It’s a three-hour drive to the Quad Cities from Chicago, and by the time you get there you’re deep in darkest Wal-Mart Land and the radio is swamped with lite country and Christian rock. Rock Island, Illinois, doesn’t seem like a prime destination for a band starting the promo push for their first album on Matador, but it’s where the Ponys are headed. They’re one of about 90 acts–locals like the M’s, Bound Stems, and the Changes as well as bigger names like Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Sunset Rubdown, and the Cold War Kids–that have stopped here over the past year to play not for the presumably show-starved indie kids of Rock Island but for two guys upstairs from a pizza place. Those two guys have a Web site called Daytrotter.com, and the studio they run has turned out a remarkable series of live recordings that are becoming the Peel Sessions of the Stereogum set.
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The Ponys set (which will go up in two or three weeks) isn’t as revelatory as many in the Daytrotter archive, since they’ve never been a buckets-of-overdubs studio band. But their four songs–all from Turn the Lights Out, due March 20–sound like a living-room concert, more intimate than their records or their club shows. On “Poser Psychotic” the band locks into a familiar high-speed art-punk stomp, but Jered Gummere’s vocals are more relaxed than his usual Richard Hell yelp–and with the help of some great mixing by Stolley, a chiming, delay-inflected guitar arpeggio reveals an uncharacteristically nuanced control of dynamics.
This fun, no-frills approach is half the reason Daytrotter has such good luck booking bands. There’s a drum kit in the studio, and Stolley has an impressive collection of amps, keyboards, and effects–most bands don’t need to load in anything but their guitars and cymbals. This often means they can bust out four songs in not much more time than it takes to make a pit stop at Taco Bell. Plus Rock Island is right off Interstate 80, and as Moeller says, “If you’re playing somewhere in the midwest, you’re probably driving on 80 to get to a show.”
As hard as it is to believe, all that the Daytrotter guys are getting out of the site is the satisfaction of capturing artists they love in the immediacy of the moment. You can hear that satisfaction when Moeller talks about a still-unreleased session with folky chanteuse Jolie Holland, who was visibly bummed out when she stopped by in October. “Her songs need that,” he says. “Maybe there’s times where she’s working on a new record and she’s happy. We want her to be happy, obviously, but the fact that she was in a bad mood that day, that touring was really beating her down and she wasn’t happy, for that day, for those two hours, it was awesome.”
