Fullbloods’ latest makes barely getting by sound impossibly fun

Warm, warped synths and eccentric guitar lines float happily around Mild West, the terrific new album from Fullbloods. Together, the album’s 11 songs — written by lead singer and guitarist Ross Brown, with the help of guitarist Jerad Tomasino, bassist David Seume and drummer Bill Pollock — are a freewheeling throwback to coke-washed ’70s disco glam, all perilous V-necks and bellbottoms and Harvey Wallbangers drunk in wood-paneled living rooms.

Brown’s easy falsetto might be the band’s most essential instrument. His voice elevates Mild West from what a merely excellent study in groovy nostalgia to a relevant exploration of millennial getting-by-ness, from dicey spending patterns (“Money”) to setting the mood for sexy times (“Winter Coat”).

Ahead of Fullbloods’ two album-release shows this weekend, I talked with Brown.

Brown: All the songs on this album I’ve been working on for a while. Fullbloods has been a band for, like, six or seven years now — wow, that’s weird — and it’s been kind of the same four people until the point where we started making the album, which was interesting. [Tomasino and Seume came aboard in 2014.] I had written some songs that I’d brought to the band, and they were enough songs to write an album with. But it was one of those situations where I was trying to write for a specific band, and it wasn’t happening. I didn’t like the songs all that much. We released that EP called Making Face [in 2013], which were a couple songs that were OK.

That whole time, I was demoing stuff on my own. That’s part of my process, doing it at home and trying stuff out. I was doing that with the intention of doing a solo release to piggyback off the release I did three years ago [Small Victories, 2012], but then I was playing with these guys [in Fullbloods], and I like these guys. So I brought the songs to them, and the instrumentation was different and the arrangements were different when we started working. We fleshed them out as a band.

I’m a Steely Dan fan, of course. A lot of stuff from that era fits into that really tight production style. For whatever reason, my writing process is arrangement first and song later — which often produces giant turds. But if you do it often enough, you can get some good ones. So I love L.A. and West Coast drum sounds, and we talked about the guitar sounds from that first, self-titled Dire Straits album. It’s just record-collector-nerd stuff.

I also wanted an approach that focused on soundscapes and a less stale way. I didn’t want to use programmed sounds or anything that we didn’t actually perform as musicians, which meant that we got in there and just played as a band. That’s the most fun, and it usually produces the best results — it’s something you can listen to on a recording and say, “Those guys sound like they’re playing together.” That ended up sounding like mid- to late-’70s stuff, so we kind of ran with it. And then some of the synths that I use on the album are from that era, and a lot of the gear that I use as well. But we were definitely trying go for more a band project than a cobbled-together, super-slickly produced, synth-pop sort of thing.

It’s definitely a silly song on the surface. This is a theme that runs through the whole album: You write these songs, and then you put them together, and you’re like, “Oh, shit, I’ve said something about myself.”

The main driver for writing that song in particular was an internal frustration that I had at the time, to want to quickly resolve something without having to meet it head-on by throwing money at it. I guess specifically, to boil it all down, that song is about ordering pizza online without picking up the phone to order a pizza, because you don’t have to talk to someone, you don’t have to be prepared on what to say. You can take your time on the Internet and click a button and it shows up at your front door. And other situations, like the rent. Once, I was told I was late on rent, and there were a bunch of late fees no one told me about, and instead of saying, “Hey, I wasn’t late, here’s my receipt,” I just paid it all and didn’t meet it head-on. The value of being a person that can address things and considers things with a critical mind, and asserts themselves and stands up for themselves, is more important than burning a bunch of cash.

Jerad [Tomasino] and I, along with Mat Shoare, we were dong Golden Sounds Records, and we decided to shut it down because we weren’t as active as we wanted to be — basically, because we weren’t being a Jeff [McCoy, High Dive’s founder]. So I started sending stuff to Jeff as we were working on the album, and that was early on when we started talking — High Dive hadn’t put out a lot yet.

The album ended up taking a lot longer than I thought it would, but Jeff’s been great. He’s quick to respond and good to work with. I think it helps that at one point, I was in a similar position with a label — like, we have this album, and now what we have to do is share our contacts and promote. We’re sharing what we’ve been through with him, and we’ve always kind of seen it as contributing our creative assets to what High Dive has going on. They’re putting out so much and representing a lot of different bands in the area, which is really cool to see.