When Durham’s Megafaun played a set at a three-day music festival in England earlier this month, fans thought they were seeing the wrong band.
“We heard from the festival office that people were calling in and asking where Megafaun was,” the band’s percussionist, Joe Westerlund, wrote in an email.
“They were standing right in front of the stage we were playing and saw a loud, four-piece rock band with electric instruments, no banjo and only one beard.”
A very different band stood before an audience who had come to know Megafaun from the twisted acoustic folk on its first full-length,The band’s sound has always been changing — from the shouted, sloppy harmonies that open to the spaced-out, texturized 12-minute “Comprovisation For Connor Pass” on — Megafaun has constantly found new sounds to tell their stories.
But Megafaun’s eponymous release represents a departure from what was expected of the once fully bearded trio.
After playing together in bands throughout high school and college, Keil Jansen moved with brothers Brad and Phil Cook, Westerlund, and what seems like the entirety of their childhood friends, to the Triangle based on a whim and one friendly visit.
Jansen sees as evidence of the band’s maturation. No one member’s role is clearly defined in the collaboration. It’s most evidenced by the vocals on the album, where members regularly take a backseat to let an idea flourish.
“Each one of them now has the ability to either sing as the focus, as the centerpiece of the song, or to use their voices and words as just another instrument in the song,” Jansen said.
Tapping out his thoughts on his iPhone over 4,000 miles from his home in Durham, Phil Cook says with the rolling hills and fertile farmland, it’s easy to forget the scenery is European. Only the occasional windmill or distant spire of an old church gives it away. The band is two days out of its 13-date tour across the UK, Germany, Holland and France, and after playing next Thursday at the Cat’s Cradle, the band will launch back into a tour that will send them from Portland, Ore., to Vancouver, B.C.
