The Thunderclaps don’t let distance keep them apart

“We don’t practice very often,” Colin Blunt tells me about the Thunderclaps, the two-man band he has formed with his cousin, guitarist Bryce Jones.

Blunt doesn’t mean that the duo wouldn’t benefit from more rehearsal time. It’s just hard for him to get together with Jones, who lives two hours away in Salina.

Blunt, 30, includes Jones, 29, in our conversation via conference call, putting his iPhone on speaker and setting it on the table between us at Mills Record Co., where he asked me to meet him.

From childhood friends to college roommates (when they simultaneously attended the University of Kansas), Blunt and Jones are more convincing as brothers than as first cousins. Together, they steer our conversation into different tangents: Blunt, his gaze fixed on the new-releases wall at Mills, begins asking Jones about various bands; a few seconds later, they’re discussing upcoming gigs. They chat easily and excitedly, and I imagine Jones mirroring Blunt’s sharp grin and frequent eyeglass adjustments.

Though the Thunderclaps have been official since January 2014, Blunt and Jones cut their teeth together in a Lawrence band called Pecos Bill. That group disbanded in 2011, after the cousins had graduated college and Jones had returned to his native Salina to teach high school English. Blunt, who had previously played guitar and bass, stuck around Lawrence and picked up the drums, he says, mostly as a new instrument to keep him occupied.

“I fell in love with it,” Blunt says. “I had no idea what I was doing, but I quickly learned that the key to being a good drummer is just playing really loud. I was just jamming with some nerds who wanted a drummer, and I was on a borrowed drum set, which is actually still the drum set I use. And then, you know, whenever Bryce would come down for this or that, we would always play together.”

After Blunt and Jones amassed a few songs, they briefly toyed with the idea of forming a full band or at least attempting to coordinate a more stable schedule.

“At a certain point, I was like, ‘I wish you lived in Kansas City, and I wish we had a bass player and this and that,'” Blunt says. “But then I just kind of realized we didn’t need that. We work best when it’s just us, and even with the distance, we still get to do exactly what we want to do.”

Blunt has a rather rakish look. Something about his wavy pompadour hairstyle, olive skin and glinting green eyes suggests a man who would make a convincing werewolf. This translates to his energy on the drum kit: At a recent in-store show at Mills, I watched as Blunt converted from man to beast, his wiry limbs tapping out tight drumbeats and cymbal flashes. Jones’ reverb-soaked guitar chords curled around those notes, fuzzy and imperfect, a mix of ’60s-era surf and garage-born rockabilly. Jones’ singing, a jangly, quirky tenor, bounced merrily through lyrics that called the listener to shake it, shake it, shake it some more. The set begged a dance floor.

On the band’s newest release, an EP called Cookin’ Up a Good Time, this energy translates loud and clear. It comprises only three songs — my only grievance — but it’s the perfect introduction to this enigmatic duo. It’s easy to imagine the broad appeal of the Thunderclaps: Their sound seems to pull in equal parts old-school rock and roll — the cousins name-check Bo Diddley, Fats Domino and Johnny Burnette — and a certain devil-may-care, DIY attitude. And, Jones says, the long-distance partnership means that songwriting becomes a somewhat hodgepodge process.

“When we started this, I didn’t really have much experience writing,” Jones admits. “And still, our songs are nothing fancy — they’re just rock-and-roll songs. You lose somebody, you get somebody, you lose your keys, you find your keys. It’s just fun stuff. I’d write all night and I’d play by myself, and usually anything that I think is worthwhile and completed, I pass it along to Colin. Then it runs through his set, and then we work it out together — usually over e-mail.”

It may not sound ideal, the cousins agree, but their long history means that they have a shorthand for communicating. And besides, they tell me, they’ve come a long way since the Thunderclaps’ first release, a self-titled, nine-track collection that they put on Bandcamp in August 2014.

“The idea was just to get the songs up there and have something out there for people to listen to,” Jones says. Those songs were recorded on a mini tape deck, the sort of thing reporters might have used in the ’90s for voice memos, he tells me, a laugh in his voice. But the cousins didn’t have any other equipment, and Blunt did his best to rerecord those blown-out songs on his iPhone so he could upload them to the Internet.

“It worked,” Blunt says, grinning, “but not well.”

Friday, when the Thunderclaps release Cookin’ Up a Good Time with a show at MiniBar, they plan to show off their improvements. Jones likens his role in the band to his day job.

“Teaching is, in a way, similar to the effect of delivering a set,” he says. “You have to have things prepared and get lessons across. It’s similar when we play: We have our songs, we’re revved up and ready to go, and we try to have a good time and get into it. Just like I would hope that kids would lose themselves in whatever we’re learning about.”