Beaking Out

It’s a Monday night in midtown, and Drew Gibson is already having one hell of a bad week.

The high point of his day was discovering an extra $200 in his checking account that he didn’t know was there — a discovery that wouldn’t have been nearly as bittersweet if he and his girlfriend hadn’t been mugged at gunpoint a few days earlier.

Luckily, no one was hurt. But besides losing his IDs and all of his own cash, the Baby Birds Don’t Drink Milk guitarist also had to hand over all of the band’s money that he had on him, which would’ve gone toward touring and the group’s forthcoming EP.

Gibson’s bad luck didn’t start with the mugging. A few months ago, his car (which he once lived out of) broke down on the road to Lawrence, and he didn’t have the cash to fix it. He’s been walking and bumming rides around KC ever since.

Now, sitting on a couch in the recording space of producer and Stella Link bassist Dave Gaumé for some 11th-hour mixing of the Baby Birds’ upcoming EP (a five-song live disc is also on the verge of being released), Gibson admits that he had to take the day off work because his feet wouldn’t stop bleeding.

“It’s probably because I hadn’t taken my shoes off in four days,” he says, shifting in his seat. The sizable rip in the crotch of his well-worn jeans is showcasing more than it’s covering up. “I guess I don’t always have the best personal-hygiene habits.”

There’s definitely a hint of B.O. in the air, but it could be coming from anyone — or, more likely, everyone. The air conditioning has gone out in the entire studio.

“Everything we’re involved with breaks,” jokes drummer Josh Riepe, who’s working with Gaumé on some tracking for the EP, which will be titled — no joke — The Jam-Packed Full of Awesome EP.

“Strum Strum Bang Bang” by Baby Birds Don’t Drink Milk:

At any given Baby Birds show, there’s a good chance that at least one instrument will be shattered. It’s an odd sight for a local show, made even more odd by the fact that the trio’s spaced-out guitar non-sequiturs, thumb-piano fills and long stretches of amp feedback seem more cerebral than aggressive.

You know those brief snippets of electronic noise and distortion that bands like to tack onto the beginning of an album’s opening song? Stretch that 10-second chunk out to four minutes, add some floating, ethereal vocals, and you’ll have a pretty good representation of what Baby Birds sounds like.

“I like this track,” Riepe says as Gaumé twists and rearranges the drum tracks for the song “Strum Strum Bang Bang” on his computer screen. “This is what I love doing — adding layers upon layers, deconstructing them over and over again, and then putting it all back together.”

The band’s history is a reflection of Riepe’s chaotic method. In November 2005, Gibson and Riepe started playing music together in Riepe’s mom’s Raytown basement — although calling what they produced “music” might be a stretch.

“Our goal back then was pretty much just to make a lot of noise,” Riepe says.

Over time, the band evolved — or, anyway, its lineup changed a few times. Friends joined and left the growing collective, adding different perspectives and instrumentation as they went along.

The first to sign on was Jameson Piedimonte, who played bass and provided vocals. He was doing sound at the Brick when he first met Gibson and Riepe.

“They’d come in and ask me all the time and say, ‘We should jam sometime, we should jam sometime,'” he says. “Their idea was to get a whole stage full of people and create kind of a Broken Social Scene type of thing — they really wanted to be Broken Social Scene.”

For a brief period, the roster swelled to seven people, which included two guitarists, two bassists, a violinist, a percussionist, a keyboard player and a drummer.

The band didn’t slim back down to a three-piece until August 2006, when bassist Oscar Allen (formerly of the Girl Is a Ghost) took up lead vocals.

Gibson says the differences between the larger lineup and the current one are few — the idea has always been to be as noisy as possible.

“You’ve got less people making noise, so obviously, it’s going to sound different,” Gibson says. “It was more muddled. But we still do what we do pretty much the same.”

What the band has lost in numbers, it has been gaining in intensity. Gibson says the current lineup and the upcoming albums are where he wants to be with the band’s music.

And though making the band a trio might not have helped his personal life, he doesn’t seem to be sweating the muggings, broken-down cars and bloody feet too much.

“I don’t take life too serious. Stuff like that just happens,” he says. “I moved here in 2002 to play music and tour around with friends — it’s nothing more complicated than that.”

Maybe three will be Gibson’s lucky number.