A
t the five-year mark, a band can begin to wonder if they’re making an impact, and perhaps even consider a musical (or even a career) course correction.
You won’t find any such speculation within the ranks of Let It Happen. The Cincinnati quartet may have taken five years to release their first full-length, last year’s bracing and infectious Cause + Effect, but the members seem as energetic and eager to move to the next phase as they must have been when they first coalesced as a band half a decade ago.
With the blazing Alternative Pop of Cause + Effect, Let It Happen is poised to become the next local band to raise their profile to a national level.
The band’s touring activities of late have been intermittent but productive, and the notices for Cause + Effect, released in September by Findlay, Ohio, label InVogue, have been almost universally positive.
“It’s been critically received really well, but we haven’t been able to do a ton of touring on it,” drummer Sean Highley says in the living room of his Walnut Hills apartment. “I think it’s a thing where it’s our first release, it takes a little while to gel.”
Although Cause + Effect is Let It Happen’s first full length, it’s the band’s third studio foray. The group self-released its debut EP, 2011’s It Hurts, But It’s Worth It, and then sent the recording of its sophomore EP, 2013’s Unravel, to InVogue, who signed them and then re-released the EP to a wider audience.
“A mutual friend knew the guy who owned the label, so there was a little ‘in’ there,” Highley says with a laugh, “I guess it was the music that did it. I hope.”
It was the music all right. From the start, Let It Happen has served up adrenalized Pop/Punk with the satellite-bouncing energy of Jimmy Eat World and fun., taking care to balance its smartass effervescence with a seriousness of intent. By avoiding either extreme, Let It Happen has earned a reputation as a band that can be thoughtful and introspective as well as explosive and smirkingly charming. That’s an impressive tightrope to navigate.
Although the quartet — Highley, guitarist/lead vocalist Drew Brown, guitarist Michael Vogel and bassist Nathan Joiner — had been pleased with the results of their initial EPs, they sensed that Cause + Effect was a next-level release.
“I felt like it was a big step from the last things we’d done and I was really happy with it,” says Vogel, who is also Highley’s cousin. “Any time you release something you’ve spent a lot of time and effort on, you think it’s great. You’ve got to kind of see where it goes. We didn’t know what to expect.”
“You get so close to your own product, you’re like that mom who’s like, ‘My daughter’s got a lovely singing voice!’ ” Highley says. “It’s important to step back from your own stuff.”
One of the big shifts for Let It Happen in the making of Cause + Effect was in the album’s pre-production phase. On the EPs, the band was relentless in working and reworking the songs to get them ready for the studio, but the members’ preparation for the album material was considerably less structured before bringing it to producer Nick Ingram.
“The pre-production for this album was a lot more lax,” Highley says. “We’d been used to working with a producer who’s like, ‘Your songs are finished, let’s record.’ This experience was nothing like that. We worked with someone who cared about our record a lot, so we came in and it was like, ‘This track has written guitars and drums for it, let’s build.’ That was creative.”
Perhaps most importantly, the band’s songwriting regimen was considerably different from its previous releases. Where the EPs had been fully composed prior to entering the studio, the songs for Cause + Effect still had some cooking time left in them.
“I had essentially no lyrics or vocals until we went into the studio,” Brown says. “Which was a blessing in disguise. I was going nuts and stressing out, but it was that last minute pressure that pushed us. And there was no opportunity to ever overthink anything.”
The band also allowed a greater gestation time for Cause + Effect to evolve and find its identity.
“We worked on ‘The Lonely One’ for several months,” Joiner says. “We knocked every other song on the rest of the album out in the exact amount of time it took to write that one song.”
“Different people worked on bits of each song,” Vogel says. “I think that’s kind of why it sounds a bit different than our EPs.”
The band also used a lot of different groups and albums as reference points for the new material, citing Paramore, Third Eye Blind, The 1975 and Young the Giant as being crucial in that regard. Rather than identifying them as influences, the quartet sees the bands they listened to prior to Cause + Effect as inspirations to realize the sounds and outcome the members’ envisioned.
“It made it way more personal,” Brown says. “There was no time to think about anything, so it was ‘What’s going on right here, right now in my life and how do I feel about it and how do I get it into a song?’ So it did become very personal and I think that’s what made it a good record.”
Everything on Cause + Effect evokes deep feelings, given the honest and raw emotion that Brown invested in the lyrics. One of the album’s best is the quietly powerful “Astray,” a departure from its high-octane surroundings.
“I felt like we were missing that emotional, sad song,” Brown says. “I went home after recording, I was drained, I didn’t give a fuck about anything at the timeand I just wanted to be done.”
Even as Let It Happen was consciously attempting to push themselves in new directions, they were also very aware of the fan base that had brought the band to its current status on the verge of a potential national breakout.
“We didn’t want to make that 90 degree turn, we wanted to make that swerve,” Highley says. “We didn’t want to abandon the ship that’s been carrying [us]. We love our fans, but we’re growing and our fans are growing with us and we didn’t want to stray too far from that.”
“That’s where Sean’s taskmaster role came in,” Brown says. “At points, the three of us were like, ‘Fuck it, let’s just go crazy!’ And he’d be like, ‘That’s good stuff, but not too far.’ ” ©
For more on LET IT HAPPEN, visit letithappenband.com.
This article appears in Jan 7-14, 2015.