Boston-based indie-pop rockers The Main Drag released their third album, 'You Are Underwater' (2009), digitally on Dec. 8 and on CD Jan. 7. The five-piece group - composed of Jon Carter (guitar, bass, vocals, keyboards), John Drake (drums, vocals), Matt Boch (vocals, guitar, bass, keyboards, trumpet) and Tufts alumni Adam Arrigo (LA '06) (vocals, production, guitar, keyboards, glockenspiel) and Dan Cardinal (LA '05) (bass, engineering) - held a CD release party at T.T. the Bear's Place in Cambridge on Jan. 7 with special guest Spirit Kid. The Main Drag plans to perform a few shows during the coming months before launching a more extensive tour this summer in support of the album.
'You Are Underwater' plays like a bubbly combination of The Shins and Postal Service with a shimmering dollop of MGMT-style synth layered on top and just enough psychedelic, Flaming Lips-esque quirk to keep listeners guessing. The album unveils seven new songs plus a remix of an earlier song, 'Jagged Gorgeous Winter,' popularized by its release on the Rock Band 2 sound track. The detailed production on each track seamlessly incorporates a diverse pileup of sonic textures.
In an interview with the Daily, Arrigo explained that a lot of the layering of sounds has to do with The Main Drag's compositional style. 'Main Drag songs have always started as recorded ideas,' he said. 'We'll send out demos or complete sessions. We'll chop up, rearrange and add parts of each others' work until the final song sounds like something completely different from what the original demo was.' ' '
'We have to learn our music, which is sort of a weird thing for a band to have to do,' Drake added. 'It's not like we get in a [practice] room and just start playing - we have to figure out how we're going to play the songs, if there's nine guitar parts or something. We have to decide what we're going to play live, what we're going to play on keyboards, what we're going to trigger on samples.'
If the band's compositional style seems a bit unconventional, their path through the confusing modern music industry displays an eccentric, successful ingenuity. Four of the five band members work at Harmonix Music Systems, developers of the Rock Band series of interactive music video-games.
'Rock Band, as a platform, has definitely expanded our band's fan-base exponentially,' Arrigo said. 'We had a song in Rock Band 2, 'Jagged Gorgeous Winter' 'hellip; and it really surprised me after it came out, the number of MySpace hits and weird YouTube videos. We found this video of these 10-year-old kids in the Philippines playing our song at a county fair.'
In an unconventional move that further blurs the line between playing music and listening to it, The Main Drag has released several songs online as raw track stems so that any listener can remix and post them publicly.
'We're a pretty free-culture band; we'd prefer that people be falling in love with our music rather than not doing so because they have to buy it,' Drake said.
With their self-financed enterprise, independently distributed albums and do-it-yourself production mentality, The Main Drag embodies a burgeoning segment of the once-exclusive music business. As the prices of recording and online promotion and distribution decline, more and more musicians are eschewing the traditional major-label path in the industry.
Going the independent route has its advantages and disadvantages, according to Drake: 'We have complete control over our music, timelines, message, image and money; but there are still big hurdles, such as getting in front of larger audiences, or breaking into markets that aren't your home town.'
We pay for our mastering, but we do all the recording and mixing ourselves, since we're all fairly competent at sound engineering,' Arrigo said. 'At this point we don't need to sign with a small or mid-sized indie label, because we're capable of doing all that ourselves. And with the Rock Band connection, we have a means of getting the music out there to a larger audience.'
The Main Drag will begin touring the northeast this March, with tour dates to be posted at their Web site, www.themaindrag.com. Their albums, including 'You Are Underwater,' are available through iTunes and Amazon.com, and some of their most recent songs can be streamed for free at www.myspace.com/themaindrag.
