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The Receiving End Of Sirens: Feeling The Space
Rob Ortenzi on 11/29/07 @ 12:52 PMStory by :Tristan Staddon
Photos: Myriam Santos-Kayda
After releasing their warmly received debut, Between The Heart And The Synapse in 2005 and promptly touring with bands like Circa Survive and Alexisonfire, the Receiving End Of Sirens-vocalist/bassist Brendan Brown, vocalist/guitarist Alex Bars, guitarist Nate Patterson, drummer Andrew Cook and then-vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Casey Crescenzo-were earning the attention of open-minded rock fans, quickly making a name for themselves within the underground. But for every layered harmony the band could strike onstage, they were falling into deeper and more irreversible discord off of it. During their first ever headlining tour in the spring of 2006, the tension was undeniable.
"We were miserable," says Brown. "Ever since I was a little kid, my dream was to be in music. On our headlining tour, some sort of rumbling in the universe brought the thought back to me of being a freshman in high school, practicing bass guitar. I was in a huge club, we had sold more records than I ever thought we were going to sell, and I'm sitting there miserable, not wanting to play."
With the band touring constantly through much of 2005 and early 2006, Crescenzo had allowed a number of extremely serious health conditions (stomach and throat ulcers, pancreatic and kidney failure, burst lung capillaries and memory loss, most likely the result of brain damage resembling Alzheimer's) go undiagnosed because he couldn't afford medical care. Accordingly, his demeanor had became increasingly unpleasant and, by his own admission, confrontational.
"The headlining tour was terrible for everyone," says Crescenzo, who currently helms his own unit, the Dear Hunter. "I was the epicenter. At that point, I was very sick and a very unhappy person. I brought people down. There were too many creative egos, and I suppose mine had to be the loudest. I knew in the back of my mind that I was a splinter. I had worked under the skin of the band and stayed as long as I could but, eventually, the body of the band pushed me out."
By the final night of the tour-May 10, 2006, in Poughkeepsie, New York-Crescenzo had come around. With touring commitments completed, TREOS' members were returning home to recharge. Crescenzo had made plans to seek treatment for his conditions while chilling at his parents' southern California home. Something didn't feel right to him, so he asked Patterson, his closest friend in the band, if he was about to be kicked out. The guitarist replied that any perceived distance Crescenzo was feeling from other band members was a product of fatigue. When Crescenzo arrived in California, an e-mail was waiting for him telling him not to bother coming back.
"I had four e-mails, one from each of them, sent at the same time, and it was the same exact e-mail, signed 'TREOS,'" Crescenzo remembers. "I tried to call them all-no answer. I wrote back to each of them as quickly as I could, begging to be heard, to which I was told it was inarguable. I was devastated at first. A few days later, after I saw the doctors, I sent [the band] a list of my illnesses to which the response was, almost verbatim, 'We are very sorry to hear about your medical conditions. Hopefully the doctors can help. We are going to draft a public statement and would like to hear your ideas on the matter.' I know how sick I was, and I know they don't believe it still. I have brain damage.
"Truth be told, I was a total dick," resigns Crescenzo, who currently helms his own unit, the Dear Hunter. But, honestly, all bullshit aside, I just miss them. I loved them all very much, and still do, and the biggest regret I have is not telling them that more often."
"I will never say I regret being in a band with him, because that would be a flat-out lie," says Nate Patterson about Crescenzo's dismissal. "I shared some amazing times with that guy. But I also shared some very hard, I-can't-stand-you times where I couldn't be in the same room with him. It was a very difficult time because he was a very important part of the band. But I was so relieved and had the biggest weight lifted off my shoulders, I went back to being who I was before he joined the band."
"It wasn't a question of who it was, but when it was going to happen or if we could get through it," says Brendan Brown. "Not for a second have I ever thought that he's not one of the best musicians that I've ever known. I'm extremely happy that he's doing well [now], because I would hate for his talent to go to waste and to see him miserable because we dropped him. But something needed to happen for the vitality of the band to continue on."
