by Daniel Colussi | First of all, the name Blues Control is pretty misleading: the music that New England duo of Russ Waterhouse and Lea Cho make doesn’t recall any Saturday night jam session that you may have drunkenly stumbled upon down at the Yale. So what is it? I guess Blues Control is just what happens when Cho’s Guaraldi-esque piano melodies combine with Waterhouse’s fuzz-damaged guitar. There could be some drum loops and tape hiss thrown in there, too. It’s this really unique thing, some kind of alchemical reaction brought about by a sincere love of classic rock music. Life-partners as well as bandmates, Cho and Waterhouse formed Blues Control in 2006. The two share the same psychic abilities common to long term collaborators. In their music (and over the telephone) they pass ideas back and forth until a point becomes clear. They haven’t played Vancouver since 2009, so come out and make them feel welcome at the Electric Owl on March 1st!

You’re about to embark on a pretty lengthy tour. Are you excited?

Lea: Well, the last time we tried to do it was in ’09 and that went well, but we didn’t think we’d ever do it again. But we’re excited.

Russ: We’ve been so busy lately we haven’t had time to even reflect on it.

Lea: It’ll sink in the minute we leave. Then we’ll be excited. But until then there’s too much to do. We’re excited to travel again and see some old friends and go to new places and play with new bands. It’ll be good.

Valley Tangents is a really nice album, and it must be the cleanest, most hi-fidelity recording from Blues Control…

Russ: When we made Local Flavour in ’09 it was done pretty quickly. It was done in a studio but mostly done live, with pretty minimal editing. There was time spent on the mix but it was pretty much live.

Lea: Yeah, we just played live and recorded it as if it was a show.

Russ: And then the engineer there at Black Dirt said we should definitely think about piecing it together, multi-tracking — which is the way most people make records.

Lea: Local Flavour came out sounding more…I guess “lo-fi” is the term…than it sounds in real life. I mean, it does sound dense in real life.

Russ: I like that record, but…

Lea: The fidelity could’ve been a little better.

Russ: Yeah, or it could’ve just sounded bigger or something. So when we were writing this new record we were thinking about ultimately recording it piece by piece. So that’s what we did; multi-tracked the whole thing and that gave us a lot more flexibility in the mixing. So that was exciting. That was the first time that we approached a record in that way. And also Drag City gave us a little bit of money.

Lea: Not a lot! Not that I’m not grateful, but I don’t want it to sound like we had a huge recording budget.

Russ: Right, but it allowed us a little more time than previous recording sessions. It allowed us to get a better mastering job.

The album’s called Valley Tangents, and it was conceived after your move to Lehigh Valley in rural Pennsylvania. So I imagine that this new, semi-rural setting informed the the songs in some way?

Lea: I think that the move helped us to move forward. I think if we’d stayed in the city…we we’re feeling kind of stifled by the time we left…like…the time constraints, the space constraints, the living expenses — it just started to feel closed in. We needed to move in order to move forward. I’m not sure if we had stayed in the city if we could’ve made another record. On that level, it was good for us.

Russ: We we’re just kind of broke, working a lot. I dunno. Our practice space in New York was not really conducive to writing music. We had neighbours that were making it hard to practice. So we now finally have a space – we’re in our own little micro house. There’s actually natural light where we practice, for the first time ever. It’s much nicer. It’s easier to stay focused when we want to work on music.

The songs within Valley Tangents are all really distinct from one another, the albums across the board are all quite different from each other. What can you tell me about your methodology of writing Blues Control music?

Russ: I think each song was slightly different. For instance, Iron Pigs — before we even started writing it we had an idea of what we wanted the song to sound like. We were like, Oh, we should try to think about doing an arena rock song, but also with an industrial element.

Bands always hate having to say what their music is and, to be sure, genre tags are generally kind of useless descriptors. You guys always refer to your music as “classic rock”. I wonder if you guys could sort of defend that to me, because it’s a bit absurd. I mean, no one’s going to mistake Blues Control for any 70’s rock band.

Lea: [laughs] Well, classic rock is such a wide term, anyway.

Russ: Yeah, it’s kind of a catch-all term. The first few tapes and shows, we thinking in terms of stuff like Mountain or Peter Green-era Fleetwood Mac, or Neil Young; just these bands from the 60’s and 70’s that would be rocking but maybe have some piano, too. And even with the new stuff we were thinking of – again – Peter Green-era Fleetwood Mac, or Santana.

Lea: There’s always Pink Floyd and The Beatles. Always.

Russ: There’s a heavy Pink Floyd influence on Local Flavour. Even “Iron Pigs”…we were thinking of Queen. Like, with “Gypsum” [off of Valley Tangents], we were thinking of Michael Jackson’s Off The Wall.

Lea: That’s not classic rock, though.

Russ: True, true. But the net we cast is pretty wide.

Lea: I think classic rock is really experimental. It’s not just Ted Nugent. A lot of those bands, they really go places on their records. That’s what we’re responding to.

Blues Control w/ Von Bingen and Dream Salon at The Electric Owl Friday March 1st. Tickets at Zulu, Red Cat, HighLife, Dandelion.

————————————————————————-

Daniel Colussi is the Music Editor of Scout Magazine and a contributing writer to Ion Magazine. A veteran employee of Zulu Records and tuneage aficionado, he DJs on an infrequent basis (about four times a year) and is a musician around town who plays in several ensembles.