Division Day signed with Eenie Meenie Records and remastered the album, re-releasing it with two additional tracks, a change that was sometimes challenged by fans.
“I think it would have done a disservice to those two songs if we just tacked them on to the end as bonus tracks,” Wilson explained.
Such an opportunity for growth was welcome to a band that once enthusiastically taped their songs on handheld recorders.
“In the beginning we were very DIY … We even went as far as recording onto people’s voice mails,” Wilson said.
Now that Division Day has fully-equipped recording studios at their disposal, the excitement of the creative process and recording songs like “Tap-Tap Click-Click,” has not dulled.
“(Recording is) like playing video games with your friend as a kid, and you play all night and then all of a sudden you realize it’s five in the morning,” Wilson said,
The studio recording did not dampen the creative spirit.
“We were really fortunate that we were recording with people who were just as enthusiastic as us,” Wilson said.
The final version of the CD has a narrative quality indicated by its title, but it is not bogged down by the loftiness of being an actual concept album. The narrative is reinforced by the promotional map of “Beartrap Island,” complete with imaginary topography, illustrated by vocalist Rohner Segnitz. This multimedia amalgamation gives form to the album’s theme.
“”˜Beartrap Island’ is a fictional place, but it’s also a state of mind; one of isolation, of living in LA, surrounded by strange things,” Wilson said.
One of the added tracks, “Ricky,” exemplifies the “Beartrap Island” state of mind, as well as the band’s capable and mood-shaping musicality. An undeniable beat and the story-like lyrics “Ricky knew the river was a dangerous place” invoke an anxiety-filled landscape you can almost see.
The song is not unique on the album for its charismatic drumming, something that consistently lends the tracks immediate likability. The layering of unusual sounds over this rhythmic backbone becomes as much a theme of the album as its fictional setting without creating a mundane homogeny of songs matching sound-for-sound.
“The songs are related in that they are about similar things, but they don’t necessarily sound the same,” Wilson said.
The overall effect is a careful balance of brave and experimental noises, tempered by enticing rhythms and customary forms. Experimental but not inaccessible: a difficult but important equilibrium to maintain without toppling into mediocrity on the one hand, or artsy pretension on the other.
This balance recalls the balance of the band itself, situated somewhere between the reality of temp jobs and playing sold-out residencies at Spaceland. Trying to make it to the side of having their passion be their paycheck, while still being in touch with the idealism of music devotees, lands Division Day right into those prime years of uncompromised creativity.
“That balance is important to us,” Wilson said, “We enjoy art records, but we always go back to good pop songs, and we want to create things that people can enjoy like that, that are accessible.”