After rehearsing their live show with only Brown and Bars singing, TREOS fulfilled their remaining 2006 touring commitments and added their one-time tour manager (and former Boys Night Out drummer) Brian Southall as a full-time guitarist/multi-instrumentalist. Taking up residency at Bars' grandparents' estate in East Killingly, Connecticut-a 50-acre property southwest of Boston featuring roughly a dozen llamas, several horses and a handful of miniature burros-in the dead of winter, they were intent to prove, both to listeners and themselves they could successfully survive Crescenzo's departure.
"It's an interesting thing, writing your second record," muses Bars. "The first couple of months, you compare everything to your first record. Everything you come up with, you wonder if it's better than what you had before. I think it was impossible not to think about, but gradually we weaned ourselves off of it. This time we wanted to be a little more precise and tactful about it instead of just going for it."
After two months of living, writing, rehearsing and endlessly jamming together in relative isolation, returning to Boston only on weekends, TREOS found an energy they lacked since their relationship with Crescenzo had soured. "It honestly felt like a whole new band," says Patterson. "You woke up with a smile on your face because you knew we were trying to create something we all felt passionate about."
The result is The Earth Sings Mi Fa Mi, an opus which, despite being considered more sparse and refined than its predecessor, still presents unbridled imagination and meticulous musical precision over an almost 70-minute running time. But while many of the conceptual elements driving the disc [see sidebar] are ambitious, they're also, Brown says, more organic. "I feel like we imposed ourselves, and what we wanted, onto the songs a lot on the first record," he explains. "On this one, we went into it with the thought that songs exist in outer space and are out there, waiting to be written."
The rest of TREOS responded to Brown's metaphysical approach immediately, especially Bars, who incorporated his own love for the work of American astronomer Carl Sagan into the material (the closing "Pale Blue Dot" shares its name with one of Sagan's most famous texts). Likewise, the rest of the band adjusted many of their preconceived notions of songwriting, infusing their appreciation for spatial relationships the way their previous album had celebrated personal ones. Now the band have a greater weapon in their sonic arsenal: silence. "On this one, we sort of let the instrument of nothingness give you a second to breathe," explains Patterson. "I was trying to use the element of space-of nothing-even if you don't hear it that much because a lot of our music is layered."
Earth is the product of five players pushing their talents to become one unified entity. For every musical progression the band have achieved, none of them would seem so striking were it not for the esoteric vocal tag team of Bars and Brown, under the supervision of returning producer Matt Squire (Panic! At The Disco, Cute Is What We Aim For). Acutely aware of the inevitable scrutiny their vocal parts would be subjected to sans Crescenzo, the duo delivered their performances with extreme passion and precision, at one point developing five different combinations of melodies for "The Breath And The Heir." "People don't think about it, but we do," explains Brown about the singers' perfectionist streaks. "We go back all the way to [our] freshman year of high school when we were a band called Settle For Nothing, thinking about how bad the vocal parts were and go, 'How are we going to pull this off?'"
"I think it's inevitable to feel anxiety about losing someone who was a big part of your band," reasons Cook. "But I'm super proud of how they stepped it up. I don't think anyone can say there's anything missing."
While they've overcome tension and dissent within their ranks to create a record that stands as the definitive statement of their young career, the Receiving End Of Sirens aren't just united as musicians, but as friends. Nobody stays in a band to be miserable; now more than ever, the band are looking forward to promoting Mi Fa Mi onstage, and their personal relationships the rest of the time.
"We all feel that we have grown so much in the past three years," says Patterson. "We are, first and foremost, very good friends. There are millions of musicians out there who are better than I am-who are better than we are-but it's almost like we're speaking to each other without saying anything. There's no better feeling when [you get] goose bumps from playing a song you've written."
"With the lineup change and talk on the message boards that we'd never be the same, I think we were all thinking, 'We have to step it up and show people that we don't want to be a flash-in-the-pan,'" says Cook. "We're not a trendy band; we're not a screamo/post-hardcore band. We had those elements in our music while we were trying to find who we were, but we've lost bits and pieces of that along the way. I think we're more confident and unique now.
"We've definitely given blood, sweat and tears for this band," says Bars. "And we'll continue to do that. This is who we are as a band; this is who we are individually. We made the record we wanted to make, and no one can take that from us. Knowing that, I don't care if we sell more records than Metallica."
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