Photos by me! Apologies for the blurriness, no apologies for rockin’ out.
Racing up the coast on their latest tour, Atlanta trio Omni blew in to Cambridge last Sunday to re-animate their first batch of post-punk tunes onstage for an eager Middle East Upstairs crowd. Collected on their summer smasher Deluxe, the songs dart straight into your heart with equal parts glitzy neon shimmer and gritty streetwise rhythms. Omni find every which way to rig the punk formula in their favor; guitarist Frankie Broyles summons up marvelously melodic lines that drift about, sputter, and lunge at your heart, painting a perfect vista for the existential anxieties, large and small, of bassist/vocalist Philip Frobos. Musings about the calm acceptance of death find equal footing with nervous admissions of dropping someone’s prized earrings in the sink. Backed up by the polite rattle and bash of drummer Billy Mitchell, whose tight grooves claw at your dancin’ shoes til you can’t hold back, these anointed three have what it takes for you to fall back in love with good ol’ rock n roll once and for all. Amen.
Before the throwdown hit the stage, the three of them were kind enough to chat with me over grape leaves and spinach pie at the Middle East restaurant.
Phillipe Roberts: Philip, do you have a favorite lyric you wrote for Deluxe? My favorite has to be “Quality of life is on the line…”
Philip Frobos: Off “Wednesday Wedding”? I was going to say the part before that: “I’ve been calling, leaving messages…” I thought that worked out really nice. It’s hard to think of one in particular; we’ve played about 50 shows in the last few months, so they can blend together, night-to-night. But we actually have a new song, and the chorus I really like. It’s just “Boys drink bottles, and break them in the street.”
PR: Think you’ll be playing it tonight?
PF: Absolutely.
PR: How long was it between finishing writing Deluxe and the new stuff?
PF: We never really stopped writing. Long story short, we wrapped up Deluxe in March of last year, but it wasn’t totally mastered until May. We had a label that was really interested in putting it out, and we all wanted it to work, but it was just one of those things that wasn’t meant to be. But! In the meantime we met Bill and Lisa from Trouble in Mind, and they were so into it. But their record schedule was already packed in for the next year….
Frankie Broyles [Guitar] and Billy Mitchell [Drums] join us at the table, a short conversation about Tequila is had (it’s an Espolon kind of night, fans), and then…
PF: So at any rate, we weren’t going to be able to do everything we needed to get it ready for release until this summer. That’s why it took a minute. But in between all of that, we kept writing, essentially getting a bonus year of songwriting without expectations to work on the second record. There’s that classic “you have your whole life to write your first album and then six months to write your second” and we lucked out of that with more time.
PR: So you’re definitely looking at a second record then? You’re completely locked in for another?
Frankie Broyles: That’s our plan.
PR: Is there going to be anything different about the second go around?
FB: It’s nothing too drastic. But hopefully there will be some progression.
PF: Progression, but you’re still gonna get the Omni that you know and love [laughs]
PR: Omni gets a ton of comparisons to mainly older bands: DEVO, Television, even Roxy Music sometimes. Do you enjoy being compared to older music, or would you like to see more comparisons to modern acts?
FB: I think it’s very flattering. I’m glad some people see that in it, but I don’t always see it myself. We all enjoy a lot of that music, so it’s cool if people feel that they’re somehow related to us.
PF: It’s nice that that’s where people’s minds go, you know? Because that means that they’re associating it with something that they’re already deeply passionate about and have an intimate relationship with. And we all share similar relationships with that music.
FB: I don’t know what it sounds like, but those are all nice things to hear.
PF: This very kind, very wasted old dude at one of our shows told us that we sound like “Van Morrison backed by Nirvana,” which was also nice to hear.
PR: [To Frankie and Billy] Do either of you have a favorite musical moment on the record?
FB: There’s a lot of small things on the recordings that I’ve grown fond of. This guy came up to me in Dallas and said “That one note that you played that’s like super flat! I love that part!” and all I could think was “Oh good, cause I thought it sounded like shit!” It’s the climax of this guitar part and I’m glad it’s there now, but initially I wanted to re-do it. But our friend Nathaniel, who recorded Deluxe, just said “NOPE! No more!”
PF: Also, there’s a part in the song “Wire” that we don’t do live. It’s right at the end of the chorus, where the sound sort of swells into the outro.
PR: Right, right, that crazy delay/chorus thing?
PF: Yeah. Nathaniel said “You guys should do something here!” and we all sort of shrugged. Frank did a couple of things and THAT happened and we were all just blown away.
FB: I remember everyone thinking it sounded hilarious. Sort of like “Well that’s just ridiculous!” But then we kept it.
PR: So y’all have been out on tour for about a week now, right? How’s tour treating you?
FB: Good! We did a month long tour about a month ago. It’s way less stressful having to stay on our native coast this time around.
PR: No time changes and such.
PF: That and the scariness of being late to places and not knowing what time it is. We learned that certain states don’t observe daylight savings time, so we’d be late to soundchecks with no idea, thinking we’d be doing great. So keeping it to the east coast has been easy breezy.
PR: Was there any track on Deluxe that took a while to get right in recording or writing?
FB: Not really, actually. Maybe the worst was one track called Eyes on the Floor where we mic’d up the amp a few different ways and it didn’t sound right to me. But we went direct in to the mixing board and problem solved. The songs were really minimal when we wrote them, and keeping it that way in the studio made it easier on us.
PF: We had a little bit of a rough patch writing “Wednesday Wedding”, but all it really meant was a couple of extra tries more than the others. The whole recording process took about 3 weeks.
PR: [To Billy] Omni is based out of Atlanta, but you’re actually from Chicago I hear. How did you get involved in the band?
Billy Mitchell: I actually moved to Atlanta about 10 years ago [laughs], and started playing in bands. We met each other going to shows and playing in other bands. Frank actually plays the drums on the record, and I was living back in Chicago when they were recorded. Philip gave me a call about moving back down and playing on the tour.
PF: We needed help…bad.
PR: Are there any bands in Atlanta that you try to see whenever you get a chance?
FB: Philip saw this band called Art School Jocks. I haven’t seen them play yet, but I want to!
PF: Very arty.
BM: Salsa Chest, they’re probably my favorite band out there!
PR: Is there a timeline on the second record?
FB: We’re doing it the same way we did before. We just started tracking scratch bass and drums for it, doing our best to work around everybody’s schedules.
PF: We’re hoping to dig in more this fall and early winter when we get back home. Ideally we can knock it out, but it’ll take as long as it takes.
FB: Well, Nathaniel won’t let it take too long.
PF: [Laughs] That’s true. Then I guess it’ll come out next year for sure.
