The dynamism between the two musicians has had decades to percolate. Vogel and Tyson met when they were in kindergarten; they picked up guitars at the same time, and formed their first official group when they were barely twelve years old. They began playing as Two Gallants (a named lifted from James’ Joyce’s The Dubliners) when they were both 21 and have remained Two Gallants for the last ten years. And despite never being in the pocket or on trend as far as indie rock goes, their music has inspired a cult following.
“I don’t really think that this term satisfies, but sometimes I call [our music] traditional noise,” Stephens explains. “Noise is such a broad term but I think of it as being an expansion of traditional music – traditional American music played in extremely loud setting and by loud and noisy things end up getting distorted and being sorted of warped.”
On stage, Two Gallants’ guitarist and lead singer is a feral, shivering ball of angst, but in conversation he is reticent and uncertain. He has the air of someone who feels misunderstood, which may be a bi-product of playing in a band that has never quite broken through, despite busting their asses on the road and leaving everything on the stage, night after night. Vogel and Tyson did earn critical success over the years – they released a debut through Alice Records and two albums through Saddle Creek, including the acclaimed 2006 record What the Toll Tells and its brilliant Appalachian troubadour single Steady Rollin) – but it wasn’t enough to sustain them. In 2008, the Two Gallants parted ways indefinitely.
“We just kinda burnt ourselves out. We’d been touring pretty steady for like four or five years straight and you know, I don’t know, it can be pretty intense being in a two-person band. Your personalities end up sort of becoming the same, it doesn’t really work out very well in some ways. It sounds like a good thing, but I think it kinda ends up being an unhealthy thing sometimes. And I just think we needed a break from each other.”
Both Stephens and Vogel recorded albums when they were apart – Stephens used his time out to make a solo record while Vogel made a string-laced alt-country record with a band called The Devotionals. It was a productive time for the pair, but ultimately they realised that they missed each other. They missed the unique and indefinable chemistry of Two Gallants.
The pair returned to the touring circuit in 2011 and have since released a fourth album, The Bloom And The Blight, through ATO Recordings. It is a very different beast for this folk punk outfit, who are to American traditional music what The Drones or Grinderman are to Australian folk. Where Two Gallants’ previous albums have been rough, raw and spare, The Bloom And The Blight seeks to harness the brutal energy of their shows. It channels grunge into their sound; bigger guitars, broader dynamics and – in fleeting moments, anyway – a hint of their powerhouse live performance.
“A lot of what made me want to take a break from playing with Tyson was that I was writing a lot of songs that were very quiet and I didn’t think really fit our band and I sort of needed an outlet for them. That was why I made a record of those songs and toured on that. I think, having gotten that out of my system, I came back with all these pretty aggressive songs or at least a bit more aggressive mentality to writing songs and it’s kind of what lead us to this album,” Stephens says.
The Bloom And The Blight was produced by John Congleton, who has worked with everyone from The Walkman to Joanna Newsom to The Roots. He brought a light-hearted to the studio, according to Stephens, helping the band to navigate some fresh ground in the recording process. Stephens doesn’t think it’s a perfect record – he doesn’t seem the type to be capable of being wholly satisfied – but he loves the drum sound and the ambitious scope of the album. More than anything, he’s just happy to be moving forward with Two Gallants again. They’ve been back on the road in the States, back to Europe where they are very well respected, and toured China earlier this year for the first time. If their hiatus slowed the band’s momentum, Stephens hasn’t noticed it.
“I feel like everything we’ve been doing, from the very beginning, has been a very slow upward process of growth. I don’t think there’s been any stagnancy or lateral moves or anything. I think every time we go out on tour there’s more people and more discussion about us. But to be honest, I don’t really worry about it that much. I love playing the music we play. We’ve got some extremely intense, devoted fans and we’re very, very thankful for what we’ve got.”
BY SIMONE UBALDI
