Friday, September 08, 2017

Sol Drop: Flagstaff Trio Leads Vibrant Crop of Groups Forming in a Vibrant Music Scene in Northern Arizona

Dare we say it? Flagstaff, Arizona. Senior Class. Northern Arizona University. Great band, Sol Drop is. Could probably beat ASU's best senior class band. That's a wild guess. But it's possible. Need to do more research on this. Yet Flagstaff is a separate cultural being from the megalopolis of Phoenix and Tucson. That breeds originality. A real "music scene" in northern Arizona? Maybe. Maybe.

The high-tech interview on Facebook Messenger with two of the three members of Sol Drop is growing dark and difficult to see as the two stand at the Conoco Station at San Francisco and Butler. First they are backlit in the sunset, then it goes all grainy blue, then, nothing but black and it's time to go. These are busy people. They have to go to class, among other things, since they are seniors at NAU.

"It has almost been a year since we released an album," Sean says.
Says Kathryn, "Since we've been together now we are a lot more solid."

In the past year the band has played SWSX for its spring break vacation, and they currently have the goal of releasing another album in May as a graduation present for themselves.

Just how prepared can three seniors at Northern Arizona University be? While the new college semester began with the annual arrival of daily parties and all the young dudes shouting over the din of giant stereo speakers, as well as the rivers of people running in and out of the bars downtown, the members of Sol Drop, a band that’s three years old, has been carefully hatching a plan.

A year ago they released their first CD, "It’s Alright," at an album release party at the Firecreek Coffee Co, where they just played another successful show on First Friday this month. In a carefully thought out marketing strategy, receipt of the new work was included in the cost of attending the event and now according to the members of the band agree other groups from the area are doing the same thing, After U2 rankled the world of Apple users by automatically depositing their last record, "Songs of Innocence," into their music player files, the incident, even if it did tee-off some music fans who simply didn’t like (hated) the band, did highlight the crisis of the ongoing search for some kind of new distribution paradigm in the age of the Internet.

In response to these kinds of issues, Sol Drop’s lead singer, guitarist and NAU honors student Kathryn Meyers, who is “leaning” toward marketing in her studies at NAU, decided to draw from the past.

“We are forcing people to buy the CDs by including it in the cost of admission,” she laughed exactly one year ago during a person-to-person interview at Fire Creek. “I know Prince would do it back in the day. He’d give his new CD to people at his shows, and then by doing that he’d make it No. 1 on Billboard."

Sol Drop is a power-trio described by its members—Meyers, Sean Buechel (bass) and Brian Dorsey (drums)—as fast-blues. Meyers’ vocals are drawn from a kind of ’80s female punk weirdness, with snarls and yelps and extended phrasing reminiscent of anyone from David Byrne, Wendy O. Williams or to her several years of listening to the “Riot grrrl” genre of music of Sleater Kinney and Bikini Kill. But her playing is inspired by Jimi Hendrix. Meyers says she started listening to Hendrix as a young teen growing up in the Arcadia district of Phoenix/Scottsdale. From there she moved on to learning to play guitar by listening to blues standards by B.B. King and other blues masters.

“I was into Joan Jett and all of those women who came out,” she says. “That interested me, those women inspired me that way. A lot of people tell us that I sound like the singer for the B-52s, but I’ve hardly ever listened to them other than hearing the song “Rock Lobster.” I certainly don’t try to sound like the B-52s.”

As far as the “how-we-got-together” story goes for Sol Drop, it’s one of the better stories you could ever hear.

Meyers, who clearly came to NAU with the idea of starting a band in mind, had noticed Dorsey walking in a dorm hallway with a drum key on a carabiner. Then she asked if he was a drummer. He was, having played in various bands in Santa Rosa, Calif. She got his number with the idea they would later jam, then sent him a text message several months later. He didn’t realize who it was at first, but then remembered the connection.

The problem was, even if they wanted to play music together, they had nowhere to practice. It was pretty impossible in the dorms they were living in.

But then one day Meyers found a power outlet on the top floor of a parking garage on campus.

As Buechel describes it, “We took our stuff on the top of the parking garage and found a common place where we could play. We did it just loud enough with the drum set to where we could hear each other playing,” says Dorsey. “From just doing that we got some fans who came by to listen, and many of them have been coming to our shows ever since. Nobody told us to stop, for some reason. People really enjoyed it, which was cool.”

Meyers says that within a week of playing on the parking garage, they had their first gig at Firecreek.

This summer they went on a DIY tour up and down the West Coast, first starting in Phoenix, then going from Southern to Northern California, finally ending up in Las Vegas, where they played at a deli.

“We did 10 shows in nine days,” Meyers says. “We did one in a party room in a bowling alley. That was an interesting story. The owner cut the power on the band playing after us because they were too loud.”

During the band’s short time together, they have played at least 60 shows, many of them in Tempe, Phoenix and Scottsdale. Their new CD was recorded in Chandler, at an independent studio called Clamsville and run by John Herrera, who Meyers says has given the group “a lot of good tips.”

Standout tracks on the new seven-track CD include the opener, “Fake,” which starts out with striking punk guitar then leads into a very Hendrix-like section. Her vocals are bratty in the punk form. Another good song is “Rewinder,” in which Meyers’ pursues a bluesy chord progression, then sings in a snarling melody laced with sarcasm. Indeed, the seven-song release is a showcase for Meyers’ brilliance as a new young talent in Flagstaff.

Working the social media, especially using Facebook and Snapchat to keep in touch with their emerging following of say, 100 people, the band is trying to do all of the right things. For Sol Drop, there is a plan: To graduate, and then survive, as a band.

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