When I met Angela Mullenhour a little more than five years ago, she was 19 and had a habit of sneaking into open mikes at bars like Quenchers and the Inner Town Pub. She played raw, inelegant solo sets of folk-soul heavily indebted to Cat Power and Bob Dylan, and even though she was obviously nervous and still figuring out what to do with herself onstage, her intensely heartfelt songs and gorgeous voice consistently made her the best performer of the night.
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Sybris’s greatest asset, though, is their enthusiasm. They’re so fearlessly eager it wouldn’t even be right to call their dedication a work ethic—that would suggest they see any of this as work. The band started rehearsing with Mullenhour in April 2003, played their first gig in September, and five months later went on their first tour. “We were kind of new,” says Podgurski. “We just went out the gate and started playing shows. We only had a few songs and forged our way through.” They pressed an EP called A Time for Hollerin, recorded in their practice space in late 2003, so they’d have something to sell for gas money on the road—and considering that 47 of the roughly 60 shows they played in ’04 were spread across the midwest and along the east coast from Florida to New England, they needed it.
By last October, when Sybris finally made time to record another album, they were practically a different band—they’d been sharpened and seasoned by their intense performance schedule, growing into each other and developing a clearer idea of what they were about. Producer John Congleton, who’d mixed their first disc, booked them for a week at the Pachyderm Recording Studio in rural Minnesota.
“That’s what we wanted,” says Mullenhour. “Nothing masking the songs, just having it sound like how we do in the practice space. We didn’t do many overdubs or extra instruments. That’s a big part of being more sure about our music—with the last record just maybe we weren’t as sure of ourselves in the songs. With this one we wanted to go all out, be awesome.”
Fri 5/9, 9:30 PM, Subterranean, 2011 W. North, 773-278-6600 or 866-468-3401, $10, 18+.
