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Photo courtesy of thebenjees.com
The Benjees—a new rock ‘n’ roll group based in New York is coming out with their first studio album Alright Alright Alright on July 14. The album will include their recently released single “Hollywood,” along with “Filthy F$cking Rich” and “Wonder City”—both tracks you can preview on SoundCloud.
The band is still in the beginning stages of defining their sound, but the upcoming album is a little bit pretty, has punk elements and could be categorized as garage rock. Lead singer, Ben Roberts, describes the group in their initial stages as going for a dirty Jack White-meets-James Brown kind of synergy.
When I spoke with the band, we talked musical influences, quirky promotional videos on their YouTube channel, and about what its like to book shows as a startup band in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Dates for a New England tour in early September will be posted to their website and there will be a release show for Alright Alright Alright at Bowery Electric on July 10—don’t miss it.
I read that The Benjees was established through a series of mishaps and lucky timing, can you elaborate on that?
Originally, we were trying to find a bassist. I had put an ad on craigslist and had a couple of friends come over to play, but Joe—he was the very last one of the day and I had already met one or two bassists that I liked a lot, and there was one that I wanted to go with kind of, so I was going to write to Joe “Don’t bother coming,” but I forgot to, and then he showed up and he was better than all of them. I’m glad that that happened. Then with Martin—our keyboardist, he was in this other band and their band disbanded and our drummer at the time had gone away, and we sort of had a couple of months where we weren’t doing as much, so we decided that we should take the opportunity to try to expand. There was a month period where Martin wasn’t joining any other bands yet so we got lucky with that, and then, with our new drummer, it was similar where he was with this other project where things didn’t really work out, and was in a couple of other bands, but then we got lucky and got him.
How long have you officially been rehearsing together?
Joe and I had sort of been playing together, working on songs and what not, and then we got Martin in 2014, and then the current lineup that we have right now, well, we just got our new drummer, but with Martin that’s when it really formed—in 2014. We had been playing prior to that, working on songs and writing some demos and things like that, sort of getting ready, but once we got Martin that’s when we started to really move forward.
What genres do you play?
I would say to you that generally it is street music. I don’t know if that sounds too young, but all of the rock influences I think would be towards the 70s down, and then the places where hip-hop and punk come in, we also have a very down-on-the-street, very much true to the daily life kind of feel. Generally, you could say rock, if you break it down to the five categories—I know there’s like a million and ten categories, but you put something up there and you open it up and its like rock, pop-rock, jam-rock. I would say its just rock, soul; we have some punk in there, some soul and some funk, so within one song we have three different styles kind of coming together. So I would say the album—there are 13 songs on it, and there’s a variety between songs, and some of them have some sort of punk influence, and then there are some like “Hollywood” that is kind of punky, really pretty, not really punky—more pretty. You can see the trouble we have.
Your song “Fukushima” reminds me of “Gold Lion” by Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
It’s always interesting when we play a show, or someone hears our music and some people will say “Oh, you sound like this band” and sometimes we’ve never heard of the band, or they’ll be like “Oh, that song sounds like this,” and we’ll be like “We’ve never heard of it.” I always really enjoy when people say what we sound like because then I like to go listen to those things. I just find it interesting, especially because we’re not good at describing our sound. We’re doing this one EP, a demo EP kind of, and the producer that is helping us is like “Well, what is your sound?” and we all sort of just mumbled and answered…then, he was working on it in the studio and somebody was like “What band are you working with, what’s their style?” He mumbled his answer too, and then he told us that later and he was like “No good.”
Do any of you play other instruments?
Definitely. There was a point where we really wanted to do a dirty Jack White meets James Brown…Martin is actually a really talented guitar player, and also plays ukulele, mandolin, piano and a little drums.
Martin added: I can sort of play them all, I mean I’m not that good at drums, but I can bang on them. I do have my accessory percussion moments.
Have you thought about adding a fifth member to the group?
