Tyler Hayden harbors a sly, roguish grin when recounting his band’s history, as if the events in question are flecked with duplicity and Hitchcockian twists.
“Martin and I have been playing together just way too long,” he said, eyeing drummer Martin Baker in the booth next to him at Pete’s Greek Town Cafe. “He had been playing with some guys and they were looking for a tyrant to come in and just take over.”
He’s half joking, of course, but when Hayden answered the ad buried in the back of Guitar Center it planted the seed for what would become Laylights. The smart, hook-laden band is arguably Denver’s best-kept musical secret, tossing the Cinemascope melodies of U2, chiming guitars of Interpol or the Arcade Fire and pulsating rhythm section of dance- punk into the boiling pot.
But despite more than four years on the scene and a litany of high profile shows — including stints at South by Southwest and Red Rocks’ Monolith festival — Laylights still fly under many local music lovers’ radar.
The band’s new “Auricle” EP, which will be officially released at a show Saturday at the Bluebird Theater, may help correct that.
Thirty seconds of feedback prefaces opening track “Tigers,” which builds into a tower of cymbal-heavy beats, pinball notes and Hayden’s virtual choir. From there the six-song release ventures into Peter Murphy-quality dark melodies (“Petite Mort”), raucous post-punk stomps (“Get Me”), reverb-laden pop songs (“The Way It Occurs”) and tracks that would not sound out of place next to Television (“You”) or latter-day John Cale (“Between the Lines”).
“At the end of last year we stopped booking shows because we knew we needed to get this done,” said bassist Chris Martucci. “We had spent a lot of time playing around here, touring and doing festivals, so we just locked ourselves in the basement to see what we could come up with.”
The band started with a short list of older songs but ended up crafting a new batch at its subterranean practice space on East Colfax. They opted to record with Andrew Vastola of Rocky Mountain Recorders, having done their previous EP (a self-titled effort released two years ago) at Brian Feuchtinger’s Uneven Studios.
Vastola has become the go-to guy for Denver’s top indie bands, and Laylights’ experience with him only reinforces that rep.
“We had a list of studios and talked with other bands that had recorded there,” said guitarist Ian McCumber. “Tyler had also done some production work there mixing and mastering the first release from Astra Moveo (on which he sings).”
“We really appreciated that (Vastola), in little ways, challenged us to make decisions,” the bearded, bright-eyed Hayden said.
“We prepped ourselves immensely before going in,” drummer Baker added. “I would attribute that more than anything to the way the end product came out.”
Well, that and impatience. Like most bands, Laylights didn’t want to embalm its music too heavily, writing and recording the EP in a relatively short burst. They already have plans to release another by year’s end.
With so many solid local releases flooding the early months of 2008, is the band concerned it may get lost in the shuffle?
“It really just makes us smile,” Hayden asserted. “We would much rather be with a wave of bands, and be a part of something with people that we adore and respect, than drop something in the middle of the ocean.”
John Wenzel: 303-954-1642 or jwenzel@denverpost.com
Laylights
Indie rock. Bluebird Theater, 3317 E. Colfax Ave., with Ian Cooke and Andrea Ball. Saturday. 9 p.m. $8. 303-377-1666 or .
