Arts & Culture
Photographs of the Future band members serenade the crowd
Photographs of the Future
The Pointer
nmeye177@uwsp.edu
Every once and a while a band comes along that makes you do a little bit more with your head than just nod, making you thank existence for consciousness, grabbing your most organic of senses and sending your mind on a ride to familiar places under new skies.
Indie-folk band Photographs of the Future does just that. Gracing an intimate crowd at Stevens Point’s newest music venue, The Garage, on Saturday night, the band played an hour of original tunes along with their personal rendition of “3rd Planet” by Modest Mouse.
The band consists of University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point students Joel Harbury on guitar and Daleth Mountjoy on mandolin, Ethan Klassen on upright bass, Erin Ribble on violin and Brad Steckart on drums.
The group recently started after an attempt to play the board game Risk fell through and the guys decided staying home and playing music would be more fun (and probably easier and less time consuming as well).
“We went back to my dorm room and put down two tracks, “Freedom is Contagious” and “Emily,” said Mountjoy, “and it went on from there. It just really clicked that first time.”
The guys pulled the name from a random page in “A Farewell to Arms” by Ernest Hemingway and Photographs of the Future was born.
The original members also expanded the group to include new members, which filled up the overall sound. According to Mountjoy, they couldn’t be happier with the results.
“They’re all music majors so they know how to come into a song and we’re doing pretty simple stuff,” said Mountjoy. “They can use those building blocks and they know a million different ways to go.”
The band played for the first time as a five-piece group for the concert. Harbury greeted the crowd by thanking them for coming, instantly grabbing everyone’s attention with a short poetic statement about how far they traveled to come and how lucky they felt to be there.
The band instantly elevated the energy in the room with their opening number. The rhythm of the song bounced steadily along like a long lost Modest Mouse song as Harbury poured the interpretations of his mind’s eye into stanza after stanza with his unpolished vocal delivery.
With lyrics that question what happens after death, like “we live and die but we don’t know why/it’s really kind of sad when you think about it” and “for all we know this could be it,” the band challenges you to do more than just sit back and listen.
The engaging lyrical content was one of the high points of the night, and Harbury sang a particularly insightful song about collecting data through life as though it were a science experiment.
Like a scientist, he presents his theories in the song, yet leaves room for interpretation. Rather than making one think, “Should I consider this?” it entices one to ponder, “What haven’t I considered?”
Harbury and Mountjoy have a number of musical influences, but Modest Mouse and Neutral Milk Hotel were two bands most central to their style. Particularly demonstrative of this influence is Mountjoy’s six-song story, written after a winter stuck in the residence halls.
The band has also been inspired by thoughts of freedom, revolution, the writings of anarchism and other outside-the-box literature; they’re definitely not afraid to share the thoughts that develop out of that inspiration either.
Throughout the night the band kept its folk-indie fusion vibe alive, playing song after song that left fans with new thoughts in the head and soreness in the hip.
The addition of the new instruments provided new foundations to the backbones of the songs. The bass lines carried songs through transitions, the violin added another layer of depth to bar after bar and Mountjoy’s mandolin lay softly behind the guitar lines, thereby adding texture and color.
But despite the band’s strengths, a few songs chugged along like a train that could fall apart at any moment, with each band member looking like the unsuspecting train conductor. Perhaps because it was their first time playing as a five-piece group, or perhaps the venue’s sound system wasn’t exactly ideal for a band of this number, but the band was less than consistent at points; some songs even seemed to almost come apart at the seams with undulating tempos.
Although the mistakes were unintended, they did lend the band a raw kind of style. And the band members danced and smiled their way right on through regardless.
“Photographs of the Future” put forth questions that just might put listeners on the path to answering if given the chance. And that chance will be coming soon, as the band will be playing at The Garage again on Feb. 20, and can also be seen most Mon. nights at the Open Mic Night in the Basement Brewhaus.
