Email
PrintThe Hipnecks
The foyer of The Mansion at Columbia is low-lit, making it seem smaller than it is. Clean and busy, the twenty-four foot walls of the entryway and the recording room at the rear of the house mix contemporary middle-upper class conservatism and recording studio hodgepodge. It doesn’t work.
The Hipnecks’ Wes Wingate looks up from his closed-eyed, headphoned head-bobbing and settles precisely into his part of the closing chord of “Mighty Mississippi,” the band’s follow-up single to last year’s album American Night. For a six-member band from mid-Missouri that spent almost three years crafting its sophomore effort, the single has been quickly produced. That’s the point, though, as The Hipnecks’ Pat Kay tells it. “It’s us going back and doing it the way we did before.” The Hipnecks play a kind of harmony-soaked pop rock, if a mandolin can be considered a rock instrument. They call to mind The Band or The Magic Numbers in style but take a varied approach to their songs, drawing on jazz and bluegrass.
A few weeks after The Mansion visit, Pat is focused and direct. His face stretches around his words; his hands work at conversation. He’s explaining the difference between the band’s two albums. “The first one, there was absolutely no tension at all. We were so excited to be recording something.”
The band’s first album, Just Another Fine Day, was recorded with nearly no overdubbing. It felt immediate. The second album had a lot of tension. With the ability to overdub, rerecord, digitally chop up the song, and stitch it back together, Pat thinks the band did so much exploring, it may have lost track of the songs. Pat is perhaps too critical; American Night hits a lot of the right notes and especially so for a sophomore album, even if it was overzealously produced. He wants to get back to song craft, though, where the musicianship is in service of the song, not the other way around.
“Mighty Mississippi” is not exactly a return to Fine Day-form, though. The band is trying out a new model for recording and releasing their music, one Pat Kay thinks is more in line with the democratic availability of songs through online forums like iTunes and eMusic. The band is not releasing an album; instead, they intend to release a single or EP every few months.
Pat has it right, too. Missouri bands thrive on live followings. The Hipnecks pack them in. Releasing a well-crafted single every few months promises to keep its audience energized. Energized enough, perhaps, to push the band onto triple A and college radio throughout the state and beyond.
Visit www.thehipnecks.com for more information and a schedule of upcoming performances.
