Trombonist Ryan Heisinger explains, “It’s something that every band does: joking around and doing stupid things.”
“But the question you need to ask yourself is, ‘Can we actually pull this off to a level that makes it look like we’re not making fun of ourselves?’ It’s one step to make someone laugh. But if you make someone laugh and they keep listening to the song because they like it, that’s the most important thing to me.”
It’s a respectable philosophy. Especially when talking about ska, the either dearly beloved or violently hated genre of music. Originally a precursor to reggae, ska evolved over the decades to a British political movement with Two Tone, only to become a mainstream commercial success and then a joke in the 1990s in its Third Wave. Today, ska is experiencing a fourth wave resurgence, aka New Tone.
But in particular, Heisinger is talking about his band—the 12 piece Voluntary Hazing—playing Art Boutiki on July 19 to celebrate the release of their debut full-length, Addictive Little Sounds.
It’s a concept album inspired by the surreal nature of modern life. Those “addictive little sounds” of everyone’s smartphones handing out serotonin pellets with each notification. The idea was built around the track “Neurotic,” a stranger-than-fiction tale inspired by lead singer Kayla Renelle’s life.
“I was dating a guy and looked on Venmo and saw he had been out with one of his exes!” she says. “It was stupid but caused a real emotion. I remember thinking, ‘This is absurd and weird that this app can make me feel this way and out him like that.’”
The album is as addicting as its theme (as are their music videos!), but get one thing straight: They do not condone hazing.
“We start out every show by saying that,” Renelle states. “For this upcoming show we even have T-shirts with a contract saying ‘I do not condone hazing.’”
The name comes from their marching band roots at San Jose State University.
“There was a tradition that every year before the first game, people would go into the porta-potties and play the fight song,” she explains. “It had been going on for 30 years or something. However, if you didn’t want to do it, you didn’t have to. Nobody cared. It was just a silly way to pass the time.”
Hence, Voluntary Hazing.
Along with taking their name from their college days, the band actually formed on campus at SJSU as an unofficial after school club. Drummer Alex Quick says he and tenor saxophonist Thomas Narveson “started the band as a way to introduce more people to ska at San Jose State.
“Right out of high school I was playing punk and ska music at Gilman all the time and absorbing whatever I could from local bands like The Skunkadelics, Day Labor, and Monkey,” Quick says.
While other students were out partying, they met every Friday night, after hours at the San Jose State band room. Heisinger joined in those early days and soon the unofficial club became its own underground movement.
“We had a revolving door for basically the first two years of existence,” Heisinger says. “We’d play ska for two or three hours and it would be just whoever could show up.”
Back then they were known as the SJSU Ska Ensemble and sometimes had as many as 50 musicians at once. Fast forward to today and Voluntary Hazing still has a rotating cast of musicians, varying from 6 to 12 depending on the show.
While their practices might be more structured, VH still takes every chance to have fun. It’s how they ended up writing one of their dancier numbers, “Skemsco,” short for “Ska-emo-disco.” And that’s just what the track is: a ska, emo, disco mash-up that’s completely insane and yet irresistibly catchy and smart.
“That was a lot of Kayla and our old bass player, Leela [Paymai],” Quick says. “Leela and I would constantly play songs that she would shout out a genre and we’d go for it.”
Surprisingly, it’s not their first venture into the realm of emo. In fact, Voluntary Hazing solidified around Heisinger’s audio class project to record, mix and produce a song: their 2019 cover of Panic! at the Disco’s “I Write Sins Not Tragedies,” which can still be heard on Bandcamp and Spotify.
But Voluntary Hazing doesn’t just love 20th century music. After all, they’re a bunch of self-proclaimed “band nerds” who respect the classics.
“We have three classical chords on the album,” he states, listing “Rite of Spring,” “Jupiter” from Holst’s The Planets and Alexander Glazunov’s “Saxophone Concerto.”
OK, that last one is early 20th century. Yet it’s a great example of Voluntary Hazing’s essence: a little bit of humor mixed in with dedicated playing, so the listener not only enjoys one track but keeps listening.
