The Latenight Callers ring twice on Easy Virtues

Easy Virtues, the upcoming, second EP from locals the Latenight Callers, turned up at The Pitch offices the other day inside a clear evidence bag – the kind with a pink seal at the top and entry spaces for case numbers and crime-lab information. The cover of the CD is black-and-white, and there’s an old typewriter on it. The red lipstick, frosty-paned office windows and black telephones are missing, but all that can be inferred from the music: an ominous, smoky, electronic chug lurking behind the sultry vocals of singer Julie Berndsen.

The Latenight Callers are squeezing a lot of juice out of the fruits of noir, and so it was less than surprising to learn that the five-piece had recently returned from a visit to San Francisco, where they played the 10th anniversary of the Noir City film festival.

“It’s a two-week festival of old noir films, and it’s held in this massive, gorgeous fine-arts vintage theater with a built-in Wurlitzer in-house,” says Nick Combs, who handles keyboards and drum programming for the band. (The Callers operate sans drummer.) “Krysztof [Nemeth], our guitarist, is a fan of the founder of the fest, and we’d been in contact with him, and eventually we were invited out to play. We performed the closing night. Everybody showed up in period suits and old dresses, like a 1940s nightclub type of thing.”

Is noir culture reaching the conventioneer fetish level of steampunk or Star Trek? Do musical acts that reflect the aesthetic have a built-in core audience? “There is definitely kind of a scene developing around it,” Combs says. “Noir City does festivals all over the country and in Europe. Right now, we’re working on getting on some. We’re not the type of band that’s going to get asked to play Lollapalooza. Our philosophy is to try to be strategic and play shows where we like the audience and the audience likes us.”

The first Latenight Callers album was written by Nemeth and Berndsen, but Easy Virtues is more of a collaborative effort. “I think it’s an extension of the first record,” Combs says. “We all have an eclectic variety of musical tastes that we try to work into a common theme. We come at it with an idea for a song and then say, ‘How do we make this a Latenight Callers song?’ “

At the upcoming Easy Virtues release show at the Beaumont Club, those songs will be even more theatrical than usual, due to the presence of Voler–Thieves of Flight, a Kansas City-based aerial troupe. “They’ll be performing alongside our music,” Combs says. “That’s why we picked the Beaumont as the venue — we needed a big enough stage for all of us.”