Bad Veins Have a Third Member in a 70-Pound Tape Player

Posted on Aug 15th 2009 2:30PM by Justin Jacobs
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Irene, a member of Cincinnati pop act Bad Veins, is truly the perfect band mate. The 36-year-old is always on time. She never complains about lack of sleep, money or time off. And she's perfectly fine staying out of the spotlight, allowing guitarist-singer Ben Davis and drummer Sebastien Schultz to answer all the questions.

Granted, this is because Irene is a 1973 reel-to-reel tape player.

But that doesn't make her any less a member of the band. While Davis and Schultz bash through Bad Veins' sweeping and catchy tunes onstage, Irene provides the backing tracks that round out the band's fill-the-room sound. "My dad gave me the tape deck when he was clearing clutter out of his house. He said 'You're a musician, you'll figure out a way to use this.' I said, 'Sure, dad. This thing weighs a ton. Thanks,'" Davis tells Spinner.

But Davis, who hadn't yet met Schultz, soon came to love Irene. His act, which at the time was simply him and a guitar, benefitted from not only the backing tracks Davis recorded and played onstage with Irene, but also from his new bandmate's aesthetics. "I thought it'd give people something to look at -- the tape going around has got to be just as interesting as me," Davis says. "So, really, Sebastien is our third member. It was me and Irene from the start."

Five years later, with both Irene and Schultz in the band and Bad Veins' self-titled debut picking up steam, the trio operates like a well-oiled machine (and not just because one of the members is actually a machine). Davis and Schultz travel with several possible tapes of backing tracks -- including autoharp, synthesizer, bass and keyboard parts -- making for several possible set lists and play guitar and drums live to the pace of the reel-to-reel.

"I like being able to just turn it on with this huge lever on the side. All we have to do flip a switch and we're paused. If I need to tune my guitar or talk to the crowd, we can pause it," said Davis. "You could be wasted off your ass and still manage to flip that bar."

While many a band is assisted onstage by canned sounds, most prefer a computer to a 70-pound, near-ancient tape player. But not Bad Veins. "It's kind of like reading a book versus reading a website on an iPhone," Davis says. "We have something that feels real onstage with us -- it's not something digital we're poking at."

The result sounds like a dark, early '80s post-punk dance party. Davis' low voice doesn't shy away from dramatic swooning and his low-toned guitar cranks along to Schultz's popping dance beats, and their first single, 'Gold and Warm,' has a chorus that'll keep you humming until 2010. Though the simplest and most common comparison to Bad Veins has been the driving synth-pop of the Killers, Davis and (we can only imagine) Irene don't agree.

"The only [Killers] songs I know are the ones you hear in a grocery store. But somehow it's obvious to all these critics that I'm heavily inspired by them," Davis says. "There are easily 100 different instruments on the record, but because we have a synth, we get 'Oh, they sound like that band.'"

Irene, the player of said synth, declined to comment. Or maybe she was just unplugged.