meltymelty is :
sean - vocals, guitars, misc.
kevin - bass, vocals, misc.
drums / percussion :
brian moore of brainbow
antonio garza of paper airplane / bookmobile
mark himmel of the slide machine
other related projects :
winter makes sailors the kyle sowashes k elle m
rise of the birdmen CD
1. same situation
2. black eyed
3. killing time
4. brave
5. walls
6. flit and flutter
7. mouths
after a while and after all LP
COMING SOON1. IGM
2. bear deer near
3. after a while and after all
4. RTS
5. mizzenmast
6. 1-22-21
7. already
8. blurry
What we're up to:
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MeltyMelty Reviews:
COLUMBUS ALIVE
Melt Down
Thursday, November 6, 2008 2:27 PMBy Chris DeVille
Picture this: You dedicate months to writing, rehearsing and recording an album.You find yourself on the verge of completion, proud of your creation and anxious to share it with the world.
Then everything goes poof. So much for technology.Such was the fate of Melty Melty, whose first attempt at an album vanished last year when the band's studio engineer (and sometimes drummer) Mark Himmel's hard drive melted down. (Himmel's primary band, The Slide Machine, lost an almost-complete record in the carnage, too.)
The duo of Sean Gardner and Kevin Davison soldiered on. They started over from scratch, embracing the clean slate as a chance to run wild. And at long last, two years after they started, they've emerged with the first Melty Melty album, Rise of the Birdmen. "I'm more proud of this record than anything I've done in the past," said Gardner, whose many affiliations have included Denovo, Kopaz, Bookmobile and The Kyle Sowashes. Gardner has reason to be proud. Melty Melty has been an intriguing presence in local music since he and Davison split from Kopaz three years ago and began building pop songs from drum loops, guitar arpeggios, humming synths and gentle vibraphones. Now a proper document of the band finally exists.
Of course, it's a much different document than the one that went up in smoke. "Had we not lost the original material, it would be more of a record to chill out to," Davison said.Rise of the Birdmen is pretty chill, nonetheless. Even pepped up with live drumming, these songs are somber affairs. Gardner spins yarns of detached despair, and the band dresses up his dream-state vocals in moody music and foreboding samples.As such, the record occupies a strange space between rocking out and passing out. It's a satisfying portrait of a band constantly in flux.
"What's funny about this band is we haven't been around that long, and I think our sound keeps changing and changing and changing, faster than any project I've been in," Gardner said.The duo credits much of that change to Melty Melty's rotating cast of drummers. At first, the band used drum loops for live performance and Gardner played in the studio. Himmel took over drums during the second go at recoding and, in recent months, Brian Moore (Brainbow, Tiara) has stepped in.
They'll add a few extra musicians Saturday at Ruby Tuesday after sets by The Slide Machine, Six Gallery and Joe Anderl. Then it's on to something new at last.
"You get excited about a recording, and you spend a lot of time working on it, and by the time you're finished with it, you're ready for the next thing," Davison said. "We're totally at that place."
Photo : David Smith
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DONE WAITING
Set Adrift on Melty Melty Bliss
November 7, 2008 – 6:46 pmBy Chip Midnight
It’s about time. I saw a bootleg of this being passed around at one of Miranda Sound’s final performances but when I tried to pry it loose from Brian Kopaz’s hands, I nearly lost my life. Was the wait worth it? Are you kidding me? I think Sean Gardner probably calls each of his projects “the closest thing to my heart” but I don’t doubt that if he had to pick just one project to pursue in the future, it would be this band which also includes another former Kopaz member (Kevin Davison). The local rags both did in-depth features explaining the nightmare behind the recording of this CD (well, not really nightmare in the recording process itself but the loss of all material due to a hard drive crash) so I won’t go into details here. But, the end result, the songs that were re-recorded, are among the best Sean has committed to CD and the kind that make you think “Man, if these guys relocated to Chicago or Austin or Sweden, they’d get signed to Barsuk/Merge/Dangerbird in a heartbeat”. I’m kind of a Ken Andrews geek and Melty Melty’s Rise of the Birdmen (free CDs are being given out at the release show) sounds like a trippy daydream featuring Pinback covering Andrews-written material or vice versa, I’m not really sure. There’s a wealth of sublime instrumentation, some computerized flits and flutters (that would make a good name for a song, “Flit and Flutter”) and Sean’s dreamy (seriously) vocals which could sooth babies to sleep. MP3: “Brave” If my friend Pbro (average yearly concert attendance = 0.23 shows) can make it out for this one, you should (and I should) be able to as well. Details Melty Melty, The Slide Machine, Six Gallery, Joe Anderl @ Ruby Tuesday (1978 Summit St.) Saturday, Nov.8
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THE OTHER PAPER
New on Disc: They crashed, then burned
And the resulting album was well worth the hassle
Published: Wednesday, November 26, 2008 2:16 PM ESTBy Joel Oliphint
A few weeks ago, we told you about the whole debacle Melty Melty went through while recording Rise of the Birdmen—i.e., losing the entire album to a computer crash and having to start from scratch. It makes for a good story, but good stories only matter if the record follows suit.
