SeaMonster

Bands named CrankCase cannot forever nourish the musical soul and thus one monikered outfit, a funky, jazzy little thing featuring drummer Pete Deeble and bassist Sam Stroosma, begat a new unit, with a vocalist/guitarist named Matt Clatterbuck along for the swim. Or maybe it’s better said that Deeble pulled Stroosma in after a time. Whatever. That’s at least a neat version of the story and lest we grow too bogged down in saltwater rock esoterica, we’ll move forward and say that through the usual channels and common friends and failed music experiments, this newly-formed trio was able to shed its natural-born ooze and become a real recording unit somewhere around the end of 2001, which marked the moment that, as Deeble says, the three got serious about music.

But what distinguishes the era of The SeaMonsters from other eras like it? For one, Deeble and Clatterbuck say, there’s a sparseness to the music that can’t be found under every musical rock. The SeaMonsters’ sound relies on bass - not guitar - to drive the melodies. “Sam really likes to move around on bass,” Clatterbuck says. “Pete is a really good funk drummer, but he’s got the coolest indie rock vibe happening. It’s not pure funk that he brings in.”

Deeble adds, “I think another distinction is that before Sam joined, what we were messing around with before was a four-piece, and we stripped down to this form, and it became something where each instrument had to carry more of the load.” He continues, “We were also listening to a lot more Minutemen and taking that direction where the guitar would be really minimal and the bass would carry the song and then there’d be some kind of trade off. Just trying to emulate that kind of minimalism helped direct the flavor of the music.”