It takes a special kind of band to draw out the observation, “Your parents must have listened to a lot of Beach Boys when you were a kid.”
“My parents did, and I’m glad they did, because I love that stuff now,” chimes Mike Marchant, the singer-guitarist behind Widowers, one of Denver’s most promising pop acts. “It wasn’t always that way, though. When I was a teenager, I got into grunge — Stone Temple Pilots and stupid stuff like that. I got into the mind- set that I had to slay on the guitar and play all these big solos.
“But after a while of doing that, I got bored and started listening to the Zombies, It’s a Beautiful Day, Love and the Beach Boys. The song structures in that kind of music are simple and easy to work with, and it wasn’t long before I was writing songs in that vein without any destination in mind.”
Marchant is a cabaret singer and a pop maestro, an old folkie and a psychedelic rock crooner. He may have started writing songs without a vehicle in mind, but he and his music found a home when Constellations broke up in 2007, a split that handed Marchant four solid players — synths player Mark Shusterman, drummer Cory Brown, lead guitarist Dave Hart and bassist Mark Weaver — who also happened to be his close friends and roommates.
“We get along really well, but we have a weird band dynamic,” said Marchant, talking from his band’s practice/recording space, which doubles as the big, old house in the neighborhood just north of City Park that four of them call home. “We all live together, and we all have for a long time. Our strategy is simple: We don’t hang out with each other all the time. I know a lot of bands around town, and whenever I see them, they’re all together. It blows my mind. We don’t do that, and maybe it’s a conscious decision. We don’t want to get sick of each other.”
Marchant is all over the place on his band’s self-titled debut record, which will be released Thursday at the Larimer Lounge. The band’s full- length album, “Widowers,” is the kind of record that shows the difference between sleepy rock ‘n’ roll and dreamy pop, and the group manages both with skilled composure and ample low-fi, DIY charm. Packed with loose harmonies and tight playing, the record will only push forward the buzz surrounding the melodic five-piece.
Listen to the seductively simple “Interstate 80,” available at the group’s MySpace page, and open up to its thick and foggy vocal layering, simple acoustic guitars and spacy atmospherics. The song sounds like a Dandy Warhols-inspired exploration into dreamy pop cabaret. Conversely, “Titaness” is the kind of light pop track that would fit comfortably within the defunct but still revered Elephant Six collective. It’s a head-bobber, enhanced by a hooky chorus that thrives via three-part harmonies.
“High Dudgeon” is a headphone masterpiece, the kind of electronic track that must have taken hours upon hours in the studio — all for the listening pleasure of audiophiles and psych-music aficionados. And “Space Never Strays,” the final song on “Widowers,” is a decidedly more acoustic outing that rejoices in the simplicity of recording voices over a simple guitar line.
Marchant and Brown handled the production on the record, and while some of the songs sound tinny and fizzed- out — intentional qualities, they assure you — it’s a professional job through and through, especially when you consider their budget, which was nonexistent.
“Cory and I started from the ground up,” Marchant said. “Our equipment is minimal, and we ended up borrowing equipment to make it happen. We called James Barone of Mothership and borrowed half of his microphones. We borrowed a Moog from somebody. We wanted to use the approach that if we spent a ton of time slaving over the music that it would sound like it actually had some money behind it. And I’m pleased with how it came out.”
Of course, not everything came easy in the self-recording process. After laying down the bare guitars, synths and vibraphones for “Moonshining,” a particularly druggy ballad, they reached an impasse on the percussion. Marchant wanted to employ a full-on drum machine approach, but Brown was after a starker tom-and-snare backing.
“After arguing awhile, we ended up just putting one microphone on a tom and snare and running it straight into a distortion pedal and an analog tape delay,” Marchant said. “He played the beat like that, and it was spot on. It’s cool for the song, and he sequenced a really weird high- hat sound in there, too.”
Sure enough, the slow-motion track is one of the disc’s standouts. The band plans on playing “Widowers” in correct track order, from 1 to 11, at the Larimer Lounge on Thursday — that is, after they learn the last couple of songs.
Ricardo Baca: 303-954-1394 or rbaca@denverpost.com
Widowers
Psychedelic pop. Larimer Lounge, 2721 Larimer St., with Achille Lauro, Mothership and Hawks of Paradise Thursday. 9 p.m. $8. Information: . Tickets: .
