Fort Collins – Matson Jones bonded over diner food, stupid human tricks and Casio-assisted break-dance aspirations.
So it seemed fitting to meet the Colorado cello-punk band, now generating national attention, at Chipper’s Lanes, “where Fort Collins comes for fun and entertainment.”
The group’s well-received 2004 self-released CD recently landed in the right hands, leading to a deal with the respected Long Beach, Calif., indie imprint Sympathy for the Record Industry. That company’s founder, “Long Gone” John, is credited with launching the career of one of the most important bands in recent rock history, the White Stripes.
Sympathy’s catalog includes the Dwarves, the Detroit Cobras and Rocket From the Crypt.
“You never quite expect people to respond,” Matson’s stand-up bass player, Matt Regan, said about the speed with which the group found a following. “It always takes you back, and when people really like (the music), you just slap yourself in the head and say, ‘This is amazing.”‘
The rerelease of the band’s self-titled debut brings much-needed distribution and tour support. Pair that with good timing – strings are surfacing in rock ‘n’ roll in such bands as Nine Inch Nails and The Mars Volta along with local bands including Munly and the Lee Lewis Harlots, and Slim Cessna’s Auto Club – and these kids could be the state’s next major export.
Their frenetic sound and poetic, manipulated vocals are already getting props from major music magazines and underground radio stations.
But it took a referral from another band, and then a second nudge from his daughter, for Sympathy’s John – who closely guards his last name – to listen to the Matson Jones CD, a 10-song collection the band recorded in a friend’s basement in Littleton.
Just one listen, and he was hooked.
“I don’t know what it was, but the instrumentation intrigued me,” John said recently from California. “They seemed to be sophisticated beyond their years. … It seemed so much more important than another (expletive) garage rock band.”
John has worked with more than 550 bands and released about 750 albums in 16 years of running his own label. With all of that perspective, he has high hopes for the Fort Collins kids.
“They’re just incredibly talented people marching to a different drummer,” he said. “I don’t even know what comparison I could make.”
Back to the bowling alley
While the band does possess a goofy, theatrical side that surfaces in its melancholy, string-driven indie rock, Matson Jones is not quite goofy enough to have sought out Chipper’s Lanes in the past.
It turns out singer-cellist Anna Mascorella had a childhood bowling trauma in which she broke a finger while goofing around with a bowling ball. Still, being a good sport, she secured a pair of worn-out red, white and blue bowling shoes and pronounced: “I’m going to be brave.”
Not that she and her bandmates are particularly inconspicuous among the flip-flop and flip-phone crowd at Chipper’s. Case in point: Regan’s geek-chic glasses, drummer Ross Harada’s Gene Shalit eyebrows and cellist-singer Martina Grbac’s black-widow bouffant are nothing like the jeans and T-shirts dominating the neighboring lanes.
Matson Jones may not be as at ease at Chipper’s as the band is among music snobs and hipsters at the nearby Surfside 7 dive bar, but the camaraderie among band members is clear. Grbac has described their chance introduction as similar to finding “the one” to marry, equally daunting and enlightening.
And that kinship should be even more evident on the band’s new songs.
“They have more soul to them,” Harada said. “Our first songs were kind of poppy punk rock – pretty simple. Our new stuff has definitely matured. We’re testing out more time signatures, and the instruments are all played much better.”
In the past, the two cellists hammered out melodies while the bassist and drummer filled in the soundscape. That process also evolved in their two years together. “It’s definitely more collaborative,” Regan said.
Distinct from Rasputina
The people turning up for Matson Jones shows – nearly 600 strong at the recent CD release party at the Bluebird Theater – range from moms and dads to frat boys, art nerds to the punk crowd. Still, there aren’t nearly as many Goth kids as in the crowd that follows the New York cello-rock outfit Rasputina, to which Matson Jones is most commonly compared.
The reference doesn’t click.
“They’re more melodic, and we’re more rhythmic,” Mascorella said.
Harada never even listened to Rasputina before critics started referencing the two bands together. “I don’t think we sound like them at all,” he said.
The influences they gladly claim include PJ Harvey, the Smiths and the Pixies.
One more thing that sets this quartet apart: Their self-proclaimed “square” lifestyle. The band’s worst vices consist of speeding and candy-grubbing. They joke about slipping into their jammies after a New Year’s Eve hotel gig while the rooms around theirs exploded with rock-star shenanigans.
“We don’t really get drunk and crazy,” Mascorella said.
By the end of a 10-frame game that lasts more than an hour, only Regan, who set out to beat Harada’s score, times five, broke 100. But Mascorella has been cured of her bowling phobia, and the band in general has experienced a new Fort Collins cultural niche.
“I’m not afraid of bowling anymore,” Mascorella said. “I’m not very good, but I can do it.”
Staff writer Elana Ashanti Jefferson can be reached at 303-820-1957 or ejefferson@denverpost.com.
