Wampire Talk To Us About The Portland Scene

Seems like bands need a pre-packaged meme these days. Yawn right? Thankfully Wampire’s debut LP Curiosity doesn’t sound anything like the pastiche compilation of B-movie horror scores their MacGuffin of a name and artwork might hint at. It’s all tumbling guitar lines and rampaging drum beats, with plenty of synth for flashes of kaleidoscopic colour. Curiosity is also sung in a cosy slouch of a charismatic drawl that keeps luring your finger back to the repeat arrow.

Wampire's Rocky Tinder and Eric Phipps, Portland music scene staples themselves, brought in label mates Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s Jacob Portrait to produce their album which is finally out next week.

We spoke to them to find out about their story so far.

Noisey: Hey Rocky. You and Eric have been playing together for years right?

Rocky: We met in fifth grade. To be in band at the time you had go up to the middle school. They would take one bus to drop everyone off, so we met on there.

Did you have similar music taste back then?

Yeah, I guess so. We were really young.

So, did you bond over NSync or something like that?

Um. I liked N Sync.

Then when you got older you started playing the house party scene in Portland?

Yeah, the house party thing was till about 2011.

Were you always set on making the band a full time job?

I always had the fantasy growing up of wanting to be a rock star, but in the meantime we went to school. We’re in school now.

Have some of the songs on Curiosity been with you for years and years?

Yeah, the record spans the entire existence of the band. It’s a good retrospect.

I heard that in order make it, you took apart all the songs you had already with your producer, Jake. Were you ever worried it might all just totally unravel at that point?

We were just really excited about bringing songs in and having someone outside of the band pitching ideas about where to chop, where to rearrange and where to write new parts.

What do you think got Polyvinyl excited to work with you on it?

They were really adamant that "The Hearse" was going to be on it. Also "Magic Light", those were the two we gave them. At first the demos we were playing them were a lot more electronic. I think they get what we’re going for now. I think they respect it and trust us.

It would be weird if they didn’t expect artists to develop. Do you listen to a lot of electronic music still?

I like to DJ when I can and a lot of that is dance music, so it is a part of me, but I’m less interested in making it now. I just play rock and roll at this point.

Has it all been going down well live so far?

If there’s one thing we’ve taken away from our shows, it’s that I personally would like to write a batch of faster songs. On the next one it would be cool to write a whole record of bangers. I think it comes from our house party background, and wanting to be more rowdy and punk.

Venue shows can be pretty jarring when you’re from that sort of scene.

Totally. That was our first tour that we did. It was a little weird being the opening band and no-one had heard our album. I’m very excited for the record to come out and people to be familiar with it.

How was SXSW for you?

It was cool. It was really intense and hot, and we were all already exhausted from tour. We'd been partying too much and didn’t stop there.

I think if you stop you’d die in Austin.

Exactly. Our whole thing is even if we get sick we’ll just keep drinking or the sickness will get crazy intense. The problem with that is you’ll get sick after for weeks.

I figure Portland is probably a great place to recuperate in at least.

Yeah. There’s the health food thing and everybody bikes.

Do you feel like any elements of Portland’s scene particularly fed into the music you make?

I think at first the town and the people around us were really inspiring for the band. After a while we started looking out at bigger bands like Ariel Pink or even Mac DeMarco as influences.

Are those the bands whose paths you’d like to follow?

Being so close to Jake and Reuben, it’s been fun to watch their success. (With Unknown Mortal Orchestra.)

So, I have to ask about the horror influence. Was there anything in particular that kicked that off?

There were some influences from bad, old, horror films. Anything cheesy. When we made the record our first concern was just getting the meat of it and once we got that far, we started letting the record develop in front of us. Making a spookier theme in the production came in the last couple days. We just started adding little touches and giving stuff a little boost once we had the record in front of us; like putting the organs at the beginning of ‘The Hearse’ which is how the record starts.

Lastly, I saw you’re using Vine a bit?

Well, there’s not a huge community on it, but it’s the funniest app I’ve ever seen. I feel like the more I Vine though, the more people are going to be like, “those guys are idiots”, but I just can’t help it.

Wampire play London’s Shacklewell Arms on June 18th, purchase tickets here.

Listen to the exclusive premiere of their new track, "Magic Light", below.