Author: Richie DeMaria
Most Oxy students are busy being students; Will Holmes (junior) is busy working toward rock stardom.
As his peers bite the remainder of their nails over room draw and registration, Holmes and his band Great Waves are finishing an upcoming EP, readying a song for the video game Rock Band and preparing to take the stage for Seattle’s massive Bumbershoot Festival.
Recent champions of the Sound Off! competition, a battle of the bands for under-22 Pacific Northwest groups, Great Waves has quickly become the biggest name in the Seattle youth music scene, or at least is most fortunate.
At the aforementioned festival, the Sammamish, Wash. four-piece beat out 130 other applicants to earn $3,000 in music gear, $1,200 in studio time with production assistance from Glenn Sound Production, live radio sessions on 107.7 The End Seattle and record industry consultation.
All this for a band that, three years ago, made bad music, according to bassist and Western Washington University student Paul Beeman.
“When I take a step back, it feels awesome to have come so far from the awful stuff we were making in high school,” Beeman said. “I imagined [winning Soundoff], but more in an unattainable dreamlike sort of way.”
Holes and Beeman first played in alternative/grunge act UTI in middle school, disbanding shortly after to play in other bands.
The current line up began at Skyline High School as The Matirns, with Beeman’s high school girlfriend and present University of Washington Student Ashley Bullock adding her vocals and friend-of-a-friend Ryan Sprute lending his percussion skills.
The Matirns played a few shows here and there under all manner of similar monikers (The Martins, The Martians, The Matters), but like most high school bands, Holmes and Beeman’s group had effectively dissolved by graduation day.
“We were pretty decent, but we never had any real time to devote to practice,” Holmes said. “When college came around, we put music on hold and went our separate ways.”
During their first two years in college, Holmes, Beeman, Bullock and Sprute attempted to keep the music going with little success. The band was, for a time, a mere side project, a hobby secondary to school.
“Finding time to write new songs during my first two years of college was tough,” Holmes said. “I would end up flying home to record songs that we hadn’t had the time to practice or tweak nearly enough, and they always sounded like garbage.”
In the summer of 2009, the duo felt drawn to music once again, and this time they did not resist the creative urge – they embraced it. The four decided to devote the next year entirely to writing music, taking a year of absence from their respective schools and immersing themselves in the studio.
“We were sick of disbanding every summer,” Holmes said. “We knew that we would probably end up going our separate ways after college, so it seemed like a good idea to put off graduation a year and make music while we still could.”
Free from school and funded by odd jobs, the members of the newly formed, newly named Great Waves put all their efforts into making music. Taking their title from a song by Australian band Dirty Three, they followed in the trio’s footsteps to create spacious, dark folk-rock.
That summer, the band recorded their “Blue Blood” EP. The band stripped down its sound to match Bullock’s hazy, laid-back vocal stylings, with a result somewhere between atmospheric rock and Americana. The nearly country “Konza Plains,” for example, is a relatively upbeat number built around acoustic guitar and soft percussion washes, while “Sea Legs” recalls the brooding swoon of Mazzy Star.
As they refined their sound, Great Waves began booking shows all around the Seattle area in whatever venues they could find.
“We played any venue we could get – teen centers, high school gyms, local battle of the bands,” Holmes said. The band said its strangest performance was a gig at an antique store, with a jazz and spoken word band as opener.
Come November of 2009, the Experience Music Project’s (EMP) Sound Off! competition began accepting applications. With an EP under their belt (the competition required four original recorded songs), an appropriate band demographic (eligible bands needed to be Pacific NW residents under 22) and a slowly growing live presence, Great Waves saw its chance at striking gold.
“The decision to apply was a no-brainer,” Holmes said.
A month after applying, Great Waves was chosen as one of 12 semi-finalists, an achievement that catapulted the band out of obscurity and into notoriety.
“At the beginning of our year off, we had no fans. No one but our parents knew about our band,” Holmes said. However, once the band got into Sound Off!, their audience swelled. “We even were able to occasionally sell out a venue – something that seemed impossible a few months prior.”
The Sound Off! qualification earned Great Waves coverage from the local press, with The Seattle Times, Seattle Weekly, Tacoma’s Weekly Volcano, the Sammamish Review and online indie music publication QRO Magazine, among others, running stories on the up-and-coming act.
After qualifying for semi-finals, Great Waves played in one of three semi-final concerts on Feb. 27, along with three other groups. They beat out pop rockers SEACATS, prog-rock group Subtle Like a T-Rex and indie rock band Us On Roofs.
“It was by far the most fun we’ve ever had playing a show, and certainly the best performance we have put on as a band,” Sprute wrote on the band’s blog. “It wasn’t looking good, as the night before we had played a terrible show, and we hadn’t once gone through our set perfect, but it all came together when it mattered.”
Their semi-final victory propelled them to the March 6 finalist round: a performance at the EMP Sky Church. There, joined by violinist David Bahr and guitarist Elliot Gray, Great Waves played against Hooves and Beak, Candysound and SEACATS, who made it in as a ‘wild card’ pick.
The bands were judged by a panel of musicians and industry figures, including John Roderick of The Long Winters and James Keblas of the Mayor’s Office of Film and Music.
“Playing the Sky Church was an incredible experience,” Holmes said of the EMP venue, filled to its 1,000- person capacity. “Heart [a Seattle hard rock band] had played there the night before the finals, so we got to use their insanely good lighting and monitors.”
The audience voted them the best band of the night, and with that, Great Waves became the 2010 Sound Off! champions – a verdict that came as a shock for the foursome.
“I didn’t think we were going to win at all after our performance,” Sprute said. “We all felt like we botched it, and we felt like the other acts really killed it.”Holmes agreed.
“It felt amazing and a little surreal to win Sound Off,” he said. “I personally did not expect to make it to the finals, let alone win.”
Immediately following the performance, Holmes, Beeman, Bullock and Sprute were greeted by EMP staff with “a ton of” music equipment – guitars, synthesizers, amps – so much that they needed a second car to tug it to their studio, Holmes said.
Now, with an arsenal of new equipment and professional studio time at its disposal, the band is taking a break from live performances to work on its second EP, due at the end of April. The band hopes to record more than an EP’s worth of material, and to keep the songs that work, Holmes said.
The band will take a different direction for its second outing, working toward a more daring sound inspired by Portishead’s “Third,” Radiohead’s “In Rainbows” and Beach House’s “Teen Dream.” The new sound may include orchestral arrangements, Sprute said in a March 17 blog post.
“We have just been trying to take a more experimental approach to everything this time around,” Holmes said. “Different vocal techniques, guitar tones, drum effects, multiple drummers and lots of other things we haven’t tried before. I think a lot of peopl
e will be a bit confused by our new songs, but I hope they like them anyway.”
With a new musical direction and their biggest performances yet to come – a publicly broadcast session on the 107.7 The End “Local’s Only” show and a headlining performance at Bumbershoot – Great Waves’ time in the spotlight is only beginning.
However, as soon as fall semester rolls around, the band will have to give up their instruments for a time – they are, after all, students. Though this year has offered the band a taste of industry professionalism, no member is willing to commit full-time to a music career yet, Holmes said.
“I will say that while we have met with some record people, everyone in the band really wants to finish college before we do anything too drastic,” he said.
This year could either spark several more years in the public eye or prove to be a brief brush with rock stardom. Either way, while he and his band mates return to the books, the Seattle area will likely be dreaming of an encore performance.
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