April 28, 2017

Center Stage - Brumby

Meet Las Vegas based Alternative/Western rock band and Radio Airplay's newest featured band, Brumby

Their latest release, is a stand alone single titled Leave a Light On, recorded at Battle Born Studios owned by The Killers. The song is characterized by synth-laden Americana vibes, anthemic choruses, and bright guitar melodies.

A band biography typically includes information on when the band was formed. But for Brumby, a rising star in the Las Vegas music scene, it’s complicated. “We’re not really sure,” says frontman Oliver Tingey. His cousins, guitarist Tyler Tingey and bassist Spencer Tingey, make up the rest of the band along with drummer Dylan Self, their childhood friend.

“The four of us grew up together and happened to play the right instruments. We were always playing together, and at one point we asked ourselves, ‘Are we in a band right now?’ We gave ourselves a name and went with it.”

The result is a chemistry as uncontrived as the band’s formation. Brumby was named Las Vegas’ best local band twice in 2016, and they took third place in Best of Las Vegas, putting them only behind local legends The Killers and Imagine Dragons.

Describe Brumby's sound in one ramble-on sentence
Brumby is somewhere in a confusing venn diagram of rock, alternative and pop, the boundaries of which seem blurrier as time goes on. We certainly have had a Western flair to many songs, but newer tracks are melding in a dash of modern R&B and synth sounds.

What's your earliest music-related memory growing up?

I had an electric "drumset" that was a single hunk of plastic with four pads on it that I would bring over to Tyler's house to jam some Weezer songs. I don't think we finished up any full-length original ideas, but that didn't stop me from drawing up some album artwork.

If you were to cover another band/artist's album, which would you pick and why?
Off the top of my head, I think it would be fun to cover a mid-career Radiohead album like Amnesiac or Hail to the Thief, but move each track a ways from their starting points. I'm sure others have done this and I just haven't heard of them for a reason.

Describe your songwriting process.
Tyler (the guitarist) is our main ideas man. Everyone seems to center best on the new song ideas that he brings along. Normally he has a basic outline of mood and at least one instrument's part will be mostly fleshed out. It goes through the musical meat grinder of our practice space "Westwind," and if all goes well, it comes out as a song that each of us has partially composed and mostly written our own part for. 

What was your highlight of 2016, either for you personally or for you music career?

I suppose a good part of last year was releasing our latest track, Leave a Light On, and receiving a lot of positive feedback about it. 

Can you give give us a little hint on what's to come in 2017?
If you've been to a live show lately, you've heard our song "Peace", which is done being recorded and only needs to be mixed and mastered before you can have a piece of "Peace" of your very own. 

What do you like more: Performing live or recording in the studio?
I don't really find these to be comparable processes. Both are integral parts of what we do. We have had a lot of great live performances, and several memorably terrible ones (such as when we were playing an outdoor show, our stage was extremely unstable to the point that we couldn't really move around for fear it would collapse, and the power kept going out). We've also had a few difficult and contentious moments during our time spent in different studios. But for the most part, I think we all really enjoy the recording process and have had the pleasure of working with some great producers and engineers over the years.

Any embarrassing on stage moments you'd like to share? C’mon, don’t be shy.
We have had a lot of mishaps. It used to be that we really didn't play a show without something going wrong. We've had some strings and guitar straps break, of course. We've also had amps blow out mid show or right before the show, and we've had our keyboard power supply break halfway through a keys-centered song. We've had power to the whole stage or part of the stage go out many times. One time Dylan's cymbals sort of exploded and flew across the stage. At the biggest show we've played, Oliver's acoustic guitar wasn't making any noise at a part where the music dropped to just vocals and his guitar, so he had to hold it up to his vocal mic to make sound.

What's one thing people should know about Brumby?
All of the band members are Eagle scouts.

What do you enjoy doing outside of music? Does your hobby rejuvenate your creativity?
I rock climb, mostly out at our conveniently located conservation area, Red Rock. Tyler is quite the bird watcher. Oliver is an equestrian (that doesn't mean centaur, but we haven't done enough research to confidently say that he's not a centaur). Dylan is a film buff and has a big gang of friends that go with him out to bars and enjoy the city most weekend nights. And we all really like Nintendo's 1999 game, Super Smash Bros., but we all play best as Kirby, so clearly we aren't very good at it.

Keep up with Brumby here!