Donna Ruth Duggan Lile
October 2, 2012
Chabert hit with added cuts and job losses
October 5, 2012
While lifting the veil of heat and the persistence of mosquitoes, fall conducts a natural intoxication.
It’s feeling the proximity of the holiday season, appreciating chilly nights under the moonlight and seeing greenery transform into vibrant foliage.
Houma band Autumn High, on a mission to encapsulate those senses, is most easily understood alongside what they’re not.
“I feel like we’re filling the little niche of not-screammo or not-swamp pop or anything like that,” co-founder, vocalist and guitarist Kenny Kreamer says. “I would just call it commercial. Indie pop would be the best thing, because I guess locally I don’t really know other bands that sound like (us).”
The group plays its second stint this month at Houmapalooza, the all-independent and original-music festival downtown gearing up for its fourth bi-annual rendition.
Two years after starting to shift its focus, Autumn High has an opportunity to capitalize on recent success.
“Autumn High has performed in our lineup before, and since then they have grown and developed with their experiences being a band,” says Glenda Toups, executive director of the Houma Regional Arts Council, which produces the festival. “Have you seen their music video? They’re going places.”
Because of the prevalence of local cover bands, which deliver entertainment via familiar material to anticipating audiences, festivals like Houmapalooza and venues like The Boxer and The Barrel are lifeboats for local original music.
“What we want to reach for is things like Houmapalooza, where we can just be us and do our thing,” says lead singer and keyboardist Beth Detiveaux. There, bands can forget the pressure of coercing people to pay a cover charge with tried-and-true replication.
With its female lead singer, prominent use of harmonies and the refined sound often linked to indie pop rock groups of its ilk, Autumn High doesn’t shy away from producing a mainstream commercial sound.
But the band manages to blur that line despite similarities, and it’s foolhardy to dismiss the group as pandering when surveying the local music scene. In Houma, it’s against the grain.
“I think it’s cool because I guess in the beginning I was worried that, oh, maybe we’re too radio friendly or something, because over here there’s this instrumental music for a half an hour,” Kreamer says. “It took us a while to start playing locally.”
It would also undercut the group’s dedication and talent, best exemplified by the music video Toups mentioned. Titled “Jester,” the two-and-a-half-minute single captured in high-definition has a professional polish.
A frenzy of local wetlands, sunsets and wildlife shots mingle with close-ups of Detiveaux, as well as the band playing in a wooded Montegut area. Detiveaux dances on an organ, which seems to rise from the earth (it took two days to actually bury the instrument and capture its recovery in film) while the band jams its pop alternative notes. Kreamer harmonizes the chorus, but the music subsides while Detiveaux sings the two verses. Not one scene is shot indoors, an appropriate fact considering the moniker’s link with nature, the song’s lyrics (“We rented the sea,” is the first line Detiveaux sings.) and the lovable bayou region they hail from.
“(Drummer and co-founder Caleb White) actually said this, and it’s something I agree with completely: Instead of making an album and trying to get that out quickly, let’s do one thing and do it really well,” Kreamer says.
Autumn High worked on the video all summer and released it on YouTube late last month. Kreamer filmed most of the scenes, except for the band shots his brother filmed, and handled the back-end editing.
In less than a week, the video had nearly three times the amount of hits (close to 1,100) than the band’s number of Facebook likes (378).
The group anticipates another video release this year and hopes to publish its second album – “Tabula Rasa,” a six-track EP, was their first in January, 2011 – sometime early next year.
Since that album, Autumn High’s sound and focus has changed. Whereas Kreamer wrote and sang most of the music and lyrics on the album, Detiveaux’s voice has been thrust to the forefront. She joined the group right around the time the album was released and does lend her voice to a few songs, but she’s undoubtedly the centerpiece of “Jester.”
“We made a conscious decision at the beginning of this year that Beth would sing more of the lead stuff,” Kreamer says. “I just love her voice.”
Detiveaux, then-dating and now-engaged to White, was hanging around with the band but at first was too shy to practice with the duo. Once she started, however, she didn’t stop, and absent a formal invitation, she merely melded with – and changed the outlook of – Autumn High.
“They never actually asked me if I wanted to be in the band,” Detiveaux says. “It’s kind of like when a guy and a girl are hanging out and he never really asks her to be his girlfriend. They just kind of become in a relationship, so that’s kind of how it ended up.”
Bassist Jacob Williams joined the group shortly after, and the current arrangement was set. All are graduates of South Terrebonne High: Kreamer was valedictorian in 2007, and Detiveaux, White and Williams graduated in 2008.
“Jester” stands in contrast to the works of “Tabula Rasa,” and not only as it pertains to vocals.
“As far as the genre I like where it’s going,” says Kreamer, who is partial to Third Eye Blind’s eponymous debut album, Matchbox 20 and other 90s alternative. “Indie pop rock, I guess you could call it, I think that’s a cool place to go.”
Guitarist and vocalist Kenny Kreamer, drummer Caleb White, lead singer and keyboardist Beth Detiveaux and bassist Jacob Williams cool down after filming scenes for “Jester,” Autumn High’s new single. The band plays Houmapalooza Oct. 27.
The album cover for Autumn High’s lone EP “Tabula Rasa” – released in January, 2011 – features a photo circa late 1970s of the band at South Terrebonne High, where all four Autumn High members hail from.
