The Conquerors take stock of their sound

It’s late on a Sunday night when I meet four of the five members of the Conquerors at the 403 Club. All of Kansas City is engulfed in Royals mania, and the patrons inside this Kansas City, Kansas, dive are no exception. The bar teems with powder-blue clusters giving off cheers and groans as Game 4 of the World Series unfolds. There’s no open spot for the band and me to sit and talk music, let alone hear one another. We move to the sidewalk outside, where we plop down unceremoniously on the concrete.

Cigarettes are lit, and the bar’s sounds are only just muffled. Lead singer and guitarist Rory Cameron, bassist Kyle Rausch (also of the Shy Boys), guitarist Vince Lawhon and drummer Jim Button all look like they’d rather be watching the game than sitting, beerless, away from it, but they spread out and smile anyway.

Cameron shakes his sandy-blond hair out of his eyes and says, “Did I mention we were thinking about changing our name?”

I shake my head.

“It’s not gonna happen, not now, but we were thinking about it for a minute.”

“You say that now,” Button interrupts, laughing. “Watch. Next week we’ll have shut this baby down.”

The Conquerors have been a band for about five years, long enough that the quintet would probably prefer to avoid confusing fans or trying to build a new brand. Still, Cameron says the Conquerors sound markedly different now.

“If you listen to what we have online — to the music on our Bandcamp — that was, like, two years ago,” he says. “All the songs were really riff-oriented, these super-spaced-out psychedelic jams with no real arrangements or anything. We’ve been getting a lot more song-oriented lately, especially trying to keep things short, around three minutes. All our old songs were, like, six minutes plus.”

The lineup, too, has changed over the years. Only Cameron remains of Conquerors 1.0. Rausch and percussionist Jake Cardwell — who is absent this night — have been with the band for a year, and their addition helped spur the music’s recent evolution.

“We’ve had members come and go, so it’s basically a different band now,” Cameron says. “Now, everybody is on the same page about the music we’re making. I think we all have the same reference points as far as where we’re coming from. We all have the ear for the tonal references that we’re trying to get. We know the kind of music that we all like, and we know it infinitely. A lot of it’s stuff that we’ve been listening to since we were teenagers.”

The reference points that Cameron has in mind are familiar names from the 1960s, which he recites almost automatically: the Beatles, the Kinks, the Zombies. And I hear those touchstones for myself the following Monday night at Element Recording Studios, where the Conquerors hold their weekly practice. Sipping on Tecate tallboys, the musicians run through half a dozen new songs that could have been snatched from a PBS special on the 1960s.

These tunes, Cameron says, are still being worked on, and the band plans to record them as a series of 45s, for release in early 2015. They, too, pay homage to the Conquerors’ beloved bygone period of rock.

In the warm studio, in low light, the band even looks like it’s from another era. Dressed in his uniform of black mock turtleneck, black pants, black jacket and shiny black dress shoes, Cameron lets his hair fall into his eyes as he stands, sometimes on tiptoe, to meet the microphone. Rausch, whose recent beard gives him a sort of hipster-Jesus look, bends over his mic to add harmonies. Button looks thrilled to be behind his drum kit, and Lawhon provides the vertebrae for the songs, tucking his chin to his chest as his riffs clear a path for Cameron’s voice. Cardwell commands two tambourines as surely as if they were his hands.

Just as Cameron claimed, the songs don’t stretch past the three-minute mark. What’s unexpected is his voice, which he changes from one song to the next, unleashing a heavy timbre on the psych-pop teaser “I Don’t Know,” then a reedy Dylan rasp against the smooth melody of “Someday.”

“I guess I started out learning a lot of songs the way they were sung, so I learned to imitate that,” he tells me later. He adds that it’s not really intentional but what his voice ends up doing — “what the song demands,” he says with a shrug. A few days later, over the phone, Cameron finally explains why he’s keeping the original name, despite all the changes the band has seen.

“I mean, it’s kind of like we’re conquering the next step,” he says. “I can’t get as much satisfaction out of doing something else. I never have. And since it started, we have just continued to hone and get better and better. I want to reach as many people as I possibly can. And I just want people to dance, really.”