Friday, November 25, 2011
By John Benson
After more than a decade of playing around Ohio, local rock act Third Class — Lee Boyle (vocals, guitar, keyboard, drums), Pepe Parish (vocals, bass, keyboard, drums) and Jack Boyle (vocals, bass, keyboard, guitar, drums) — has come to a major conclusion about the band-fan dynamic.
“Any group that can get someone who doesn’t like music to like them, that’s the whole goal,” said Lee, a 2002 East Palestine High School graduate. “You’re just playing to other musicians otherwise. We have to do something about that.”
Part of that something for Third Class is changing its paradigm for success. This includes no longer recording an album in hopes it breaks the group. Instead, the trio recently raised $2,000 to record an EP that it plans on giving away for free at shows. Lee said the thought process is people are more apt to buy T-shirts and merch at a show over a CD.
“They don’t know if the music was recorded in a basement or if it sounds bad,” Lee said. “So we figured with a six-song EP that kind of doubled as a demo, we can give it away.”
Titled “12 and 9 EP,” the project is the band’s third studio effort and showcases its recent efforts to become more poppy. For the sound, the band combined its 2007 guitar and synth-oriented “Chloe’s Epitaph is Chloe” with its 2009 Queen-inspired album “The Red Wheelbarrow.”
Lee said standout tracks from the new EP include the in-your-face title track, along with the mellow-yet-intricate “Demons Outside.”
“This goes back to our old style of using chord progressions that are unique,” Lee said. “On ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ we got stuck with kind of doing loops in the same key, which was fun. But these new songs have real progressions that take a while to listen to. So in that way it goes back to the old style of songwriting of progressive rock.”
Therein lies the current dichotomy facing Third Class: to sound poppy as a means of being more accessible yet remaining faithful to its progressive rock leanings, which are anything but pop-oriented. Lee explains how the threesome is struggling against compromising its musical credibility by traveling too far down the accessibility road.
“I suppose we’re not willing to compromise that but we’re just trying to fit into the niche that has come about in the last few years,” Lee said. “Indie rock is kind of a stereotype now. We were just trying to emphasize what we already were in relationship to that and not necessarily change. Just like the cover of the EP looks more stereotypical indie rock. And the way the tracks are arranged, we put the songs that sounded like each other next to each other and we don’t usually do that.”
Next for Third Class is playing around the region and creating a grass-roots following that may not include the bigger cities such as New York and Chicago.
“We’d rather see a scene built here than go out to where they already are,” Lee said. “I think playing for people in small towns who are bored has more promise to a band like us than going out and playing some venue that looks good on paper farther out of town. When we end up in the venues that everyone is supposed to play, we’re crowded. We’re a small fish. We kind of get drowned out.”