Music: The Birds Are the Word

When Paul Siler and Cheetie Kumar decide to make changes in their lives, they don’t dick around. Nearly three years ago, the pair agreed it was time to leave their longstanding gig with visceral and much-acclaimed Indie Rock champs the Cherry Valence — he was the band’s bassist, she was one of their guitarists — and get married. OK, so maybe that wasn’t the biggest change in their world.

“We’d been dating for nine years, so that wasn’t so much of a life change in theory. Symbolically it was,” Siler says with a laugh from the couple’s Raleigh, N.C., home. “We bought a house, which was nice.”

With no concrete band vision in place, the freshly official Siler and Kumar began thinking in terms of their follow-up project that would ultimately become Birds of Avalon. The couple invited neighbor and local vocalist/keyboardist Craig Tilley over for a few informal late night jam sessions. Siler and Kumar were old friends with Tilley, who had manned the merch booth for the Cherry Valence on several tours and who was already fronting a popular N.C. band, The Weather, but he enjoyed the loose and raucous vibe at Siler and Kumar’s place.

For their part, Siler and Kumar were working toward a sonic ideal rather than a specific genre sound.

“We definitely wanted to have something that was more focused on putting together songs that could hold up on a record rather than just being good in a live setting,” Siler says. “Spending more time on each song and being sure that hopefully there was another hook around the corner that would make you want to listen to it again, as opposed to ‘I’ll just wait and see them live because they do that there,’ which seemed like the Cherry Valence thing.

“Also we wanted to have a little denser sound. I don’t really like using the word ‘psychedelic,’ but it seems to fit OK. We just wanted to get a little freer with sounds without losing the fact that there’s a song somewhere around there.”

For their new gig, Siler wanted to move back to guitar, which he’d played in bands before taking up the bass for the Cherry Valence. The fact that Siler and Kumar were now co-guitarists turned out to be a critical step in establishing the sound of the songs that would comprise Birds of Avalon’s stunning debut, Bazaar Bazaar, released two months ago and a clear contender for end of year accolades.

“Practice time is hard, it’s hard to get everybody together, but since me and Cheetie lived together, it was a good opportunity to work on guitar parts,” Siler says. “Unless you’re roommates with the other guitar player, it’s hard to find the time to really be able to work on that stuff. That was a key to making the songs a little more intricate.”

With the core trio in place, Siler, Kumar and Tilley began exploring covers they each liked as well as working on songs that each brought into the sessions. The results were exciting for all three, and they started thinking about who should be brought into the fold next.

“Everybody in the Cherry Valence and The Weather loved Scott (Nurkin) and his drumming with this band, the Dynamite Brothers,” Siler says. “The Dynamite Brothers don’t tour all that much, so it seemed like he might have some time to play, so we asked him and he was more than happy to do that.”

Eventually multi-instrumentalist and home recordist David Mueller, whose band Strange was slowing their activities, was invited into the circle as well. Although not technically a bass player, Mueller’s formidable musical prowess was all he required to master the instrument in a short time.

“After three or four months and feeling around with a few songs, we realized we should give it a name and see what happens,” Siler says. “We were all part of a similar music community and we knew that nobody in the band was a Marilyn Manson fan. We all had a nucleus of being into The Beatles and Led Zeppelin and John Coltrane, just a similar foundation of a wide variety of stuff.”

With the quintet solidified, the newly christened Birds of Avalon began fleshing out their song sketches with a more fully defined concept of combining elements of raw Blues, thunderous Psych Rock and visceral Prog of the ’60s and ’70s, with a ’90s/now Punk abandon. In their gifted hands, the sound resonates with a timeless quality and bristles with contemporary energy, an accomplishment made all the more impressive in light of the band’s relatively brief history.

On paper, the combination might sound like too many ingredients — a contention that Siler agrees with — but the proof of their success is all over Bazaar Bazaar.

“It sounds terrible, but it’s perfectly fine,” Siler says with a laugh. “When I think about anybody calling something Blues with white people involved, it makes my stomach turn, but there are certainly good people who do it well — Soledad Brothers or Lee County Killers. And then Prog brings up lots of stuff you don’t want to think about. But we’re all into Mahavishnu and old King Crimson and there’s nothing wrong with that music at all. Labels are hard and they always sound goofy … it’s the music that matters.”

This article appears in Aug 1-7, 2007.