“Here Again,” the first track from Saint James’s new EP Us and Your Friends, starts with a fuzzy chord dragged from the guitar’s strings, setting the mood right for the heavy drums and bass that fall in at the end of the measure. They’re accompanied by a slide guitar, a healthy heaping of twang, that feels right at home in the music but broadens the sound’s landscape. We’re not just in the Northeast anymore. We could be anywhere in America, or maybe passing through it. But Saint James isn’t exactly about windswept highways across the prairie. There’s menace there, too, embedded in the music and the lyrics: “Like a phony gun I am holding you up with a sense of revenge,” the singer states on the chorus, knowing helplessness and rage coiled together.
Saint James is a new New Haven-based project from a quintet — Taylor Pulcifer on vocals, Mark Almodovar and Kevin Gaffey on guitars, Ross Cohen on bass, and Chris Mala on drums and percussion — who are all members of previous bands: Call It Arson, Quiet Giant, Baby Grand, and My Heart to Joy. With Saint James (as with a couple other bands on the New Haven scene), the sense of being grounded in the Elm City is both about the fact that a couple members live here and about the fact that New Haven is, in its way, centrally located, between New York and Boston, where other members of the band live. That geographical reality, however, has meant the band has stuck a pin in New Haven in a few different ways. The album was recorded at Sans Serif Studios on Chapel Street, and over the holiday weekend the band played at the State House with New Haven bands The Tines and Luke Ellingson as well as the New York-based band Good Looking Friends.
Being a three-state band can be a tricky proposition, but listening to Us and Your Friends, it’s easy to hear why, for the band members, it’s worth the hassle. Cohen and Mala together make for a tough, surging rhythm section, and Pulcifer sings with a sharp, clear voice that lets him cut through the band’s big sound with ease. Almodovar’s and Gaffey’s guitars are the final, crucial ingredient; their sense of timing, the way they work off each other, make the band sound huge. So “Genuine Try,” the second song on the album, is a lurching waltz that snarls from second to second but offers consolation, too. On “Death and Taxes,” a paean to the soul-sucking grind, Almodovar and Gaffey together move deftly from creating melodies and countermelodies to unleashing ripping squalls of distortion that fit the fuzz in the narrator’s head, as when Pulcifer sings “well, the fact is: death and taxes / you’re no one’s darling anymore / they tried so hard to change the score / if I’m on my own, that much is fine / but I can’t decide if I’m on my way out.”
The band’s sound is at its thickest and hookiest on “Something More,” a generously thick cut of Americana. And with the EP’s closer, “Can’t Ignore It,” the band shows it knows its way around a slow build, as it takes the volume down at the beginning of the verse and takes it up, step by step, until, on the triumphant-sounding chorus, Pulcifer’s voice soars over it all.
“I get a feeling overwhelmed by regret / where I’ve been, who I’ve met; can’t ignore it / then I look down and I accept all this mess / do I dare to confess I adored it?” he sings, in a tone that feels like he does indeed dare. The lyrics speak in a way to how the band members have come together from previous projects, and taken all of that experience to make something that feels new and vital, without forgetting about the past.