CHAPPO with DJ Fishr Pryce
8 p.m. Friday
Fassler Hall | Oklahoma City
CHAPPO with Horse Thief and DJ Fishr Pryce
8 p.m. Saturday
Eskimo Joe’s | Stillwater
A career-changing offer just about went into the trash as Alex Chappo — namesake of the Brooklyn-bred indie-rock outfit — let the mouse hover over the delete button. It was an email asking to use their punchy, infectious jam “Come Home” in an iPod Touch commercial, an offer too good to be true for a (happily) struggling four-piece three years from first forming in the East Village. True, the song was tailor-made for commercial placement, anchored to a crowd-friendly chorus of “oohs” and “aahs,” racing through wafting acoustic strums, starry synth flurries and greasy floor guitar riffs like the very best of ’90s radio alt-rock. But it felt like a prank all the same: too out of the blue, too unexpected to be reality. Yet something brought Alex in even still, convincing him it was worth a follow-up.
“We got an email about it, and I thought it was spam. I was this close to just deleting it,” Alex said with a laugh. “I used to kind of poke fun at the bands that thought some miracle was going to drop out of the sky. You can’t operate like that. But saying that and meaning it, suddenly something did fall out of the sky for us in a very strange, organic sort of way.”
A sort of obsession brewed as a result of this moment, one that was a click away from a different existence, be it significant or not. It’s not that CHAPPO has “made it” in the most lavish sense of the phrase; they aren’t selling out arenas or topping the Billboard charts. With “Come Home” sitting at over six million plays on Spotify, though, that commercial has afforded a life that allows them to focus completely on music, a luxury not afforded to millions out there dreaming of doing the same, and to share management with The Flaming Lips. It’s that dichotomy between what is, what isn’t, what could have been and what could be that seems to mark the concept behind Future Former Self, the band’s sophomore album out May 12 … at least in an abstract sort of way.
“I wrote this short story that is about this one man who is traveling to a black hole because his planet is dying. They are getting this signal and think it may be a parallel universe calling out to them to maybe save mankind,” Alex explained of his sci-fi narrative that drove the writing of the record. “He’s traveling in this spaceship by himself, and as he’s leaving his wife traveling in space, his perception of time is warped and his dreams start to melt into his reality. I look at the whole album as a transparent flip book, layered on top of each other. So you see the journey overlapped.”
The full-length follow-up to 2012’s Moonwater, the story speaks to the sonic evolution the psych-rock-flavored band has experienced in the past eight years. It’s bounding outward, even if CHAPPO has set a border for it to roam out at a distance, as heard on lead single “Hang On.”
“We are rediscovering and redefining who we are as a band, so it’s a parallel in that sense. There’s a story behind this album, but a story behind us that seems to point at each other,” Alex said. “It plays around with different styles but tries to put the CHAPPO stamp on it. There’s some ’70s, West Coast-y kind of guitar and some grungy elements that kind of get a little funky and a little psychedelic. We do feel like the album is focused more and feels like it lives in its own world. We didn’t want to feel stuck in a certain indie rock landscape; we wanted to explore, and the songs we were writing lent themselves to that while feeling born out of the same universe.”
Maybe it’s no small coincidence that CHAPPO is under the same guiding hand that took The Flaming Lips from Long John Silver’s to festival headliners and godfathers of modern indie weirdos and screwballs. There’s downright Coynian flashes in “Come Home,” and that lava lamp swirl of billowing color and loose forms bound into this hypnotic, fluid balance is straight out of that dusty, acid-blotted notebook of satisfying the soul while fucking with your mind.
“There’s a balance of being adventurous and doing strange things and making something accessible that people can get into,” Alex noted. “It’s a good thing, to do something that isn’t so streamlined but is still approachable. We are writing more together and deconstructing and reconstructing songs. It’s far more collaborative, and I think it’s less static in that way.”
Playing two more Oklahoma gigs after an appearance at Seven 47 in Norman on Thursday and returning for July’s Center of the Universe Festival in Tulsa, the Sooner State feels like a home away from home for CHAPPO, who, though a longtime New Yorker, grew up in the swampy waters of Baton Rouge. Blending down-home goodness and freaky sensibilities, he sees the path CHAPPO is on and likes where it leads, ever mindful of the path that dissolved when he hit a reply button.
“It’s an honor to be in their neck of the woods. You can feel their presence,” Alex said of the Lips. “We stopped by the Womb last time we were here. They gave us a little moonshine, which was awesome, and that whole art commune, sort of DIY art house vibe is super appealing to us. In our own ways, we try to do similar things in Brooklyn. We aren’t quite to the point of having our own warehouse yet, but it definitely is something to aspire to.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgo1nkGBejs
