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Bayside: Be Here Now
Posted by Rob Ortenzi on 11-Apr-07 @ 04:19 PM
Over the past seven years, Long Island quartet BAYSIDE released a series of incredible, yet overlooked, albums. But after shaking the specter of death and the abuse of web-dwellers, this could be their time to rise to the top of the pop-punk heap. Story: Trevor Kelley Anthony Raneri hasn't slept much in the last week. On Monday, the Bayside frontman and his bandmates-guitarist Jack O'Shea, bassist Nick Ghanbarian and drummer Chris Guglielmo-played a show in New York. A few hours later, they hopped on a plane to Arizona, where they performed at a radio-sponsored concert with Jet. The next day, they flew home and spent 16 hours working on their new album, The Walking Wounded. There were naps here and there, maybe for a couple hours. Right now, however, the 23-year-old Raneri is wide awake, draining $5 cups of coffee and smoking an endless string of cigarettes. "We literally haven't been to bed for more than five or six hours since Monday," Raneri says, walking down a busy street in Manhattan with an enormous cup of Starbucks. "And it's what, Friday?" It is. But more specifically, it's the last day that Raneri and his bandmates have before delivering their new album to their label. After nearly three months of recording, everything will come to an end tonight. In a few short hours, Bayside will be sitting in a mastering plant called Sterling Sound with some dude named Eu Nastasi, listening to the final version of the disc. Then, the four of them-along with their floppy-haired guitar tech Kyle Henderson-will file into their beat-up van, speed off to their respective homes in Long Island and Queens and, after a rough week, finally get some rest. When they wake up the next morning, they'll start the long-but-familiar process of waiting to see if this will be the album that finally breaks Bayside to a larger audience. They've been at this juncture many times before: When they released their 2004 debut, Sirens And Condolences, all signs pointed to a commercial breakthrough. The band's label, Victory Records, even ran a series of boastful ads that read: "In 2002, we brought you Thursday. In 2003, it was Taking Back Sunday. This year belongs to Bayside." Suffice to say, it didn't. Bayside's debut went relatively unnoticed, and 2004 belonged to their touring buddies and fellow labelmates, Hawthorne Heights. Tonight, even Raneri will admit that he bought into the record's pre-release hype. "When those ads were going out, we were like, 'Wow, I guess we're going to be huge now,'" he reflects. "That didn't happen." Nor did it happen with the band's 2005 self-titled follow-up, recorded by Kenny Gioia and Shep Goodman, a production team who have worked with everyone from country singer Lee Ann Womack to emo buzz band Cute Is What We Aim For. The record Bayside completed with them was filled with chugging downstrokes and instantly memorable choruses-just about every song on it sounded like a potential hit. Of course, there were no hits on Bayside. As has often been the case with this band, Bayside's second album was loved by some of your favorite bands, but to date, has only sold 65,000 copies. Most of the attention that Bayside received at the time revolved around the death of drummer John "Beatz" Holohan, who was killed in a van wreck while they were on tour with Hawthorne Heights in late 2005. In the year since then, Bayside's profile has risen slightly, but Raneri has also had to deal with the very public nature of his recent marriage to a specialty actress. How all of this will all affect the band's next album remains to be seen. Perhaps like the records before it, The Walking Wounded will be adored by a select few, but overlooked by mainstream music fans. If so, that would be a shame: Wounded is easily the most ambitious album of Bayside's career and once again, those within the band's inner circle are excited about its possibilities. "Anthony really pushed himself over the last year to write this material," says producer Goodman, who, along with Gioia, reprised his role from the band's last album. "He came in and was like, 'Check this out, I want to do a klezmer thing in the verse of this one song.' He was definitely bringing in outside influences." As for how the album might do commercially, Goodman believes that it "has a major shot." Raneri, however, has learned to keep his expectations low. "Since day one, we've always been happy with wherever we are," he says. "If we get to a point where 10,000 kids come to our shows and we're millionaires, that would be great. But I'm happy where I am. What's happening right now... If this is it for the rest of my life, I can live with that." For the rest of the story, pick up AP 224 below... |
