Rock isn’t dead. It’s just on tour.
From niche New Orleans genre to a full-blooded community.
Words and photography by Katie Sikora.
“There’s just not really a huge community for [rock]. There’s starting to be. There’s a couple rock bands that are starting to play shows with each other: Painted Hands, Midriff, Paper Bison, Toonces, Bantam Foxes. My hope is that the more we play shows with each other, the more of the our fans will come and hang out and all like a similar thing: the show. At minimum they would connect over the show and once you connect three or four times, all of a sudden, it’s a friend group and it’s a social thing. That’s how Saturn Bar was, I was really happy with the show at Saturn Bar.” — Louis Monroe
It was the night of the Quintessential Octopus EP release show: the boys of Midriff were on the corner waiting to close out the show; members of Yung Vul were smoking cigarettes by the van while Natalie from McGregor doled out hugs; Morgan Carson of The Kid Carsons and Owen Legendre of Bare Naked Bear Handlers were taking selfies with PBR bottles. Natalita was already on the dance floor.
You would find none of these artists if you Googled New Orleans music. In a city like ours, one with a steadfast love of jazz, funk, or anything with a horn really, it’s still easy to underestimate the power of rock n roll and the adaptations it continues to go through. But that is slowly changing here and Joe Ceponis, Louis Monroe, and David Sigler of Quintessential Octopus plan on being here for the advent of a new rock scene in New Orleans.
Artists like The Revivalists and Anders Osborne have done a lot to stir awareness of rock and its offshoots in this city but in most cases rock shows in New Orleans are associated either with a diluted Bourbon Street version leftover from the 70s and 80s or with a rich punk/hardcore/metal scene that, while well established, does not encompass the far-reaching fringe rock genres of 2017. Even The Quints now have a hard time aligning with that classic image and sound.
“There’s so much music out there that it sort of ceases to be any one genre anymore. There’s just so much fucking music. It’s easy to say, oh we’re a rock band because we use electric guitar, bass, and drums but if we didn’t have those instruments, I would never call it a rock band. It’s not dead, it’s just progressed past what it was. It’s just different now.” — David Sigler
And “different” can be incredibly hard to define. At their inception, the two-piece Quintessential Octopus did call themselves rock n roll for lack of a better description. But as their musical tastes matured, that identity felt stale. In 2015, their sound took a new turn, adding Monroe on bass.
All three of them have deep musical backgrounds (Sigler is trained in classical guitar performance, Ceponis studied audio engineering at Loyola University New Orleans, and Monroe has a nearly ten year career as a vocalist) that were narrowed down into a rock framework and instrumentation once they arrived in New Orleans. But stylistically, the music has grown into a fusion of their diverse current musical influences — a strange mixture of classical composer Bela Bartok, Scottish art-punk band Country Teasers, Oxford, Miss. indie-rockers Colour Revolt, The Strokes, James Blake, The Dirty Projectors, and the jazz DJs on WWNO between 11pm and 2am. They hope that as different people with different careers and different interests with tastes and influences that continue to grow and mature, their music will expand and they will begin to identify with more than just their instruments. They call it art rock.
It’s no secret that much of the music that is perpetuated here is bent to the tourist market. For bands that don’t have that New Orleans “sound” or “flair”, opportunities can be limited. This is a city built on and celebrated for its traditions in culture and music and when there isn’t a clear, audible pathway to those traditions, the ability to classify oneself as a New Orleans musician becomes harder. Ceponis, Monroe, and Sigler all agree that New Orleans has had a formative effect on their music, but beyond that they have not yet distinguished how that effect is manifesting itself in their work. So how to do you take a catalogue of music — representative of many different genres — that even the artists have a difficult time describing, and introduce it to New Orleans?
While the city’s influence may be buried deep, the essence of Quintessential Octopus’s latest EP All Hallows Barking makes them primed and ready to become a part of the musical fabric of our town. It’s a five song album that Sigler describes as brutally honest, a trait also used to describe New Orleans. This city has a heat and an energy of its own and if you don’t work to give back to it and honor it, it will leave you in its dust. It has flaws and it wears them like a crown. Similarly, the majority of the songs on All Hallows Barking were written, developed, and recorded during a hard period in the lives of the three members and they wanted to embrace those imperfections. They wrote about what they knew and at the time, they were working dead end jobs and had their hearts broken. They were dealing with depression. So they took everything they created and forged it into a dark but beautiful piece of art.
The song “Saddle” is about that ‘downtrodden-ness’, as Sigler puts it. The fourth track, “The Whole Time”, is an introspective frustration of seeing people claim to be artists but who are not in it for the right reasons and subsequently finding yourself questioning whether or not you are in it for the right reasons. “Food Dreams” was written about Dylann Roof, the shooter who killed nine people in a church in South Carolina. It’s about racism and the fact that historically speaking, crimes like that don’t do much to change the opinions of people who truly hate others with skin colors different from their own.
“We really wanted to this EP to be as honest as it could and we really worked hard. That was the goal the whole time. We said we were going to spend a year in production just to make sure this sounds handmade and weird and dark so it takes people somewhere for five songs. Our whole goal is to be as intense as the actual songs.” — Joe Ceponis
Quintessential Octopus is also set apart from other young genre-bending bands by their extensive catalog. They have three other EPs as well as Mother, their 2014 full-length album. This self-made hustle reflects the New Orleans spirit, stemming from their ultimate desire to play as much music as possible for as many people as possible and to get better at it along the way.
Some New Orleans artists have achieved mainstream success and still bring local appreciation for the genre. Cowboy Mouth is often cited as a homegrown outfit who left an indelible mark on the scene in the ’90s with a hit song and record deal with MCA. Morning 40 Federation — active first in the early 2000s and then resurfacing in recent years — blazed the trail mixing horn funk with punk rock guitar tone and vocal aesthetic. More recently, New Wave duo Generationals garnered high-profile licensing deals, raising awareness for the city as an incubator for independent music. But often these bands or groups like them may only be here long enough to play a hometown show and do laundry before they’re gone on tour again. Or they may realize this is not the easiest place to grow a niche market. Perhaps they haven’t received sustained support from the wider community. But whatever the reason, they simply are not here and on the scene and less likely to provide support and inspiration for the artists in the beginning phases of their musical careers. For The Quints, that means putting more time and energy into building the circle of friends who are also playing rock and versions of it into a unified community.
“We’re doing this to pull it along. It puts the fire behind us to say ‘there isn’t a scene so I’m going to fucking work harder’.” — Joe Ceponis
The boys of Quintessential Octopus do have plans and goals to tour with their music, to travel and gather new experiences to aid in the growth of their sound and their artistic expressions. But they want to do that and be able to come home and be welcomed back into their city, or at least a small pocket of that city, amongst their friends, colleagues, and musical influencers right here in New Orleans. And by the looks of the roster of musicians who came out to celebrate the release of All Hallows Barking earlier this month, it’s already happening.
