4 To Watch For: The High Water Marks

Drummer Hilarie Sidney of Elephant 6 legends Apples In Stereo first ran into Norwegian singer/guitarist Per Ole Bratset while on tour with her band in Oslo. Shortly after Sidney returned to the U.S., she and her recently discovered collaborator began working together on a new project. Well, not exactly together.

“We started writing songs through the mail,” she says. “It was really slow but it was cool to send something off and then get it back and be like, ‘I wonder what it’s going to sound like now?’”

Holed up in room 528 at Norway’s Gyldenlöve Hotel, Bratset would ship whatever he’d come up with to Sidney, who was at home in Lexington, Ky., and she’d do the same. The two used cassette 4-tracks to record their new material, trying different parts and ideas as the songs took shape, and eventually dumping what they had on the computer for 8-track capability. The resulting debut, Songs About The Ocean, is an album of beautifully warm, catchy, high-energy, lo-fi garage pop for the masses.

After finishing the project, Bratset moved to the U.S. and, with things working out so well, he and Sidney decided they wanted to take their show on the road. Only trouble was, they didn’t have a band. But when you run in certain indie-rock circles, it doesn’t take long to find musicians interested in a side project: Enter new recruits bassist Mike Snowden (Von Hemmling) and drummer Jim Lindsay (Oranger, Preston School of Industry). Snowden was already in town, but Lindsay relocated to Lexington from San Fransisco.

“At the first practice, they listened to the recordings and learned all the songs,” says Sidney, marveling at their proficiency. “It fell together so quickly and it felt so comfortable that we decided to have them in the band. I think they’ll be on the next record.”

But with the group embarking on a U.S. tour with Clinic in mid-October, and with its first record (released by eenie meenie) just hitting shelves, isn’t a bit soon to be talking about the next record?

“We have pretty much everything ready,” says Sidney. “We’re almost ready to start recording, we just have to think about how we want to go about it this time … Honestly, this [band] is my main thing right now because nothing’s ever happening with the Apples these days. And I write a lot of songs so it’s nice for me to be able to be more creative. If the Apples decide to make another record in the future, of course I’m gonna be way into that, but everybody in the Apples is so unmotivated sometimes,” she laughs, “I never know what’s going on.”

Luckily for Sidney and her bandmates, it looks like The High Water Marks have enough creative potential to keep them busy for a long time to come.