Dawes show at Little Rock's Rev Room will 'get a little wilder'

Los Angeles band Dawes threw its fans a bit of a curve on the new album We're All Gonna Die.

The laid-back, Laurel Canyon-influenced rock that brought the group plenty of Jackson Browne references on previous albums was upgraded with more eclectic instrumentation, warbly beats and vocal experimentation. It was a bold move for the quartet, which returns to Little Rock to host An Evening With Dawes tonight at the Rev Room.

"I think we were definitely ready to take a double step to the right," says bassist Wylie Gelber, who has been with the band since it was known as Simon Dawes. "We tried to get as weird as we possibly could [but stay] within the confines of ourselves."

We're All Gonna Die is the fifth studio album from the band, which includes, along with Gelber, vocalist/guitarist Taylor Goldsmith, drummer Griffin Goldsmith (Taylor's brother) and keyboardist Lee Pardini. The album dropped in September and was produced by former Simon Dawes band mate Blake Mills.

The first single, "When the Tequila Runs Out," is a bouncy, oddly syncopated ode to getting elegantly hammered. "When the tequila runs out/we'll be drinking champagne," Taylor Goldsmith sings.

As a bassist Gelber, 28, who works through a rubbery, jazzy solo at the end of "Less Than Five Miles Away," says it was fun to cut loose a bit on this album.

"Different records require different things. We've done other records that are guitar-solo heavy, but whether it was this batch of songs or just working with Blake, who's a bass-centric guy, it was definitely fun to get a little wilder than normal. It was fun to stretch out a little bit."

Gelber says An Evening With Dawes will be a career-spanning show: "There will be no opener. It will be a set, an intermission and then another set. We'll be able to reach into all of our five records and make a nice, well-rounded show from our whole catalog. It's going to be fun."

Taylor Goldsmith and Gelber have known each other since they were teenagers, and have been playing together since then.

"Like any kids, we were going through our Bowie, Stones, The Band phase," he says of their early sound in Simon Dawes, captured on the band's lone album, 2006's Carnivore. "But to me, it was never that different [from Dawes]."

Gelber, Dawes' resident tinkerer who builds his own basses, was working on the band's equipment at his home in Los Angeles earlier this month a few days before the current tour began.

"I build a lot of gear for the whole band and do a lot of maintenance stuff," he says. "Right now I'm building three pedal boards for our keyboard player to get them super-dialed in before the tour. I'm constantly tweaking all the stuff. I love doing all that."

In the early days, before the band could afford to have a crew, Gelber's technical skills were called upon to keep the group's equipment in playing condition.

"It was the four of us in a van and I'd be fixing everything," he says.

Nowadays, with the band able to afford some help, he doesn't have to shoulder the entire burden, but still likes to get his hands dirty.

"For me, the perfect blend is having people on our crew that can do the stuff I do, but in a different way," he says. "If I have downtime on tour, there's nothing I love more than cracking open my tools and fixing something."

Style on 01/31/2017