Bands Through Town
Story by Aaron Irons
Rock n’ roll is a hairy wheel, tangled and greasy, fragrant from seven decades of viscera, cactus’d by snapped guitar strings, scarred by glass, smoldering with distorted legends and hot ash, stripped to the steel belt by burn-outs to the point no reasonable sentient should even feign consideration… But then a band like the Nude Party emerges to heroically cut through the myth, expose fresh tread, and make the whole machine go ‘round once more.
Battling out of Boone, North Carolina, where the band earned its name (and reputation) performing au naturel, the Nude Party landed a stiff right with its 2018 eponymous debut that offered Stones-y, garage-heavy tunes that stuck to the ribs and banged around the skull. The follow-up, 2020’s “Midnight Manor,” like its predecessor, exploited the sweet spot between vintage rock n’ roll of the filthy-toned variety and ripe 21st Century perspective.
“Rides On,” the Nude Party’s latest effort is a glorious leap in the same direction– higher octane, self-reliant, and tough to ignore. Produced by the now seven-member strong outfit at its converted barn studio in upstate New York, there’s no posturing or reinventing of the wheel, just the tamper-proof formula of rock n’ roll resistant to banality and hearty enough to thrive beneath the ice until called.
“We put out the previous record, and then we didn't tour it because touring was kind of impossible at that time, so we were at home a lot,” Nude Party frontman Patton Magee recalled in a recent interview. “We all live in the same house, so I think we were getting pretty antsy about doing something. We'd been building the studio and at a certain point, it was just like, “Okay, it is time to make a record."
Though they had the space, time, and inclination, what the band didn’t have was the necessary equipment. So enter Tampa-based engineer Matt Horner.
“We called my friend and engineer way down in South Florida to come up and bring a bunch of cool gear, and we just set up in [the barn] for 14 days and all the songs that anyone had been kicking around, we just made a big ol’ pile of them,” said Patton. “Some were full-on songs, some were just riffs or grooves, and we just went through them and saw what sticks. Some things changed, got some different ideas together, and ran through them until we had arrangements that we were excited about and were fun to play.”
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Mixing country honk, British Invasion-filtered blues, and transitional late ‘60s/early ‘70s psychedelia that threatens all-out punk, “Rides On” is evocative but nevertheless revels in immediacy.
“We'd write songs and add them to our set during the touring of that first album. When we came to do the second album, we'd already been playing those songs a lot together, so it was a lot easier to just set up, hit record, and do it the way we did it [on stage],” Magee said. “This process was a lot more broken down to base elements because none of us had heard each other's ideas. It was all new to everybody. There was no falling back on what you were used to playing, you had to figure it out on the spot. I think in a lot of ways, that makes it stand out from the previous records... It's a little bit of an outlier. It doesn't sound as much like a set. It sounds more like an album to me.
Magee, who currently makes his home in Brooklyn, New York, was raised in a large family – one of nine brothers and sisters – and credits that upbringing with the ability to communicate with his many bandmates on stage.
“Ever since I was a little kid, I was riding around in my mom's big bronze GMC Savana van with a ton of people next to me. I don't know if it's normal, but I do feel like at a young age, I was desensitized to being hyper-socialized -- and to being in a van with way too many f***ing people. No one else has seven people,” Patton said. “The only other band that has as many people as us and tours in the rock n' roll world that I know of is King Gizzard. I think about them every day and I wonder how they do what they do. I think the way they do it is just by being the hardest-working band in show business. And I feel like we're probably the second hardest-working band in show business.
“The band sounds so f***ing good right now. Honestly, that's how I feel,” he said. “Maybe that sounds egotistical, but we were rehearsing the other day -- and we don't live together anymore. We're spread out a little bit geographically, so we don't come together as often, and there was a point where I was playing along and looking around, and the band has just gotten so much better at getting together and picking it up and just being musicians. I looked around, and I was like, ‘This is the best f***ing rock n' roll band in the world.’ That's how it feels.”