Brattleboro band The Snaz primed to shine
BRATTLEBORO – The four members of Brattleboro band The Snaz gathered at keyboard player Mavis Eaton's house on a recent Sunday afternoon. They were discussing their upcoming trip to Austin, Texas, to play at the biggest music festival in the country, South By Southwest.
Lead singer, guitarist and primary songwriter Dharma Ramirez suddenly realized what their road trip would mean.
"Oh, my God," she said. "I have to tell my teachers!"
That reveals a couple of things about The Snaz. One, they're really, really young — their combined age of 64 is nearly a decade less than that of Paul McCartney — and two, these high-school kids are promising enough to be booked at a massive music festival that's all about giving bands from around the world a chance at getting discovered.
The Snaz, who perform next week in Burlington, seem just a step or two from that big break. Ramirez, 17, writes tunes with strong hooks and lyrics that explore teenage turmoil in refreshing ways. Their songs dart and dive in unexpected directions similar to one of the high-energy indie-rock bands they cite as an inspiration, Arctic Monkeys. On stage, Ramirez sings those songs with alluring bravado; when she declares "I wanna be the queen of rock 'n' roll" in the song "Running Away From Home," it's not hard to imagine her coronation.
Eaton, also 17, and drummer Zack James, 14, play with controlled ferocity. Nina Cates, 16, tempers the heat with a relaxed, ultra-cool presence on bass. With Ramirez knowing when to bend her voice at just the right time and the band stopping and starting on the point of a pin to build and release tension, the four teens show that they're eons ahead of many veteran bands when it comes to musical smarts.
They have the songwriting chops and the musical chemistry to command attention, and they also have a healthy dose of rock 'n' roll confidence. "Our music is quirky, original, catchy and groovy yet moshable," the band wrote for its biography on the website for South By Southwest, where they performed Saturday as part of a Vermont-music showcase. "We are a young group of attractive, energetic rockers."
This could be the next Vermont band your out-of-state friends ask you about.
Considering their youth, though, the members of The Snaz are not naive. They know that making it big in the music business — which they hope with cautious optimism to do —is far from guaranteed.
"I feel like it's dangerous to bank on that, but if we could get there it would be incredible," said Cates, the bass player who in the liner notes to the band's new album, "Running Away From Home," goes by the name Nina Singleton-Spencer.
James said the four don't want to imagine themselves as a professional band because they know they can't rely on it happening. "If you say, 'This is what we want to be,' you could look like a total fool," the drummer said. "If we work hard as a band, we could accomplish that (success)."
The hard work began when Ramirez and Eaton decided to start a band as eighth-graders at Brattleboro Area Middle School. The only catch was they didn't know how to play their instruments. Ramirez learned guitar by watching instructional videos on YouTube. Eaton winged it on keyboards; the best she could say about her early output was "This sounds vaguely OK."
They honed their sound after trying out a few drummers and choosing James, then 11 years old, whose brother and Ramirez's brother are friends. "Dharma was excited about that because you had a gong," Eaton told James.
"He was just like super-amazing," Ramirez said, "way above everyone else."
The band's previous bass player left, and Ramirez took to the web to search for girls her age who played instruments. She found Cates playing guitar on Facebook and messaged her to ask if she played bass; Cates, already a fan of The Snaz, responded that she had been playing bass since fourth grade. She joined the band the day after Christmas 2013.
"It was just a breath of fresh air," James said of Cates' arrival.
The band has played dozens of gigs and already had more success in southern Vermont and northern Massachusetts than most bands could hope for in their home areas. They've been nominated as Best New Act by the New England Music Awards, which will be handed out April 18 in Foxboro, Mass. They were finalists in National Public Radio's Studio 360 Battle of the High School Bands. They celebrated the release of their new album this month in the crowded, lively, venerable Iron Horse Music Hall in Northampton, Mass.
That new CD, "Running Away From Home," was produced by Peter Solley, a Grammy nominee for his work with Motorhead and a former member of English rockers Procol Harum. The Brit who lives in southern Vermont has produced records by a litany of rock and pop acts over the past four decades, including Ozzy Osbourne, Mountain, Peter Frampton, Ted Nugent and Oingo Boingo. The shouts of "Hey!" on "Whose Fault Was That" from the new Snaz album sound a lot like the vocals on what might be the best-known song Solley has produced, the 1980 hit "What I Like About You" by pop-rockers The Romantics.
The Snaz was playing at the Guilford Fair in southern Vermont a couple of years ago when Solley heard them and introduced himself. "He said he wanted to work with us and we were like, 'Cool,'" Eaton said.
In the recording studio, Guilford Sound, he gave the band advice ranging from altering bass lines to turning a louder vocal into a whisper. "He was really good at being organized and getting everything done as quickly as possible," Eaton said.
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Yet the band is ready to move on from working with Solley. James said the band sometimes felt his musical ideas were too rooted in the 1970s, and they want to make sure they more clearly define their sound. They've talked about giving The Snaz a more sweeping feel, something resembling the music of contemporary acts such as Arcade Fire or Vampire Weekend.
Oddly enough, a band of teenagers has reached a crossroads. "We're really trying to evolve our sound," James said.
They're putting a lot more thought into the songs they write. That's creating stress for a band whose increasingly popular sound is already built upon a layer of nervous energy.
"We feel like we have to write songs that are actually good," Eaton said, "because people like us now."
Contact Brent Hallenbeck at 660-1844 or bhallenbeck@freepressmedia.com. Follow Brent on Twitter at www.twitter.com/BrentHallenbeck.
If you go:
WHAT: Hank & Cupcakes with Steady Betty and The Snaz
WHEN: 10 p.m. April 4
WHERE: Light Club Lamp Shop, Burlington
ADMISSION: Free; donations accepted. 660-9346, www.radiobean.com
Look for a video featuring music by and an interview with The Snaz at www.burlingtonfreepress.com.