That may have been on guitarist/vocalist William Keegan’s mind when he began recording Indie Punk songs in his Santa Clarita, Calif. bedroom under that banner more than a decade ago. The name remained when Pangea expanded into an actual band in 2008, with Keegan, his high school friend, longtime musical confidante and bassist Danny Bengston and his then-girlfriend and drummer Adrian Chi Tenney. Complications arose when Pangea signed a label contract with the Harvest label in 2013.
“We sent in our first release and we got an email saying, ‘The lawyers (at Universal Music Group) won’t let this come out unless the name is changed,” Bengston says from a Vermont tour stop. “We fought it, but they sent us this long trademark report of Pangea musical entities. It was like 300 pages long, and it was everything from recording software to a World Jazz trio. There were just so many things called Pangea out there in the music world.”
The band had already faced that issue when setting up its social media framework, discovering the variously spelled “pangea” was used prominently in music. As a workaround, Tenney added the word “together” to the band’s domain name, and eventually rechristening itself.
“We’re not very fond of the name, but we’ve gotten to the point now where it’s kind of too late,” Bengston says with a laugh. “We just put ‘together’ in there and made (the ‘t’) smaller. People know where to find us, and most kids just refer to us as PANGEA. Even on stage, we go, ‘Hey, we’re PANGEA.’”
Tenney eventually drifted away to concentrate on her own projects and Erik Jimenez, one of Bengston’s fellow California Institute of the Arts schoolmates, joined on drums in 2010. That’s when, Bengston notes, PANGEA “became a real thing.”
Since then, together PANGEA has experienced several changes, both in personnel and stylistic expression. The group has featured a rotating cast of guitarists, including Wand frontman Cory Hanson and current member Roland Cosio, and through its various EP and full-length releases, the quartet has evolved from the Ramones/Replacements-tinged Garage Surf Punk of its 2010 cassette debut, Jelly Jam, and 2011’s Living Dummy to the ’90s-fueled roar of 2014’s brilliant Badillac and follow-up EP The Phage. Together PANGEA’s recent output had a profound impact on the foursome.
“When people start to care about the art you’re making, you tend to take it a little more seriously,” Bengston says. “Back in the CalArts days, we were just a party band. We didn’t have tuners. We didn’t even tune our fucking guitars; we’d tune by ear before we went onstage and hoped it was OK. This is stuff we realized a while ago, but it took us a surprisingly long time for us to do basic things that serious bands do. We’ve been playing for about six years now, but we’ve only been serious and good for about three. Badillac came out on a major (label) and kind of caught us by surprise. We’re better for it all and I think we’re the best we’ve ever been.”
Badillac was a turning point in more ways than one. It represented a new kind of deliberation in together PANGEA’s process, an expansion of its palette of influence and a therapeutic exorcism of the members’ personal pain.
“Badillac was a lot darker (than previous efforts). William had just gotten out of a three-year relationship, I had just gotten out of a five-year relationship, so it was an angrier, angstier album,” Bengston says. “It was a good album, but I don’t see us writing a record like that again. We’ve all grown up quite a bit since Badillac.”
The group is currently working on a new album, slated for a summer 2017 release. In a move that departs from its standard methodology, the band is playing a trio of new songs — described by Bengston as “a little more Rock & Roll than the last record” — on together PANGEA’s latest tour. The band is also anxious to apply the same brisk studio technique to its next album that they learned from musician/producer Tommy Stinson (of The Replacements fame) on The Phage EP.
“Badillac was done in three- or four week-long sessions over the course of a year because we didn’t have any deadlines or a label or any plans for a record, we were just making it,” Bengston says. “After finding out we were opening for The Replacements (last year), we found out Tommy wanted to work with us and that he would be in L.A. for a couple of days after the show. So we had a clear objective; we had two days and Tommy guided the process. He came in, saw what we’d brought gearwise and said, ‘Maybe you should use this instead of that,’ and ‘We’re gonna go across the street and get a drink, then we’re coming back and you’re doing three takes of every song back-to-back and that’s it.’ It was very different than spending a year. I want to record again like that.”
The new together PANGEA album could be shaping up to be the kind of career-defining album that encompasses a band’s full range of influences and experiences. While Keegan has always been together PANGEA’s primary songwriter, Bengston has been writing a lot lately and plans on having a couple of compositions on the new album. With avowed influences like the aforementioned Replacements and Power Pop masters The Nerves, as well as classic icons like The Beatles and The Kinks, together PANGEA seems to be on the brink of something special. But Bengston quickly explains that those legendary groups aren’t the members’ biggest and most personal inspirations.
“We end up getting influenced by our friends and the bands we play and tour with in ways that we don’t predict,” Bengston says. “Our first record, Living Dummy, was really influenced by our friends’ band, Audacity. We were on tour with (Chicago rockers) Twin Peaks and we all really love (their) record, and I’m starting to think about songs after listening to them.”
TOGETHER PANGEA plays a free show Thursday at MOTR Pub. More info: motrpub.com.