This one is so good you won’t really care how it came to fruition.
Like Sean Gardner’s other projects (Bookmobile, Winter Makes Sailors), Melty Melty produces highly accessible but no less artful indie rock, this time with an unmistakable deference to Pinback—a comparison I wouldn’t make lightly.
Rise of the Birdmen is polished and spacious. “Walls” is built around a simple, repeating guitar bend, and “Killing Time” is Melty Melty at its dreamiest, Gardner and former Kopaz compadre Kevin Davison making tasteful use of analog synths, eerie guitar and found sounds. “Same Situation” would be the obvious first single, if singles still mattered.
Gardner’s instantly recognizable tenor has a tendency to wander too far into whiny land, but it usually anchors the songs nicely; his inventive vocal melodies provide the majority of the album’s hooks.
Nothing against the band’s label, We Want Action, but Melty Melty deserves something bigger, and with this debut, the band just might get it.
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DON'T JUST DO SOMETHING, STAND THERE
Melty Melty
Monday, November 10, 2008By Joel Oliphint
On Melty Melty’s debut album, Rise of the Birdmen, singer Sean Gardner sounds like a man who has come to grips with technology’s aggravating tendency to implode. “Machines can tumble on over, it doesn’t even matter to me/ Machines can burn out their motors, it doesn’t even matter to me,” he sings on “Same Situation,” the leadoff track.
Gardner learned to roll with the punches the hard way. He and bandmate Kevin Davison had just about finished recording the album with their engineer/drummer Mark Himmel (The Slide Machine) when Himmel’s hard drive crashed. They lost everything.
“It was awful,” Gardner said. “We looked at companies that could recover hard drives, and it was way too much money and they couldn’t guarantee it. We got programs to try, spent countless hours at the Mac store, but it was just a lost cause. And then we all invested in external hard drives.”
It took a couple of months to gear up and start over, and once they did, the record began to take on a whole new feel. The first time through the songs had a raw, home-recorded sound, but Rise of the Birdmen is “a lot more polished than we expected and a lot more produced,” Gardner said. “We love it. I’m really, really proud of it, but it’s definitely a lot different than the beginning.”
The real beginning of Melty Melty goes back even further, to the days when Gardner and Davison were in Kopaz, a Columbus band that garnered some major label attention and then promptly called it quits. So the two began focusing on the direction Kopaz had started to take--slower, spacey, poppy and simple, taking cues from Pinback and German duo Tarwater. (On Rise of the Birdmen, the Pinback influence is impossible to miss.)
At first the pair tried to tour on their own, looping live drums with Gardner behind the kit. “It was a really cool idea but it didn’t always work,” he says. “Every song kinda started out the same and it wasn’t as fun to perform. And sometimes you’d get a bad sound guy who didn’t know what we were trying to do.”
Eventually Himmel came on board and Melty Melty did some touring, but he has since been replaced by Brian Moore, drummer for Brainbow and formerly of Tiara. Bookmobile’s Antonio Garza occasionally fills in as well, and the plan for this Saturday’s record release show at Ruby Tuesday is to have all three drummers playing simultaneously at certain points. It’s super-trendy these days for indie-rock bands to have two drummers, Gardner says, but three? “We’re treading new ground,” he joked.
Like Gardner’s other projects--Bookmobile, Winter Makes Sailors--Melty Melty doesn’t shy away from a hook. But Gardner said the different bands occupy a different space in his head when it comes to songwriting. Slower songs tend to become Winter Makes Sailors tunes; catchy, fun songs usually go Melty Melty’s way, and when writing for Bookmobile, Gardner said there’s “beer in the air and jump-kicking, the fun rock and roll side.”
Oh, and then there’s the Kyle Sowashes, but Gardner admitted not much sweat goes into his role there. “All I have to do is write a sweet tambourine part.”______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
