For all their frigid post-punk stylings, we reckon The Rassle have pulled a fast one. Fooling a blog-fed mob is can be pretty easy, so maybe it’s only after meeting the boys in person that you get to the grain on The Rassle – a Texan wholeheartedness dressed for the weather in Williamsburg.
The band’s two biggest songs, Born Free and Wild Ones reveal an unchecked American Spirit © that is infectious through its own lack of ostensible irony – there is none of The Drums’ ersatz Americana – more of a sense of unalloyed spirit in Born Free, which references the red white and blue dream, and then Wild Ones displays a cockiness which is half artistic conceit and half gol’ darn true.
The band are made up of brothers Reed Van Nort and Blair Van Nort from Texas and Erik Ratensperger and Marc Solomich. All the members were in previous bands which enjoyed good levels of success. Erik was The Virgins, who supported Patty Smith and Sonic Youth and were in The Rolling Stone Top 100 Best Songs of 2008 with their song ‘Rich Girl’.
The band came straight – like Little Dragon – from SXSW when they speak to us over a couple of Becks in the March afternoon, but are in high spirits.
They talked us through being at the forefront of the DIY studio revolution – when they miked up their pokey Brooklyn flat to record their very first demos. “It was more through the circumstances we were in. We had come from other bands, and time had gone by since we had set foot in front of an instrument. We started rehearsing and recording in a way that we hadn’t done before – typically you go into a recording space, and play some songs acoustically, but we started out in our apartment” says Erik.
Blair adds: “Also we weren’t even sure what we wanted to go musically yet – so it was a lot easier just to stay at our house to record, without having the time crunch of – ‘We’ve got to get this track done today’, and not to be able to fully realise what you want to do with it.”
Watch out for The Rassle, the All-American supergroup. Just don’t tell them we said that.
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[...] and time had gone by since we had set foot in front of an instrument. The band’s two biggest Songs, Born Free and Wild Ones reveal an unchecked American Spirit that is infectious through its own [...]
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