Local scene-makers, it turns out, can have a tremendous impact on young musicians.
Izzy True, a band from Ithaca, N.Y., plays melodic, intelligent indie rock, with groove and sinew. “Troll,” an EP, came out last summer on Don Giovanni Records, a New Jersey-based label that also carries the Providence punk band Downtown Boys, sardonic folk-rocker/cartoonist Jeffrey Lewis and others. “Nope,” Izzy True’s full-length debut, was released earlier this month.
Back in 2008, when singer-songwriter Isabel Reidy was still in high school, however, a local musician named Bubba Crumrine joined Ithaca Underground, a non-profit arts organization, and got serious about out bringing cool bands to town.
“Bubba started pulling in noise bands and punk bands and a lot of stuff that wasn’t coming through at all,” Reidy says. Crumrine encouraged Reidy, and booked her band into opening slots.
“It was very formative, just feeling like it was possible to play music, that being in a crappy high school band, we could play shows,” she says.
Izzy True plays Wamleg in Wallingford on Aug. 27, on a bill with Spit-Take, Pinfinger, Ryan White and Pleasure Beach.
Reidy probably would have pursued music anyway. Her family is musical; Silas, an older brother, plays guitar in Izzy True, and Reidy’s father and sister are both musicians. But Crumrine and the Ithaca Underground broadened her tastes.
“I think I would have just been playing different music,” Reidy says. “But it definitely set some wheels in motion for me.”
“Nope” is full of great songs and solid performances. “New Age,” my current favorite, is a slow-burning paean to authenticity: “I want a ritual of feeling,” Reidy sings, in no hurry at all, “to banish all the emptiness that comes / from doing and not fully believing / from falseness and going through the motions / and what you did is coming back to you.”
“Total Body Erasure” begins with a classic-rock-worthy riff. It’s ironic: “Classic rock is stupid as hell and built on toxic masculinity,” Reidy told Ithaca.com. “I get a kind of masochistic pleasure in that part of it right now.”
“Historically, I’d written a bunch of bummed-out stuff, which is still pretty accessible,” Reidy says. “In the past couple of years, I’ve made an effort to write songs that are fun to play live, and I think that goes hand in hand with a level of accessibility.”
Isabel and Silas started music together only recently. “He was always the more serious of the two of us,” Reidy says. “He’s been playing guitar seriously for years, and I was just doing my own thing. … Once we’d grown up a little bit, we were able to play music together.”
The Reidys, bassist Jon Samuels and drummer Angela Devivo travel by car. The band plays small clubs and DIY houses, often to unfamiliar crowds.
Putting the band together, finding the right mix of talents and personalities, took time; Reidy would rather play with family members and friends than great players who are jerks, or “someone who plays really good and nice, but you just don’t connect with,” she says.
“You’re spending a huge amount of time with them. It’s crazy. It’s incredible that nobody in the band thus far on this road trip has ripped each other’s heads off. I genuinely like [the other band members], and I think that’s super-important. You can have great players, but if you’re not bonding on some level, the musical chemistry is going to be off.”
Reidy often writes words and music together. “Sometimes I’ll get a phrase. … That happened with ‘Total Body Erasure,'” she says. “That phrase occurred to me, and eventually I wrote a song around it. I make comics, too, and it’s the same thing. I find that when I go into something with too much of an agenda, it doesn’t work. It’ll be heavy-handed.”
Reidy’s comics, meanwhile, are essentially illustrated poems. “I’ll write out the text of the poem and illustrate afterward,” she says. On the road, at DIY spaces and bookstores, she gravitates toward like-minded musicians and artists. Her politics, she says, are “definitely on the radical end of the leftist spectrum.”
“You find a lot of people of that persuasion at those kinds of places,” Reidy says. “It’s cool to talk to people about how things manifest in their communities. There’s this amazing potential for people in DIY to organize around that, because there’s a built-in community. It’s one of the only hopeful things going.”
The band is moving. Reidy and DeVivo will soon relocate to Philadelphia, and Silas Reidy and Samuels probably will follow suit.
“I’ve been living in my parents’ house for the last four years, and rent’s not cheap in Ithaca,” Reidy says. “I want to live somewhere where I can support myself.”
IZZY TRUE plays Wamleg in Wallingford on Saturday, Aug. 27, t 7 p.m., with Pleasure Beach, Ryan White, Spit-Take and Pinfinger. Tickets are $10. 860-329-2968 and 203-317-0016
