THE DRIFT

By Kyle Lemmon

Photo by RC Rivera

Genre pigeonholing is like typecasting — bands or actors, no one’s very keen on it, though most find it near impossible to escape. San Francisco four-piece The Drift has dealt with its unfair share of “post rock” critiques from the press, but hasn’t let that dampen its spirit. Stalwart spokesman and bandleader Danny Grody views the categorization as an obligatory obstacle: “Whether you want someone to call your music this or that, it’s out of your control. It’s part of human nature to want to organize and give things titles, but at the same time, it’s very limiting.”

“Limiting,” or anything remotely close, is definitely not a satisfactory descriptor of the atmospheric dub-jazz-rock grooves on The Drift’s sophomore album, Memory Drawings, released on Temporary Residence Ltd. in April. The record’s eight tracks straddle the line between grimy Afro-beat, dank disco-soul, late 1960s free jazz and late ‘70s dub. Although there are no lyrics pushing The Drift’s dust-storm musical narratives, the band’s clarion trumpet player, Jeff Jacobs, steps up as the album’s emblematical lyricist/vocalist. Notes Grody, “We certainly wanted to highlight the melody for Memory Drawings and Jeff’s trumpet helped with that.” Guitarist/keyboardist Grody, drummer Rich Douthit and upright bassist Safa Shokrai fill the rest of the band’s expansive sonic canvas.

In a very apt parallel between art and music, The Drift’s method of crafting its songs falls in line with the hazy oceanic art depicted on the cover of Drawings by San Francisco artist Colter Jacobsen (who also drew the cover of The Drift’s debut, Noumena). “Colter is fascinated with the concept of drawing from memory and I can really relate to how he’s playing off his intuition,” Grody says. “We do a lot of our songwriting as a group when we go into the studio or practice. We usually try to remember elements of what we’ve recorded and just expound off of that memory.”

Drawings’ foggy and nostalgic signifiers really ensconce and distend themselves in the album’s grainy ambience, itself a result of the record’s analog recording at San Francisco’s Tiny Telephone studio with veteran producer Jay Pellicci. Though they don’t consider themselves audio classicists, the members of The Drift unquestionably reap the medium’s recompense. According to Grody, “It’s a combination of really enjoying the warmth of analog recording — which suits what we are doing — and the ability of the sound spreading on the tape that technically does not happen when you’re recording with digital media, which essentially compresses music.”

Grody is also a member of the very experimental and prolific Tarentel, which formed in 1995 and often threatens to eclipse his work in The Drift. He appreciates the variety though, explaining, “Now I have a really nice spectrum between the two groups. For me, it gives some balance. I hold them both as equal projects.” Grody isn’t the only one attached to other endeavors — his bandmates’ copious projects dot the underground Bay Area music landscape as well.

While The Drift has had its share of genre pigeonholing to deal with, the band also got slapped with a “pretentious” ticket for titling its first album Noumena, the philosophic term used by 18th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, and a result of Jacobs’ love of philosophy. The band has certainly progressed in the 21st century, however, earning a spot at England’s All Tomorrow’s Parties festival and nabbing the vibrant Four Tet to remix its song “Gardening, Not Architecture” for its Ceiling Sky EP. As the EP — which gathers rare and previous vinyl-only tracks on CD — reveals, The Drift embraces the digital and analog worlds with indistinguishable zeal. Not too bad for a group that’s supposedly “pretentious.”

Kant’s profound, yet simple idea of things in and of themselves wraps itself around both the band’s first album and its more melody-driven follow-up; it suits the kind of ideas The Drift commits to tape. Grody lays The Drift’s tunes on the line: “You put it on and you feel a connection with it or not, but they exist and hopefully you can exist with it.”

www.myspace.com/trldrift