OKLAHOMA CITY — There’s just something about a great “power trio,” a classic, three-piece, guitar/bass/drums rock band with each putting in the work to create something with both more space and openness than standard rock and also way more heft and intensity than you’d expect from just three players.
Like Rush, The Police, Nirvana, or the immortal Jimi Hendrix Experience, the power of a great trio rests in the focused personalities and styles of its three elements, everyone contributing a full, confident musical voice, like a tripod with each leg leaning on the others for balance.
There’s little room for error and no one to pick up your slack or fill in your gaps.
In short, everybody in a trio better bring it.
Music and film
by Brett Fieldcamp
Sponsored by True Sky Credit Union
Luckily for OKC’s Big Weather, their brand new debut EP “A Nice Try” proves that this trio can bring it with the best of them.
The combined efforts of singer/songwriter (and part-time Tiger backing up Beau Jennings) Chase Kerby, veteran guitar wizard Zach Stabler, and inescapable, chameleonic drummer (and one of Johnny Manchild’s core Poor Bastards) Ethan Neel, Big Weather obviously carry something of a pedigree in the city’s indie-rock scene.
But like any great trio that needs to be considerably more than the sum of its parts, the guys spend exactly none of the EP’s six tracks resting on their laurels or expecting any of their previously earned respect to automatically carry over.
They play like a gang of young, hungry, upstarts, with Kerby exploding his lungs on any number of mammoth choruses and holding down a persistent, growling bass, and Neel playing like his life depends on it, blasting through some insane fills, always heightening the momentum instead of simply punctuating lines.
But it’s Stabler’s playing that hitches it all together and keeps it from going over the edge. His style is “Swiss Army guitar,” pulling out whatever texture, harmony, or power chord the moment calls for with precision.
In fact, with a punk energy driving atmospheric, affected guitar and frantic, fusion-inspired drumming, it’s admittedly difficult to not draw some pretty direct parallels to The Police, especially as the EP’s sporadic keyboard cameos and arena-sized pop-melody choruses so easily evoke that band’s 80s heyday.
But while it was a healthy streak of reggae and Caribbean flavors that underlined the sound of The Police, for Big Weather, it’s an undeniable reservoir of gritty, ever-so-slightly Southern-tinged songwriting that runs just beneath the fist-pumping indie-rock surface.
Strip these songs down to the foundations and there’s a good chance they’d all actually work as simple folk songs or piano ballads, partially because of the tightness and focus in the melodies, but perhaps even more so because of the open-hearted barroom storytelling in Kerby’s lyrics.
Each song here is a lament not just of failure, but of the self-assured hubris that led its narrator off a cliff.
From opener “Staring Out the Window” and its defeated realization of “I guess by now I should’ve known” to “you can’t walk away from this” in “Night Before Sunrise” and through the titular refrain of “you wanted this” from closer “YWT,” it’s all about drowning in sunk cost.
For songs bursting with so much youthful energy and sonic electricity, there’s a sense of reflective sadness and guilt that feels, for lack of a better word, adult.
Rather than the usual lovelorn pity parties or swaggering chest-beating that we’ve all come to expect from the various indie-rock avenues – emo, post-punk, etc., etc. – these songs each seem to be willfully, even desperately attempting to reconnect to that fire of youth. It’s the sound of trying to claw your way back to the age when you were last blindsided by embarrassment or heartache or even a home breaking apart.
The problem, of course, is that age brings with it enough perspective to see your own complicity in the drama, to realize that, well, “you wanted this.”
And when you’re hit by that feeling, there’s nothing left to do but put your foot to the kick drum, bang out some massive chords, and sing it out harder than ever.
That’s the sound of Big Weather.
“A Nice Try” by Big Weather is available now on all streaming platforms and on Bandcamp at bigweatherokc.bandcamp.com.
Follow Big Weather on Instagram at @bigweatherokc.
Brett Fieldcamp has been covering arts, entertainment, news, housing, and culture in Oklahoma for nearly 15 years, writing for several local and state publications. He’s also a musician and songwriter and holds a certification as Specialist of Spirits from The Society of Wine Educators.
