Protected: Kid Savant
Kid Savant
Kid Savant
Kanye with Daft Punk? Rihanna, T.I. and the miya-hee-haha O-zone song? You've got to be kidding. The reality of dance music right now is that today's oh-shit hit is yesterday's no-way-Jose fusion of disparate genres. Up-and-comers Kid Savant are taking that lesson to the studio. John Sullivan, Ryan Weisberger, Kevin Pariso, and Andrew Wendahl are four Chicago-based rockers who are flavoring their driving Floyd-inspired acid-funk with styles snatched from the after-hours trance scene that's blowing up north of the border in Montreal.
Sullivan mixes live percussion from his kit with synth triggers in Ableton while Pariso lays down searching guitar phrases on the landscape and keyboardist/vocalist Weisberger weaves clean piano lines and dusty Bono vox across the top. What comes out the other end is an unexpectedly haunting sonic palette-Armand Van Buuren as played by Coldplay, or maybe U2 with a vocoder-a bass-laden trance-rock hybrid that can flip wigs and stroke chins with equal aplomb.
"We draw our inspiration from DJ sets at clubs like Circus and Stereo in Montreal," says Sullivan. "They open at 3 a.m., after all the bars have closed. It's deep, progressive, heavy house. They have something called 'the crawl' where the DJ takes a drum line or a bass loop and extends it for three minutes. The crowd stops dancing and just swirls their heads. And when the line comes back in, people are screaming. It's the selling point."
Sullivan says he and his bandmates are experimenting with bringing the hypnotic energy of a trance night to more conventional formats, like the four-minute pop song. "Now, we're looking for that catchy top-40 sound, but with something unique to it," he says. Listening to tracks like "Girl," a dubby track that features guest vocals from dreadhead King Shadrock, one can't really tell where the traditional instrumentation ends and the digital wizardry begins. But such Frankenstein hybridization is essential to the Kid Savant formula-hell, that's how they got their name.
"I was thinking about how Mary Shelley got the idea for Frankenstein, just out of nowhere, sleeping," Sullivan says. "Something similar occurred in the strange space before sleep, although it wasn't so dramatic. I thought the word 'savant' was awesome and then Ryan [Weisberger] called and we added the Kid, maybe as a tribute to Radiohead's Kid A."
Like Radiohead, Kid Savant know just how to find the sweet spot for experimental, inventive music that's still infectious and marketable. They're hitting the studio again this summer in Montreal for jam sessions that give birth to embryonic riffs, riffs that develop into fully realized, emotive tunes. Expect great things in the near future from these 21-year-old savants.