MUSIC PROFILE: Giant Panda Guerilla Dub Squad
Deep-dish reggae
Rochester City Newspaper
12-24-08
By Frank De Blase
Giant Panda Guerilla Dub Squad has spread its treads over miles and miles of
American highway since the band was first featured in City Newspaper four years
ago. Back in 2004, the young group - founded in Ithaca, but made up of Brighton
kids, and which currently includes Matthew O'Brian (guitar, vocals), James Searl
(bass, vocals), Christopher O'Brian (drums), Dylan Savage (guitar, vocals),
Rachel Orke (rhodes piano, clavinet, melodica), and Aaron Lipp (Hammond B3
organ) - was holding down a weekly weeknight slot on the rooftop deck of the
now-defunct Tonic and barnstorming surrounding cities on the weekends. Its deep
reggae groove drew large: hippies, hipsters, folkies, and rockers all made the
scene in a low-gear bump and grind reverie while GPGDS made with the one drop.
As the group's touring schedule expanded into other zip codes, and eventually
other time zones, so did its fan base. The band began touring full time with
concentrated jaunts in Colorado and California - hotbeds for fans of the
jam-band idiom GPGDS was busting into, and busting wide open. The band's mastery
of the music resulted in several successful trips to Jamaica as well.
Flash forward to today. Giant Panda Guerilla Dub Squad is, in fact, giant. The
band members have become champions of authentic 70's-era reggae. Not infused
with, not influenced by, not tinged with, but steeped in the infectious,
hardcore rhythms laid out by legends like Peter Tosh, Jimmy Cliff, Lee "Scratch"
Perry, and the whole scene centered around the famed Studio One.
GPGDS just kind of fell into the sound; reggae seemed natural to the band.
"Because we're musicians and we've been playing together for so long, I feel
like that's just where the dust settled," says drummer Chris O'Brian. "We fought
it out with all these different kinds of music as teenagers and reggae is where
our ears landed."
The band has just signed with The Agency Group and has retained bicoastal
representation. It is playing - and selling out - big joints now, like Denver's
Gothic Theatre, the Middle East in Boston, and the band is scheduled to play Red
Rocks as part of a reggae festival in 2009. Fans are following them around and
getting band-inspired tattoos.
What are these fans called? Panda Heads? Dub Squad Squealers?
"They aren't called anything yet," O' Brian says. "They're just called our
friends."
Sure, these friends love the band's deep-dish reggae - what's not to love? But
according to bassist James Searl, they can't help themselves. It's all in the
band's analog allure.
"There's no binary code going on in any of our music," Searl says. "We use only
analog and old instruments as opposed to digital. The actual vibrations of
strings through speakers, or whether it's a Fender Rhodes, which is a mallet
hitting a key, sends a much more specific sound wave to people's bodies and to
people's ears. This affects them physiologically, undeniably, whereas binary is
ones and zeros in the computer simulation of a sound. None of us are scientists,
but it does seem to have an absolute effect. Analog makes a more direct
communication."
Besides the scientific mojo, and whether or not the listener believes their
seduction is involuntary, reggae just sounds good.
"Reggae, for us, has always been the most accessible music for people all over
the world to communicate with, as far as musical aesthetics," says Searl. "The
way that reggae is set up with a consistent groove, a consistent beat, and
warmth."
That's important to the band, not just in how it affects its musical integrity,
but in the unification of ideas and culture, says Searl.
"There's absolutely a culture that's starting to assert itself," he says. "And I
don't think it's by any means revolving around our band. It's more of a new
generation of like-mindedness mixing with older generations and starting to
assert themselves all over the United States. People that are very consciously
minded in many areas of education, people that want to know the facts [about]
how the government is working, how good or bad people's lives actually are...
just the reality of the world we're living in, and how it should be, and if we
work together, how we can make it a little better."
This message, and the sound it rides through, gets explored nightly with GPGDS,
and the audience and overall situation contributes to how it all goes down. It's
not just the band's adherence to analog, but its healthy approach to exploration
that sets the players way, way apart from those who jam aimlessly and without
point. This band doesn't jam.
"It's soundscape creation as a group instead of noodling as an individual,"
Searl says. "The show is absolutely different every night for more reasons and
variables than us. It has to do with the fact that we're in a different room
with different people, a different city, we had a different experience that day
than we did the day before. It's never talked about. We never discuss how the
changes are going to be from night to night."
But according to Searl, even GPGDS can fall prey to routine.
"We fight that vehemently," he says.
The majors are sniffing around, and O'Brian promises a record soon "label or
not." The band will continue its 180-plus-gigs-a-year schedule in its Dodge van,
which it plans to convert to running on waste vegetable oil. GPGDS isn't just
words and music. Still, it feels and wields music's universal power.
"Music is the one thing that can stand up to the Illuminati," Searl says. "It's
as old as human beings are. It is something that has always spoken and motivated
people. It brings people together. And we wanna bring people to the dance."
Giant Panda Guerilla Dub Squad
New Year's Eve Bash w/ Walri, Roger Kuhn, Funk N Waffles
Water Street Music Hall, 204 N Water St
Wednesday, December 31
10 p.m. | $20-$25 | 325-5600