MEMBERS: Ezra Tenenbaum, Shane O’Connell, Michael Stasiak
FROM: New York, but two of them come from Washington state
YOU MIGHT KNOW THEM FROM: Their jangly, Big-Star-inspired debut single, “Dust in the Sky”
NOW: Releasing their phenomenal debut album Calling Out on Captured Tracks
One day it won’t be one of the things people talk about when they talk about Brooklyn’s EZTV, but until we’ve all had a chance to spend the summer riding around with the windows down while blaring Calling Out, the group’s debut, there’s no getting past the Spiritualized story.
The very first time EZTV played together, they were auditioning to be the American touring band for Jason Pierce’s long-running indie spaceboy outfit. Drummer Michael Stasiak got the nod from his boss at Manhattan record store Other Music, who had heard that Pierce was looking for US-based players. “It just popped into my head that [Ezra and Shane] were the best musicians who could probably pick it up pretty quickly,” says Stasiak.
They didn’t get the job. Guitar player and frontman Ezra Tenenbaum elaborates: “We threw something together in a few nights. We put together a list of Spiritualized tunes and the next day we convened in this tiny practice space in Bushwick and played five or six songs with Jason. He was a little cranky. It was this crazy cram session for these songs that are hard jams. I knew it wasn’t going well when I came in and he said, ‘I thought you were going to play keyboards.’ He was very cool but he was cranky, man.”
Thus, with an assist from a cranky forty-nine-year-old British rocker, the three members of EZTV went from college buds to actual rock band. The group (who are joined on the road by second guitarist Will Cole, son of singer-songwriter Lloyd), all met at NYU. Self-described “music nerds/engineering/recording guys” Tenenbaum and O’Connell were in the same recording class, and Shane met fellow Washington state expat Stasiak—who was then playing for indie darlings Widowspeak—in a Spanish class. The band’s name comes from a mutation of Tenenbaum’s initials—ET was rejected as possibly upsetting Steven Spielberg—and was eventually agreed upon as the best of a bad batch of suggestions.
The group’s power-pop finds inspiration in predecessors who focused on melody-driven songs with an emphasis on harmonies and thoughtful progressions. Think Big Star, I.R.S.-era R.E.M., and Badfinger, to which EZTV add smatterings of sonic experimentation and effects—they are engineers, after all. The results sound immediately familiar and worthy of repeated listens. Says Tenenbaum, “We’re past the ‘trying to be in a cool band’ part of our career. Now we’ve distilled it down to just trying to write great songs and present them in a way that we like to hear, which has always been a theme in power-pop.”
EZTV are heading out on their first multi-state tour this month, with Tenenbaum and O’Connell taking a break from their engineering work. And Stasiak? Well, he might be calling in sick to his day job. “This thing that’s going around,” he says. “I might be out for ten to twelve days.” It’s not like the last gig his boss hooked him up with worked out anyway. FL