We’re getting there. I’ve been reaching out to a few other guitarists slash keyboardists because Martin plays guitar and keys, and I sort of do as well, and originally we wanted to have Martin play guitar and keys during shows but when it comes down to logistics, that’s a lot of stuff to bring to a venue. That’s kind of the tough thing about New York, when you’re in Montana you can get in your van and pack all of your stuff up and bring it in, but in New York there’s cabs, and the bigger your band is—everyone is busy as hell in New York and we’re four people trying to get together, but someone will have to wait tables, or have another show. I think bringing in another musician would only really happen if we get enough attraction and a little more resources. Ideally it would be really nice, the ideal world would have horn sections, back up singers and definitely another guitarist. A lot of the album has two, three, four guitars on it, and I think it would sound better if we had a few more people because everyone could do less.
Have you run into any problems promoting the band?
If you go to our YouTube page, there are some little promo ideas, I don’t know if you’ve got to check those out at all, but you should check them out. We’ve tried to come up with different ways to promote ourselves, and one of those ways is to do 30-second quick, little sketch video kind-of-things, where we put it on YouTube and rather than just spam people on Facebook, which we do anyway still, at least now with videos they get a little something. We’ve also found that venues really appreciate that, having a little contact aside from just maybe a flyer. But in terms of problems, I think our major problems are just where should we play, when we play—like in Manhattan, it’s really hard to schedule venues in Manhattan. I think the biggest problem right now is trying to schedule shows because everyone is so busy—Joe is in a couple of bands, Graham is in a couple of bands, I’m an actor as well and it makes me really nervous and then you’ll go out for a commercial and they’re like “It shoots the 23rd” and I’m like “Oh no.” It’s a life of anxiety in that way—you burn bridges with those venues when you cancel. In New York City you’re competing with Madison Square Garden. You can literally see a million bands in New York and I don’t like when venues charge a lot of money for our kind of level. It’s not that much but you can pay $15 and see somebody that’s a little more established. New York City is an interesting place to play—a lot of the time you don’t get paid and the venue will make you responsible to find all of the other bands, and you’re bringing all of the crowd, there’s no walk-in-crowd. At the end of the day you organized the show, you brought everybody, you spent money on cabs, you get there and you might get a free-drink ticket, and you don’t get paid at the end. If you bring 25 people, or whatever the cutoff line is, then you don’t. That’s really what the problem is.
Would you categorize The Benjees as Brooklyn-based?
I think that the band started in Brooklyn, and for a while I lived down in Brooklyn, so for that reason I would say that we absorbed that, but I wouldn’t consider us necessarily to be a Brooklyn band. We play in Manhattan just as much, if not more—I think this year we actually played in Manhattan more. In Brooklyn a lot of smaller-level venues have been shut down in the last year…but there are some new ones and we’re going to try to get some shows there, but I wouldn’t categorize us as Brooklyn-based.
At Downtown, we focus on the downtown New York area, but we do cover bands playing all over the city. The different music culture that’s in Brooklyn, versus downtown, versus bigger venues like Madison Square Garden is noticeable.
I now live in Manhattan and it’s definitely a whole other world. When you walk through the East Village to get to the Lower East Side, those music venues are over there, and the culture of who goes out has changed definitely, but its not always bad.
It’s also a little bit more of a neutral location, like if you have some friends in Queens and you have some friends in Manhattan.
What do you guys see in your future? One year from now? Five years from now?
We take it one day at a time. Today is what? Tuesday? Wednesday? But what we have coming up is we have our album coming out in July, we are going to shoot a new music video by the end of this month called “Ringer,” and that will be released before our album comes out. We are also planning a possible east coast tour, or New England tour in late August and early September. After that we are looking to take a bunch of new material we have and put it into another round of recordings. I’m really excited to record again. This is our first true album, so some of the songs are older on there, some are new, I’m just really excited to do a new album because the stuff we’re writing right now I think is stronger, and we have our new drummer and that helps the sound. I mean our other drummer was great, but I’m really excited to get some new stuff in there. Me and Ben getting through the progression from some of these little bumper videos to the music video we shot, and the fact that Ben is an actor and I work in production on the crew side of things, and we’re trying to get better at that as well, because I think that the visual language—people get just as into that as the music itself. When we can frame that properly together, I think it’s going to be great.
by- Katie Garry