For Zach Gehring, guitarist for the rock band Mae, the group’s latest album showed the quintet can crank up the volume on their leaner, pop-heavy songs.
“It’s definitely more of a rock record,” Gehring said of the band’s third LP, Singularity, which was released last year. “We wanted to make a record that captured our energy live because we think our records in the past haven’t done that.”
The band attempted to harness that energy as it dove through an hour-and-a-half-long set to a sold-out crowd at the Middle East Downstairs Friday night. With a mix of old hits from the band’s breakthrough LP, Destination: Beautiful, to material off its most recent studio release, Mae headlined a lineup that included The Honorary Title, Between The Lines and Far Less.
Mae kicked off its high-energy performance with the crowd-pleaser, “Embers and Envelopes,” from Destination: Beautiful, which elicited a loud, immediate sing-a-long from the audience. The fist-pumping action continued through “This Is The Countdown,” off The Everglow to “Brink of Disaster,” the first track from Singularity. When the band strummed the first few chords of the 2005 hit single, “Suspension,” the crowd erupted in cheers.
It’s that connection with the audience Gehring said makes touring worthwhile.
“That’s what keeps people coming out. They form this other unique dynamic with five people aside from the CD,” he said.
Like other bands, Mae is experiencing an adjustment with a changing industry landscape. Album sales continue to slide and the band experienced some turmoil after their label, Capitol Records, merged with Virgin last year. And on this tour, the band downgraded from a bus to a van to cut costs.
But despite some setbacks, Gehring said the band continues “to keep our focus and remember why we do what we do.”
And while other bands are facing the change by adopting new marketing techniques, like licensing songs to TV shows and commercials, Gehring said Mae wants to stick with the traditional path to promote its music.
“The marketing we want to do is not inspired or chained to the idea of that kind of exposure,” he said. “I think all that stuff is fruitless in the sense that you can’t make people like your band based on things that are ever-changing. Once you step outside of yourselves, then it becomes a real drag and you’re always chasing trends.”
That frame of thinking doesn’t worry The Honorary Title’s lead singer Jarrod Gorbel. His band recently performed on an episode of the CW soap “One Tree Hill.” Though he admitted the band received some flack about lending songs to the show, Gorbel said he “didn’t think twice about it.”
“I want success,” he said. “I’m not worried about credibility or anything as long as it’s the music that I wrote. And if somehow it becomes really popular, of course that would make me happy. It might make a small group of indie kids unhappy. But I’ll always be true to our fans.”
Gorbel said The Honorary Title also experienced some growing pains after it made the leap from the indie label Doghouse to Warner Brothers last year. Part of the lengthened time gap between its debut and its latest release, Scream and Light Up The Sky, was due to creative differences between the label and the band, he said.
Warner asked the band to re-record two tracks, including the single “Stuck At Sea,” to reach for a more pop-friendly sound. The band compromised with producer and singer-songwriter Butch Walker, a friend of Gorbel’s, who has produced tracks for Avril Lavigne and Fall Out Boy, among others.
“I was willing to play the game,” Gorbel said. “I was like, ‘Fine, I don’t want anybody to write anything for me
