Killing You Softly

The three heads in Namelessnumberheadman wouldn’t hurt a fly. They’re intelligent, conscientious, responsible and respectful. They’re three all-around nice guys.

But they’ll still try to kill you.

Rather, the Kansas City trio’s new album, Your Voice Repeating, will try to kill you. After all, it tried to kill them.

Two weeks ago, they were driving to a show at the Music Café in Columbia. The two-car caravan consisted of guitarist/vocalist/keyboardist/drummer Chuck Whittington in one vehicle with their gear while vocalist/drummer/keyboardist Andrew Sallee and keyboardist/knob-pusher Jason Lewis followed in Sallee’s Honda Accord. They had already been set back an hour by a pileup on Interstate 70 outside Kansas City and were racing down the icy freeway around 75 miles an hour with minutes to go before the opening act took the stage. Then the Accord began to wobble.

“Do you hear something?” Sallee asked Lewis.

“No, I think everything’s fi—”

Bang. A tire blew out. The car spun violently, careened off the road and sailed down an embankment. Backward. Snow sprayed over the windshield as Sallee and Lewis waited for impact. And then … nothing. The Accord came to a stop in heavy snow a few feet from a barbed-wire fence. The sound of Your Voice Repeating, which the pair had been listening to as rehearsal before the show, filled the void.

“That would have been an appropriate way to die,” Lewis says, laughing, a few days later. “‘They were narcissistic to the very end.'”

Instead, they made it to the Music Café and managed to assemble their galaxy of equipment, including at least six keyboards, just before their set was scheduled to begin.

“It was inadvertently very rock star of us,” Lewis says. “Striding in right before we were supposed to go on.”

That’s about the only thing rock star about the band.

Sallee, Whittington and Lewis all grew up in the small town of Shawnee, Oklahoma, an outpost east of Oklahoma City in what is described as the state’s “Frontier Country.” The town is home to some twenty churches and one high school. They spent their adolescence absorbing home-state heroes the Flaming Lips and quietly plotting their escape.

It’s been nearly four years since the group adopted a moniker from a character in Steven Soderbergh’s cult comedy Schizopolis. Nearly four years since they began tweaking conventional song structure until what came out was a hybrid of styles melding indie pop, folk, electronica and atmospheric noise. The band’s first two albums, 100,000 Subtle Times and When We Leave, We Will Know Where We’ve Been, were met with widespread praise as their reputation grew beyond Kansas City.

But even as Nameless has made a name for itself, its members remain almost painfully shy. They find sitting for publicity photos to be merciless torture. Whittington and Lewis admit that many of their fans are “music nerds just like us,” techno geeks who get just as excited listening to the band’s music as they do inspecting the band’s MS2000 keyboard. Those same fans tend to keep their band at a safe distance during live performances.

“It’s a demilitarized zone,” Whittington says of the distance between crowd and stage. “But we’re a band for wallflowers, so it’s all right.”

Watching Nameless onstage is like peeking through a two-way mirror. The band seems generally oblivious to the cocktail-sipping masses huddled in the shadows. They’re lost in their own waves of sound. At least until a video camera appears.

“Once I saw the camera,” Whittington says of a videographer who appeared stage-side at the Music Café, “I totally fucked up the next song.”

All three also have very un-rock day jobs. No porn-shop clerks, strip-club DJs, waiters or record-store employees. Sallee is an assistant dean of admissions at William Jewell College. Whittington works as a computer programmer. Lewis does database work for a law firm.

“All the temp jobs dealing coke were full,” Lewis says with a laugh. “So I had to go for this.”

But even though they create exceptional music in the nebulous prog-rock vein and are inspired by subtle intricacies in literature and art and cinema and everyday life, they’re hardly artistic snobs.

“I have a lot of music guilty pleasures,” Whittington says. “I sort of enjoy bad music. Old Paula Abdul, 50 Cent … the Super Bowl halftime show was really good as far as guilty-pleasure music.” (No one in the band, however, could have relieved Janet Jackson of her pastie. “The whole thought of that would be so embarrassing,” Lewis says. “I don’t think any of us could pull that off, so to speak.”)

What the band does pull off is considerably more difficult. To create layered rhythms of dreamy soundscapes, Namelessnumberheadman has to, in effect, become three one-man bands performing in unison. There are between six and nine keyboards strewn about the stage at any given performance. Lewis mans the keyboards and reins in electronic cacophony. Whittington sings and plays guitar, keyboards and drums. Sallee sings and plays drums and keyboards. All at the same time.

They have never seriously considered adding a fourth member, though the cumbersome handicap of only six hands undoubtedly prevents them from seamlessly re-creating its recorded sound live. And don’t expect a keytar anytime soon.

“That could be the missing ingredient,” Lewis says. “That could get the ladies right to the front of the stage.”

But the complete Namelessnumberheadman experience is better captured in wax than in person.

“As far as getting the sound the way we want it and getting the vibe across, we can do that better in a recording studio,” Whittington says. “All of the songs turn out differently when we play them live. Although it may not be the vibe we intended. But it’s still a pretty cool vibe.”

The vibe created by Your Voice Repeating is a continuation of the band’s earlier albums. The tracks are peppered with moody exploration and indie explosion, toe-tapping grooves and electronic fuzz, aching lyrics and massaging vocals. The album isn’t a radical departure from the band’s previous work but for one exception:

It tried to kill me.

I had made it all the way to the record’s second song, “Every Fiber,” when disaster struck.

Bang. A tire blew out. And then … nothing. I pulled to the side of the road. OK, listening to the album wouldn’t have killed me or anyone else. But even if it had, listening to it was worth the risk.