Ray of spite

Beauty is where you find it, says Deathray frontman Dana Gumbiner. At least that’s how he justifies risking his considerable cool-crowd credibility, which was bolstered immeasurably by forming a band that features two former members of hipster faves Cake, by publicly admitting he digs Britney Spears.

“I was watching this thing on MTV, Making the Video, and she is just so obviously manufactured, but she knows it and she doesn’t seem to care,” Gumbiner rationalizes. “She’s so trite, but something about the basslines is just awesome. I like her music, and there’s some cool hooks in there, but I can’t tell if I like it in a tongue-in-cheek fashion or if it’s a genuine, sincere love. I think it’s a little bit of both.”

This revelation comes as somewhat of a surprise after taking a listen to Deathray’s self-titled debut. It’s pop too, but it’s the kind that has little in common with the prepackaged, overmarketed bubble gum all over the radio — but plenty of similarities to The Cars’ new-wave sensibilities and, of course, the work of every power-pop star’s hero, Alex Chilton of Big Star.

“His songs almost sound as if they’re about to fall apart at any moment, and the energy is so incredible,” Gumbiner raves. “There’s just the right amount of danger in those songs to make them really interesting to me.”

It’s difficult to isolate the ingredients that take pop to a higher plane, but Gumbiner hypothesizes about the mystery element that makes certain songs stick out more than others. “It’s got to have a melody that affects you on some level emotionally, and for me, personally, I’ve got to be able to get the lyrics, so it’s got to have some lyrical bent that keeps your attention,” he explains. “It doesn’t have to be anything particularly deep; it just has to be something affecting. I really love a lot of what’s going on in R&B and hip-hop radio right now. There’s some amazing lyrical hooks. They’re not necessarily about anything but shagging, but it’s also presented in a totally new and original light. I guess that’s another element, too, that makes a great pop song. Even if you’re Xeroxing something, even if you’re wearing your influences on your sleeve, you’ve got to be able to make it your own and to present it in a way that is new and original and exciting. Not to say that we’re anywhere close to that.”

It was actually a shared appreciation of good pop that brought Gumbiner together with the men who would become Deathray. “I was doing a solo thing at the time, and I had a demo tape that I was kind of passing around. I was hanging out at a local open mic, and I knew Victor (Damiani, bass) and Greg (Brown, guitar) through Cake, because the band that I had played in previous to this (Little Guilt Shrine) had toured with them briefly,” Gumbiner recalls. “I passed my tape along to Victor, who passed it along to Greg. Greg gave me a call, and the three of us met at a bar, had a beer, and talked about our influences. We discovered that we sort of had a shared musical vocabulary. We all loved ’60s pop music and great pop songs in general, songwriters such as Alex Chilton and Nick Drake. We’re big fans of the edgier late-’70s/early-’80s new-wave bands, like Blondie, Wire, and Television. Actually, I think Television might be a bad example because they write songs that last longer than three minutes.”

Getting together proved simple enough, as did writing songs. It turned out that choosing a decent name was to be Deathray’s biggest hurdle. “For a while we were known as Misty, and then we were The Plastic, and then I think we were The Micronauts for about two seconds,” Gumbiner recalls. “I think Polygamy Okay was one name that lasted for about an hour, but eventually we settled on Deathray because it has the right amount of menace and it’s sort of an indirect homage to our sci-fi jones.” It so happened that Cake’s label was still feeling kindly toward Brown — who, it should be noted, penned the hit “The Distance” for his former band — and Damiani. “Shortly after that, we made a five-song demo that we sent to Capricorn, and they were kind enough to offer us a record deal.”

For that record, Deathray tapped Eric Valentine, best known for his work with Smash Mouth and Third Eye Blind, to sit behind the boards. “We sent him a tape through a friend of ours, Michael Urbano, and he said, ‘Why don’t you come on down to the studio and we can hang out, listen to some records and whatnot, and talk about what you guys want to do?'” Gumbiner recalls. “We drove down to Redwood Studio, which is just south of San Francisco, to hang out with him for the afternoon. We got there kind of expecting this black-lacquered, smooth enamel surface studio with a sexy receptionist or something behind a nice desk, and we get there and literally it’s in this industrial warehouse space. It’s basically a cross between our practice space, which is a complete dump, and an airport hangar, full of old vintage drum kits and an assortment of analog noisemakers, whether it be old Moogs or strange beatboxes from Japan that I’ve never seen anywhere else.”

After that meeting, Deathray was ready to get to work, regardless of the fact it didn’t yet have a drummer. The band found one right before it started recording, but at that point the band had already decided Urbano, who’s got a day job playing in Third Eye Blind, would play on the disc but not become a member. “He actually played at our very first club show, sort of as a guest drummer, but it was understood from the beginning that he wouldn’t be able to join the band permanently for a couple of reasons, probably the strongest of which is that he just had other commitments at the time. James (Neil) joined the band shortly after that,” he says, noting that Neil did manage to finagle his way onto a few of the tracks. “He totally understood what he was getting into from the get-go, and we made it very clear that there was no subterfuge or strangeness. We just let him know that we kind of have this agreement with this guy, but we do love your drumming and we really want you to be in the band.” The final member, synthesizer player and guitarist Max Hart, joined after the Deathray record was completed.

Having Hart in the band means Gumbiner is freed up to concentrate on being the frontman, even if it’s a role to which he’s still becoming accustomed. “I’m going into this band as sort of the full-time quote-unquote frontman, even though I’m reluctant to use that term with all the baggage that comes with it, but being the singer was a little bit scary and a little bit awkward at first,” he confides. “I slowly came into my own, I guess, on stage, and now it’s really relaxed and a lot of fun. We’ve done a lot of hanging out and talking about what we like as far as rock and roll performances go, and we’re all into, obviously, the early Who and the Stones, and we even find a lot of inspiration in people like James Brown. His performances were just incredible to watch.”

That’s fine, just as long as Gumbiner doesn’t start finding too much inspiration in, say, Britney Spears.

DeathrayWith The 9’s, Skirt, and Moaning Lisa

Saturday, May 27at Westport Block Party (between The Hurricane and McCoy’s)