FROM THE LUSH opening soundscape of the first track, “Another Tribe,” it’s obvious that dredg’s latest album, Chuckles and Mr. Squeezy, is like nothing they’ve done before. The song’s lyrics could even be read as lead singer Gavin Hayes’ anticipation of resistance to the popular Los Gatos indie band’s electronic direction: “They always say they’re against the grain/Come on, they all look the same/They just joined another tribe.”
But in fact, Hayes says he wasn’t expecting the amount of attention that’s been given to the new sound.
“I’m surprised that people are surprised by that,” says Hayes by phone from their San Diego tour stop.
And perhaps they shouldn’t have been, considering that the veteran alt-rock band worked with hip-hop producer Dan the Automator, to whom Hayes gives enormous credit for helping dredg re-invent themselves sonically. They also relied on some guidance from drummer Dino Campanella, who has been fooling with electronic music for quite some time, and sharpened his genre chops playing gigs with the Limousines.
Earlier evidence that dredg was in the mood for the unpredictable came with their epic 2009 album (and their first after leaving Interscope), The Pariah, the Parrot, the Delusion. The record was full of contradictions: it was dense, yet hookier than anything they’d done before, fully prog-rock, yet tight all the way through, arty yet perhaps their most commercial release. If anyone was expecting a backlash from the record’s shift in sound, it never came; in fact, it was the band’s highest-charting album.
“I think that’s what this band’s about,” says Hayes of their creative risk-taking. “If we were regurgitating the same record over and over, this band would have broken up a long time ago.”
Instead, they’ve been together for 18 years, with the four core members (also including Mark Engles on guitar and and Drew Roulette on bass) unchanged since 1993.
What continues to evolve, as on Chuckles and Mr. Squeezy, is the band’s art. Clearly, they saw this coming, having early on adapted the Chinese symbol for “change” as their logo.
“That symbol is true to the band,” says Hayes. “We live by that.”-—
Plaza de Cesar Chavez in San Jose
Thursday, August 4
5:30pm; free.
