broncho

Double time: Tulsa’s BRONCHO returns with sonically drenched new album
for The Oklahoman / NewsOK / LOOKatOKC

Photo by Pooneh Ghana.

“You gotta settle into it.”

Ryan Lindsey, singer and guitarist of Tulsa quartet BRONCHO, is talking about the band’s new album, “Double Vanity.”

When he says it, we’re reclining on a thrift store sofa in the makeshift living room of BRONCHO’s post-apocalyptic warehouse space in Tulsa, surrounded by trusses, mirrors and metallic plastic sheeting. There’s a large tube television playing a VHS tape of the 1985 Chevy Chase comedy “Fletch” and a slowly floating but seemingly permanent haze in the air.

I did eventually settle in, to the environment and the album. In both cases, it did not happen right away.

Where BRONCHO’s two previous punky efforts sped by at one hour combined, “Double Vanity,” out Friday on Dine Alone Records, is a comparative stroll. It’s a rich, reverb-drenched 40 minutes, equal parts darkness and pastel watercolor. It’s what Lindsey calls a slow headbang record, and it marks a stark about-face for Lindsey, guitarist Ben King, bassist Penny Pitchlynn and drummer Nathan Price.

In other words, meet BRONCHO 2.0: They’re here to set the mood.

Off the heels of “Class Historian,” the 2014 earworm single whose “da da doo doo doo doo” refrain made it a breakout hit (the track currently boasts more than 12 million plays on Spotify), Lindsey’s talent for penning pop and punk hooks reached its largest audience yet.

It comes as a surprise, then, that the band’s next move slows things down considerably. “Double Vanity” is a statement record: grungy and expansive, with every song chugging along at the same leisurely tempo, all vocals and guitars alike twisted under billowy recording effects.

But still, under that first impression are the fundamentals, glimmers of the trademarks that have made BRONCHO successful so far. Giving the album time, according to Lindsey, is crucial: “Once you commit to it, that’s where the little parts of it start to show themselves.”

Matter of understanding

One of those critical reveals is Lindsey’s singing style, a distinctive drawl that has grown increasingly unintelligible since BRONCHO’s inception. It’s what SPIN recently called “androgynous” and “elastic,” and Lindsey doubles down on this style on “Double Vanity,” along with studio effects further obscuring most every line.

“That’s the one thing everyone in our crew had an issue with, but that’s what everyone has always had a problem with, with me — they can’t understand what I’m saying,” Lindsey said. “It’s not intentional; it’s just the way I am. When I focus on ar-tic-u-la-ting, I think about that rather than taking in whatever makes me feel good about performing.”

The vocal character Lindsey plays in BRONCHO has contributed to the band’s charm immensely, but of course complicates clarity for the listener, literally muddying what the band has to say. This is something Lindsey understands despite his tongue-in-cheek stage antics.

“Ben and I, when we’re talking lyrics, we want things completely drenched,” Lindsey said. “I care about lyrics that might be misheard, but sometimes I’ll hear a song and think it’s great, and I hear the real lyrics later and lose some emotion for it.”

Take “Fantasy Boys,” the new wave-y lead single in which Lindsey coos, “Is it something in your walk / is it your legendary play / I wanna eat you up / I wanna drop your name.” Reviewers pounced on the innuendo of the track, likening it to ’80s romantic movie anthems. Close friends, however, say it was initially inspired by the dynamics of a fantasy basketball league. As ever, BRONCHO leaves it up to listeners to decide what they’re hearing.

“I’m making stuff for myself, something that I like,” he said. “I don’t necessarily think of it selfishly until I have to step back and explain myself. And maybe it is a little selfish or self-indulgent, I don’t know. I think there’s people who get it. And hopefully we find the people who do.”

Influential partners

Whether you get it or not, “Double Vanity” owes no small thanks to a couple of the people who do: the production team of Jarod Evans and Chad Copelin at Blackwatch Studios in Norman. The two have incidentally become less-than-silent partners in this era of BRONCHO, harbingers of a technical kismet that has borne heavy influence.

“We’ve gotten to a place where we know how to work with them, and I didn’t wanna mess that up,” Lindsey said. “I like the way they deal with the stress of the studio and the stress of getting something done.”

Working with longtime friends in a familiar setting also allowed BRONCHO some liberties with the record’s pace and environment. According to Lindsey, the band spent the first week of studio time “getting the vibe right,” finding drum sounds and setting up a lounge that included parking the band’s RV and adding patio furniture and artificial grass to create a studio lawn.

And spending that time proved critical. After initial “scratch” recordings and drums were completed, Copelin had the opportunity to purchase an AKG BX20, a massive analog spring reverb unit discontinued some decades ago, famous for its ability to re-create concert hall-style echoes within a small studio space.

“I fell in love with it. It brought the record to life for me and everybody in the band, like, ‘Oh, there it is. We have a record,’ ” Lindsey said. “It felt like cheating. Two weeks into recording, I found out I liked the way my vocals sounded through it and the way guitars sounded through it, and we were on a path.”

Meanwhile, Evans’ newfound interest in manual video production meant much of the recording process was captured visually as well, inadvertently creating a hazy, multicolored aesthetic that has synced up perfectly with the songs and album-related artwork.

“Those cameras kind of have their own vibe and really set the tone for what we wanted to do with our first video,” Lindsey said.

Evans had been searching for a discontinued editing system called Video Toaster (originally engineered by Brad Carvey, reportedly the inspiration for his brother Dana’s character Garth in “Wayne’s World”) for some time. While in the studio, Evans found it for sale — for a mere $500, in Norman. The result of that fateful purchase is a blurry and absurd but suggestive video for “Fantasy Boys,” shot mostly in the warehouse.

Places and parties

A former production space for bathroom fixtures, the industrial building and its surrounding land are peppered with empty hot tub shells, the ceilings and walls coated with inches of chemicals layered so thick it all appears to be frosted, part dirty cake, part limestone cave. BRONCHO’s headquarters looks exactly like a place where an album like “Double Vanity” could be conceived: more than a little dirty, littered with bygone artifacts and somehow still brand-new.

A stage and catwalk are prominent in the center, and various iterations of the stage set — a complex tangle of mirrors, plastic foliage, wire fixtures and purple lighting — are assembled inside when the band is at home.

Currently, though, BRONCHO is in the middle of the first of several summer tours, this one a monthlong, cross-country trek of the sort that has consumed the members’ lives over the past few years.

“I found a way to never be home,” sings Lindsey on “Soak Up the Sun,” track nine of the new LP. Whether that’s really what he’s saying is anybody’s guess, of course.

“All I know is ‘Double Vanity’ is a place I’ve been trying to get to,” Lindsey said. “In some ways, people might be turned off by it, but it also opens us up to other people. There have been those fans after the shows who just want to party, party, party … but I think this is more of a party record than any of our other records. This is the type of party I would go to.”