
By Dustin Lothspeich
It’s a joy to dig through the patchwork quilt of genre-jumping that takes place on “Channels,” the long-awaited debut EP by San Diego indie darlings Ed Ghost Tucker. Admittedly, it’s also a Herculean task — and a welcome one at that. After all, it’s not often that reggae, worldbeat, and chillwave occupy the same sentence, and it’s even more rare that such a sentence would be used to describe a band from our own backyard. But after having the six-track album on repeat for a while, it hasn’t gotten any easier to decipher. How exactly do you categorize a group that defies categorization?

(Photo by Skylar Lusteg)
“I would probably stutter for a while and struggle to come up with the right term,” Ed Ghost Tucker guitarist/vocalist Rutger Rosenborg said. “But in the end, I might say, ‘It’s pop/rock.’”
Sure, if you want the Cliffs Notes version — yes, it’s pop/rock, but it’s so much more. Over the course of the 21-minute record, the La Mesa-based quartet (also comprised of keyboardist/vocalist Michaela Wilson, bassist/vocalist Cameron Wilson and drummer Ryan Miller) walk a tightrope through nearly every monument of modern music. Simultaneously, they tip their collective hat to a litany of vintage musical cornerstones to boot. For every trace of Fleet Foxes, Grizzly Bear and Vampire Weekend, they glance fleetingly backward at The Beatles, Bob Marley, Paul Simon and The Talking Heads. No band likes to be confined by labels, but some struggle against it more than others. Ed Ghost Tucker seem to have taken the fight from the monkey bars to the boxing ring — whether they know it or not.
“I don’t know that we are actively concerned about being pigeonholed; I think we just like to challenge ourselves and try new things,” Rosenborg explained. “The cards will fall where they fall. I think that’s what holds these songs together in particular. It was definitely intentional for this collection, but we don’t like to do the same thing twice, so our next collection of songs will probably have a different feel and a different writing approach altogether.”
If anything, “Channels” is a meticulously crafted EP — the audio equivalent of a cantankerous movie house operator slicing and pasting snippets of several different films together to make one entirely new piece. The fact that it lives and breathes as a fully cohesive album is, well, nothing short of amazing. Imagine The Beach Boys 1966 masterpiece, “Pet Sounds,” reinterpreted by Lee “Scratch” Perry and Radiohead’s Thom Yorke: Acoustic guitars appear and fade, electro beats give way to brushed drums, angelic group harmonies pepper complex electric guitar phrases until surprise island-rhythm funk breakdowns and handclaps resolve into wide, shoegaze canyons. And that’s just one track (“I Do”). We might as well refer to Ed Ghost Tucker as a new-and-improved Dr. Frankenstein, the refined mad scientists of San Diego’s music scene.
“When we write, we do it spontaneously and intuitively,” Rosenborg continued. “After we’ve written something, we can get pretty methodical about editing it. Sometimes we think about it too much. We’re constantly making adjustments to rhythms, harmonies, lyrics — even entire structures. I think we’re just very wary of homogenization and calling any form complete.”
After witnessing the band perform more than half a dozen times, it’s safe to say that they’re just as impressive live as they are in the studio — if not more. They’re absolute professionals at their craft, and with the scalpel-like precision with which they’ve constructed songs, they really have no other choice. The four members are nearly swallowed by their arsenal of equipment onstage, and with three out of the four contributing vocals throughout the set — let’s just say the sound guys of America’s Finest City have had to up their game.
Absent is the drunken debauchery of their peers, the typical ancient rock posturing, the who-gives-a-fuck stage personas and petulant, attention-starved attitudes. The quartet operates intently and deliberately — swerving through jazzy excursions, experimental jams, drop-of-a-dime transitions and impossibly complex harmonies with equal aplomb. It’s always a calculated exhibition; one that finds them working away under the demands of their own labyrinthine artistry. However, the perfectionism that drives the band in the studio and during the writing process can also plague them in a live setting, according to Rosenborg.
“For me, live sound and recorded sound are very different experiences,” he said. “With live sound, I think a lot of Ed Ghost Tucker’s intricacies and layers get lost. Our sound depends a lot on being able to hear and communicate with one another, and that’s not always easy to do on a loud stage.
“So I’m sure there are times when we just sound terrible, but I think we’re probably harder on ourselves than anyone else could ever be. A live situation is not an ideal sound situation, but that’s what makes it so interesting, unpredictable and impossible to replicate. It’s also worth remembering that a group of people crowded into a small dark room is much more forgiving than a single person in bed with headphones.”
Until now though, the band hasn’t given their ever-growing fanbase much to obsess over in bed. A couple years back, they threw up a few home-recorded demos online and followed it up with a studio single (“Devils”) in late 2013. This year saw the release of “Sofia” — an instantly catchy indie pop song accompanied by an equally beautiful music video, which caught fire across the blogosphere. On Nov. 22, the band will finally be releasing their first physical product at their EP release show at Soda Bar — and it was a painstaking effort to say the least.
“[‘Channels’] was definitely a labor of love, of heart and mind. That’s why it’s very imperfect,” Rosenborg admitted. “I must have averaged 20 or 30 hours a week on it for eight months, tinkering and learning. The rest of the band was in there with me for some of that too. So if people hate it, they can blame me. If they love it, they can credit us all.”
Even now, on the cusp of the release, he’s still anxious about sending his baby into the world: “It will always be incomplete. In fact, yesterday I was making adjustments to the masters simply because there were things that I was hearing that I thought maybe could be different … But at a certain point, you just have to let go and move on. One of my favorite epigraphs to a book is from E.M. Forster’s ‘The Longest Journey’: ‘A work of art is never finished. It is merely abandoned.’ It’s taken us two years to finally abandon these songs.”
Luckily, Ed Ghost Tucker has never sounded bigger or better. They’ve somehow managed to translate the magic and atmosphere from their live show and the promise of their early recordings into a sprawling, fully formed journey through the musical ether.
Not bad for a pop/rock band.
—Dustin Lothspeich is a music writer in San Diego. Contact him at dustinlothspeich@gmail.com.
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