Wampire: Curiosity Rewarded

Hometown: Portland, Ore.
Members: Rocky Tinder and Eric Phipps
Current Release: Curiosity
For Fans of: Unknown Mortal Orchestra, STRFKR, MGMT

Portland duo-turned-quintet Wampire, whose debut album Curiosity was released this May, did it the old fashion way. In an era where the quickest (and now probably most common) path to indie-rock stardom involves toiling away with an acoustic guitar and drum machine in a bedroom, uploading a demo’s worth of lo-fi recordings and letting the magic of the Internet handle the rest, Wampire represent the old guard.

When they signed a record deal with Polyvinyl last year, it was an affirmation that hard work, persistence and plenty of partying (this is rock ‘n’ roll we’re talking about, after all) pays off. My conversation with frontmen Rocky Tinder and Eric Phipps took place over the phone while the band was on tour with Smith Westerns, en route from Washington, D.C., to New York. Just like any band rising into the indie spotlight from obscurity, Wampire seemed to come out of nowhere, but their journey began nearly six years ago, when the duo made a habit of lining up as many gigs at house parties around Portland as possible. “We were 20 at the time so we were just trying to party all the time,” remembers Tinder. “It worked out pretty well.”

Many music fans were introduced to Wampire by way of the press photos that hit the Internet earlier this year, around the time Curiosity’s driving, tour de force of a lead single, “The Hearse,” was officially released. The photos featured Tinder and Phipps posing serenely, lit from above and shot with an ultra-soft lens so that the pictures resembled ‘80s-era glamor shots you might have had taken in a Sears photo department. One shot featured a nebulous purple-and-black backdrop that resembled some sort of deep space galaxy cluster.

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What made the photos great, though, wasn’t the idea to shoot them but the creepy expressions and uncomfortable poses of Tinder and Phipps. It was unsettling—as if something perverse was going on behind the scenes—but at the same time hilarious.

If the photos were an intriguing first impression (Who were these creepy dudes?), “The Hearse” was the second and most important Wampire-related release to register with prospective fans. The song begins with ominous retro synth tones before exploding into high gear with forceful drumming, a monster bassline and eerie effects that sound like they were swept up from the floor of a haunted recording studio from the late ‘70s.

Between the name (a German take on “vampire” that Phipps picked up while abroad), the press photos and the power of “The Hearse,” Wampire crept their way onto the radar of music fans, and Curiosity’s May 14 release date couldn’t come soon enough. Side note: This was the same week that Vampire Weekend’s Modern Vampires of the City was released, and the day before both hit the shelves the band tweeted their hopes that this coincidence would lead to confused Vampire Weekend fans mistakenly buying Curiosity.

Though Tinder and Phipps’ poses in those initial press photos couldn’t have been replicated by anyone else, the actual idea for the photos came from good friend and fellow Portlander Ruban Nielson, also known as the frontman of Unknown Mortal Orchestra. It’s an important note, because it confirms just how tight-knit and collaborative the Portland music scene is, and if it wasn’t for this spirited community of musicians Wampire never would have made it out of the local house party circuit. Over the course of their time spent playing the beer-soaked basements of the Rose City, Tinder and Phipps continually took steps to take their sound, and their career as musicians, to another level.

Free beer was great, but ultimately it wasn’t going to pay the bills. They progressed from jamming to writing more-focused songs and trying to grow their sound “to be a lot more live and a lot more psychedelic,” as Tinder puts it. They recruited a live drummer. They organized tours of the West Coast and even an unofficial trip to Austin for South by Southwest in 2009. “Those [tours] always just felt like vacations,” says Tinder. “Basically we were just going out and partying. It wasn’t very lucrative and didn’t really help our career or anything. They were just so much fun.”

They also started opening for bands they had come to know around Portland, and in early 2012 they found themselves on a bill with STRFKR and Nielson’s Unknown Mortal Orchestra. In the audience was a Polyvinyl exec. “He was pretty thrilled with the show,” says Phipps. “We didn’t talk to him, but he talked to Jake Portrait [from Unknown Mortal Orchestra] and was like, ‘I’m pretty interested. I want to hear more.’ We ended up sending him some tracks and telling him that we were ready to go with a record, but we kind of fibbed a little bit. We only had some demos and some old music and stuff like that, but he was into it.”

To help put a full-length album together—which, as Phipps noted, they weren’t entirely prepared for—Wampire recruited the man who had facilitated the partnership with Polyvinyl in the first place: Jake Portrait, whom Tinder notes was the only person they could have imagined producing their album. Together they worked to further hone the band’s sound into not only something that was palatable live, but something that would be palatable through stereo speakers.

“At that point we made some pretty big strides to change everything up,” remembers Phipps. Older songs were polished up, new ones were written. The fact that after six years they now had a reputable label behind them made taking their sound to the next level all the easier.

“We were just excited to use some different sounds on the record, and the world was our oyster,” Phipps continues. “We’d never had a budget to record with. We’d never been able to just go into a studio and make all sorts of new sounds with, like, five different synths. It just opened up a door that let us do whatever we wanted.”

Though the opportunity to work in a studio setting with more equipment at their disposal than they’d ever seen was invaluable, what excited Wampire most about signing to Polyvinyl and having an album out was the ability to tour and play live every night. “That’s my favorite part about playing music and I think it’s the same for everybody in the band,” says Phipps. “Recording is awesome, but the live set is a lot more fun than sitting in the studio for three months at at a time.”

So playing live. Playing live and partying. Also: homework. Yes, during Wampire’s first big tour of the year—a nationwide affair with Unknown Mortal Orchestra and Foxygen that led in and out of South by Southwest, where this year they were an invited band, with official showcases and everything—their buzz was partially killed by finals they had to take online for college courses they were enrolled in back in Oregon. “It worked for a while,” Phipps says about studying while on the road. “I got decent grades, but when you don’t want to do it and when you’re stressed from tour it’s just counterproductive for both things that you want to focus on.”

“It was a fucking terrible idea,” adds Tinder before expressing concern at the prospect of having had to find reliable WiFi while on tour in Europe.

In the midst of their second major U.S. tour, Tinder and Phipps are in the process of phasing college out of the picture. They are musicians, and they’ve paid their dues for too long to give Wampire anything less than their full attention. They don’t plan on looking back, either. While a lot of new-on-the-scene bands who had to scramble to write new songs just to fill out their first LP might worry about having to pen a whole new batch of tracks for their sophomore effort, it’s all come naturally for Wampire, even with their close to non-stop touring schedule. “I can’t wait to write [new songs] and start playing,” says Tinder. “Like Eric was saying, the shows are the best part, so if we can get some new ones out, if we can make more really fun songs to play, that’ll just be awesome.”

With the textbooks now closed and, as Phipps said, the world as their oyster, the next wave can’t come soon enough.