Seattle’s Dude York reimagines power pop circa now with sophomore release Sincerely
Fade in:
Ping’s Dumpling House, a garlic-centric, family owned eatery in the heart of Seattle’s International District
Dialogue:
Peter Richards (guitar/vocals): Let’s start in the middle—we’re going to tell our story like a Quentin Tarantino movie.
Andrew Hall (drums/attitude): So, it’s going to be long, and we’re going to feel very tired at the end of it.
Richards: I was thinking that we’ll just be casual about the use of offensive language.
Claire England (bass/patience): Maybe it’s more about that particular time period, 2013 or so.
Hall: We played our music in every room that would answer our emails. You play a lot of shows where three of your friends reluctantly show up, some other indifferent dudes get frustrated that you’re not playing louder/harder/faster. We played a lot of shows like that. Maybe 80. They were all super weird. We’d play 17 songs in 40 minutes and …
Richards: Then Claire’s fabulous previous project broke up. And we were thinking, best-case scenario, can we pay her to join us.
England: Natalie Portman’s Shaved Head. It was a great era: a good time to shave your own head.
This is what an interview with Seattle’s Dude York feels like: a movie dominated by banter, a breathless rush through periods of real interpersonal history (Richards and Hall have played together since their college days in Walla Walla; England joined later) leavened by a healthy dose of self-lacerating humor and a dazzling array of pop-culture references.
That’s not a bad way to describe the band’s recorded output, especially on its new sophomore full-length, Sincerely (Hardly Art). Think of Dude York as the Thermals to Chastity Belt’s Sleater-Kinney or Tacocat’s Dandy Warhols—all part of the same Seattle pop/punk scene, but representing wildly different points of view, with Dude York’s trio format perfectly lending itself to sugar-shock power-pop confections such as the album’s epic opening blast “Black Jack,” (“Baby you were born different/And meant to be that way”), the melodic roar of “The Way I Feel” (“OK, I’ll keep this short/I’m not up here for sport”), the “Raspberry Beret”-meets-new wave-“Blinded By The Light”-ness of “Something In The Way” and however you’d care to characterize “Time’s Not On My Side,” a Dylanesque slice of American Pie that eccentrically wanders the west in search of its broken heart to the tune of the only audible acoustic guitar on the record.
Sleater-Kinney producer John Goodmanson helps the band achieve just the right balance of bitter and sweet, sugaring its salty tales of mental instability and manic self-belief with just the right amount of Cheap Trick. It’s a big-sounding record about life’s small irritants: anthems as happy to focus on breakups as hookups.
As the trio good-naturedly argues its way through lunch by debating the merits of Oasis (“I love boy fights, and you can dance to every song,” says Hall), the bottom third of the Will Smith catalog (“Wild Wild West’s steampunk qualities are highly overlooked,” says Richards) or ironically reminiscing about Adult Friend Finder, “the primary dating website of the early 2000s,” it’s clear that they all agree a step forward has been achieved with the new LP. “It’s a more cohesive statement in terms of our intention,” says Hall. “Luxurious without actually being a luxury object. There’s a higher thread count.”
Fade to:
—Corey duBrowa
