Otter’s Slick Licks
The jazz-pop quartet Northampton didn’t know it was missing
With a few cold, hard months of winter on the way, Otter’s first full-length album arrives just in time to help melt the ice. “No Sleep No Dreams,” the first track on I Am My Brother, sets a relaxed beach groove, with smooth electric guitar, brushed drums, and warm, fuzzy keyboard. A pristine guitar solo midway through is fledgling Santana, while Matt Gaydar’s plainspoken tenor takes this indie cuddle-fest one step further. “With you here,” he mumble-croons, “there’s no sleep tonight.”
From beginning to end, in fact, I Am My Brother is dreamy and soulful, tapping the deep, warm traditions of funk, rock, lounge-around dorm jams, and the jazz-pop stylings of young maestros like Jamie Cullum. It’s an impressive achievement for four Skidmore guys who graduated college in 2014.
But Gaydar and his mates — bassist Josh Speers, drummer Jeremy Rosen, and pianist Ryan Ahern — met as freshmen, which means they’ve been playing together for six years now (all four of them sing). Their tenacity shows. Like their namesake critters, the members of Otter make sleek, playful fun of recording, with a nimble sense of both improvisation and pop song structure.
The Valley appealed to this foursome, who played house parties at Smith and Mount Holyoke during their senior year, and so after two years of touring and a brief stint in Boston, Otter has moved its home base to Northampton. For the many of us who haven’t heard much of them until now, these 11 tracks will serve as a welcome introduction. They offer a type of song the Valley hasn’t heard much of lately: the bluesy, jazzy slow-burner.
The third track — a moody break-up ballad called “Top of the Hill” — showcases this band’s ability to make music that is sharp and atmospheric at the same time: the song is a flickering fog of hazy drum riffs, insomniac lyrics, and alarm clock glitch-pop beats. The whole album, recorded at Northfire Recording Studio in Amherst with local producer/musician Andrew Oedel, is a fully-rounded composition, to be enjoyed in a warm, enclosed space.
It has its stand-out tracks, while also include “In Lieu of Getting Over” and “I Am My Brother, and He Is Mine,” as well as a few instrumental interludes, but the song title “Chrysalism” really nails it — this little-known word refers to the calm feeling of being indoors during a thunderstorm.
“Coming from a jazz background, we want to play improvised music with a structured framework,” Speers said by phone last week. “That’s important to us — not to be a jam band, but to still be able to improvise.”
Otter recorded I Am My Brother at Northfire Recording Studio in Amherst, in collaboration with local producer/musician Andrew Oedel. The process was a beast, Speers said, because the band decided to write and record a new full album from scratch, rather than rely on previously written material. Speers and his mates talked at length about the message and sound they wanted to get across — he cited alt-rock bands Alabama Shakes, Snarky Puppy, and Hiatus Kaiyote as a few of his personal inspirations — before they got down to the writing.
“We’ve always felt that our songs are never quite done — they go through different generations,” he added. “It’s really freeing to have the album done, because now we can deviate from that and keep our live shows fresh.”
Otter will play album release parties in Boston on Feb. 4, in Burlington on Feb. 5, and in Northampton on a soon-to-be announced date. I Am My Brother is currently available to stream through Sound of Boston, and it will be available to purchase on Jan. 25 through iTunes and Otter’s Bandcamp page.
