Carrboro is not bright lights. Which is why Ben Carr and Geoff Schilling of Last Year’s Men, sitting on a picnic bench in the glow of a single streetlamp, look so fitting: one of the town’s most promising rock bands, lit just-enough in the suburban dusk.
Set to release their debut album Sunny Down Snuff on Durham’s Churchkey Records Nov. 9, Last Year’s Men—vocalist/guitarist/songwriter Carr, guitarist Schilling and drummer Ian Rose—will celebrate by playing the Duke Coffeehouse Saturday with Chapel Hill mainstays Spider Bags and Americans in France. The show will also commemorate Spider Bags’ Churchkey 7-inch, "Take It Easy Tonite," which is their second of the year; the first, "Dog In The Snow," was released by Bull City Records.
Even though they have an album under their belt and one of the Triangle’s greatest punk bands co-headlining their release party, Last Year’s Men have only been together for a year—though all three have played in bands since their early teens. Carr formed Last Year’s Men as a two-piece with Rose last October, after his old group the Begin-Agains—of which Schilling was also a part—collapsed.
“It’s just, we were all kind of bored suburban kids. I remember when I went out to the Cat’s Cradle for my first punk show, I was like 12,” Carr said.
When Schilling added how the punk kids would end up finding each other, Carr gave a little summary of the coming-of-age process for a garage-rock youth, one he’s completed quicker than most.
“You make bad music together, and then you move out of your suburban home, and you become poor,” he said.
Quicker than most, because one fact about Carr—something you could never tell from listening to Sunny Down Snuff, which is so tight and propulsive and mature throughout, so unlike the traditionally slapdash, scattered work of teenage musicians—is that he’s just 18. Schilling is 22 years old, and Rose is still a student at East Chapel Hill High School. But the only significance of the young ages is to underscore how talented these guys really are. The music more than stands out on its own merit, deeply steeped in past and contemporary styles.
“The band started off with Ian and me playing Sam Cooke covers, and we would make them loud,” Carr said. “When I was at [Durham Technical Community College], I’d have all this downtime. So I would go over to Chaz’s [Martenstein, of Bull City Records] and he’d just spin records for me, and one day he was spinning Reigning Sound—that’s a [Memphis musician] Greg Cartwright band—and I was like, ‘S***, this is awesome, what the f*** is this?’ He gave me a copy and said, ‘Absorb it.’ So I did, and just kind of dived into rock and roll.”
Their sound is a hybrid of punk- and garage-rock, marrying the sensibilities and techniques of each to the other.
“We kind of do the same thing the Replacements do, the same kind of method,” Schilling said. “Noisy and loud.”
Last December—two months after forming the band—Carr graduated from Durham Tech a semester early, and Last Year’s Men—at that point just Carr and Rose—hit the road. Upon returning, Carr toured solo with Jay Kutchma of Durham’s Red Collar, and in attendance at Last Year’s Men’s first show back was Steve Jones, co-founder of Churchkey.
Jones loved the show and asked the band to make a record for his label; Carr called up Schilling, who was at the time living in Boston, and asked him to join the band; and there they were, with a three-piece and a record contract.
“It was a nice change of pace,” Carr said. “I feel like Geoff and I, in all of our musical projects, have been screwed over way too many times. So, it’s kind of nice dealing with legitimate folk.”
Once the band started recording, Jones and Kyle Miller, Churchkey’s other co-founder, brought in Dan McGee, Spider Bags’ frontman, to serve as kind of a musician-advisor to Carr and the band. The two ended up clicking, and McGee stayed on to produce Sunny Down Snuff in its entirety.
“All good rock-and-roll stories in this town start at Chaz’s Bull City Records,” McGee said. “I was in there one day and he’s playing me these demos of Last Year’s Men and they kind of blew me away.… The first song that I heard was “Beware.” It’s just an incredible, ageless, timeless song, you know? That could be from any period in rock and roll, and it just blew my mind that a kid his age had that kind of grasp of songwriting.”
After listening to the band’s demos, McGee met Carr and Schilling at a coffeehouse, and from there he was sold.
“When you’re young and talented, there’s a lot of ways you can go with it: You can be really ego-driven, or you can be really negative and shy about it,” McGee said. “And Ben was neither of those things.”
McGee said his primary role in producing the record was helping the guys to get the sounds they wanted, but also to bring in the other individuals necessary to make the best album possible—to “get the right people together and get out of the way for [the] band.”
Talking about the considerable time spent making Sunny Down Snuff, Carr joked that they’d never be able to pay Churchkey back for the investment. But Jones felt the record was set up for success, and expectations were ultimately exceeded.
“We knew when we got Dan McGee to help out with the record [that] it was going to end up being a good record—everything the guy touches sounds great,” he said. “Having [McGee] on board with Ben’s songs, and the band and him working together—as the cuts came through… you could just tell it was going to be something special.”
With Sunny Down Snuff said and done, Last Year’s Men have a strong relationship with Spider Bags—McGee gives Carr songwriting advice, Bags member Gregg Levy plays bass on the album and the two groups have multiple shows on the horizon. Recording on Churchkey and playing with guys like Kutchma, the band’s been embraced by the Triangle. And Carr and Schilling can’t value the support enough.
“This area and the people who have made an impression in the scene—[there aren’t] that many people. Everybody plays in each other’s bands, everybody’s seen each other’s bands,” Carr said. “It’s just cool people.”
The CD release party for Last Year’s Men and Spider Bags will take place at the Duke Coffeehouse this Saturday. Doors open at 8:30 p.m., and Americans in France kick off the show at 9 p.m. Tickets are $5 for the public and free to Duke students with I.D. For more information, visit http://www.duke.edu/web/coffeehouse.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.