#movershaker

Detroit, like most cities in the U.S, is a place with its fair share of big name contributions to the pool of pop culture. Though the touchstones may be obvious, Barry Gordy’s founding of Motown, Iggy Pop rolling around on broken glass, The White Stripes penning a Jock Jam Anthem to end all Jock Jam Anthems, they are obvious because they mattered.

 Detroit’s role in the greater history of American music has been as prolific as it has been sporadic, as influential as it is insular. Now, after decades of several different kinds of decline Detroit seems to be entering a new era of growth, both economically and creatively.

Coming up in the middle of it all are indie punk four-piece, Mover Shaker. A band who, now only a month out from the release of their debut full length, is as aware of the city’s past, present and future as they are of their own.

“You think about it a lot,” says Jack Parsons, one of the band’s two vocalists/guitarists, “You think a lot about any place that you live but Detroit is a very interesting place with a strange and turbulent history.” Parsons, who’s been living in the Detroit for the past couple years, has personally witnessed the changes the city has only recently gone through.

“There is a lot of growth,” Parsons says optimistically before provisionally adding, “for better or worse.”

“Detroit is a city with a really long history of racial tensions and I’d be lying if I said it isn't still there,” he says, “ I'm weary of the opportunity that is being cultivated within the city not being made to people who had been living there the longest.”

Despite his weariness, the opportunities, especially for artists and musicians like Parsons and Mover Shaker, are abundant. Parson describes how “There are five or six things to do on any given night, not just weekends”. He cites the city’s techno scene and especially its garage rock scene as being particularly alive and well saying, “That [garage rock] scene here hosts three or four events every night of the week.”

Just to be clear, that means anyone could go see between 21 and 28 local shows in the span of just a week.

With a non stop circuit of live music available, one might assume that Mover Shaker would be perpetually playing out. On the contrary, Parsons describes the band as “sort of hermits,” when it comes to their activity in the Detroit scene. He says that instead of playing out, Mover Shaker has been much more focused on the writing of their new album.

“I don't know if we really fit into what happens in Detroit.” Parsons says, laughing a little. “Not because we don’t want to play with those bands, but I came up in the punk scene in Detroit and center line, when there was a string of small house venues in Warren.”

In the earlier half of the decade, while Detroit was nurturing its garage rock scene, the city’s surrounding suburbs, like Warren, had a related but different scene going on, one that focused primarily on more suburban strains of punk and hardcore. It would be there that Parsons and the other members of Mover Shaker would come together.

“I only played in one serious band before Mover Shaker,” says Gabriel Miller, Mover Shaker’s other Vocalist/guitarist. “It was a pretty generic scene-y post-hardcore band. I was 15, I think. I only had played 4 shows with them before they kicked me out.”

Around the same time, Miller was scrolling through Youtube when he found a channel of drum covers by Mover Shaker’s future drummer, Colin Shea. “I sent him some guitar demos,” Millers says. “He dug it and invited me over to jam with him and his brother. We were kind of instant homies.” Miller met Parsons, who was then bass player for the punk band, The Flaks, shortly after. “They were all from the same town; all part of the same general group of friends,” Miller says. The two would not become close however, until the Flaks dissolved in February of 2014.

“When you’re in a band in high school it becomes your entire social circle...if you’re serious about it,” Parsons says of his time in The Flaks. With his old band broken up, Parsons says relationships became strained and that’s when he started to see more of Miller and the Shea Brothers, who were then the rhythm section in local post-hardcore band, Grace Harper.  

“I was kind of set in not being in another band but I found pretty quickly that I couldn’t do that,” Parsons says. Mover Shake would form shortly thereafter with Parsons on guitar, Miller on bass, Colin Shea on drums and Grace Harper frontman Liam Rush on vocals.  The band would play their first show on May 22nd of 2014 and would go on to play periodically throughout that spring and summer before being approached by friend and audio engineer, Thomas Dobbins, to record an E.P.

Mover Shaker’s “Living Standards” E.P would be recorded in Dobbins’ basement on a budget of a few hundred bucks and Parsons says and the band was, “really happy with how it came together.” The record would be released online that September to what Parsons called a “Positive, albeit small reception” and even received attention from (now SXSW certified) D.I.Y music blog, Funeral Sounds, who praised the band’s “hauntingly poetic” lyrics and “raw, emotive” sound.

With the momentum of Living Standards behind them and a booking at the Holland Mi.’s annual Bled Fest ahead of them, the band decided to once again work with Dobbins, now relocated to Rax Trax Studio in Chicago, for the recording of a debut full length in April of 2015. The band booked two days in the studio and worked between 16 and 20 hours, recording seven full songs instrumentally, on both days but hit a roadblock once the time came to record vocals,discovering that final lyrics had yet to be written.

Out of time, the band was forced to head back home to regroup and tighten the bolts before Bled. By this point, Miller had switched from his initial position as bass player to guitar where he was more comfortable, with the band bringing on Colin’s brother, Ryan, to play bass. As Miller says, “Doesn't it kind of just make sense for our rhythm section to be, genetically, the same person?”

Not long after the festival, which despite the band's smaller staging drew a room full of passionate fans moshing along, Parsons says, “Things came to a head...Certain people in the band wanted to be in different roles.” Ultimately, this led to parting ways with Rush as a vocalist, a decision that was mutual.

Rush, a visual artist who Parson calls “a bit of a boy wonder,” has stayed on working as the band's visual creative director and put together the art for the band's single and upcoming album.

With the slot of front man now left open, both Parsons and Miller stepped in on for vocal and lyrical duties, something that was new to both, and headed back down to Chicago in October of 2015 to finish their album. This time booking three days and once again working longs hours through the day and into the early morning. In-studio, the band managed to pen two entirely new songs and lay down the remaining lyrics and vocals. “It came down to the wire,” Parsons says,“We had to find our voices all while it was coming down to a point where we’d have to say,’If you don’t write this line in the next 45 seconds, we aren’t going to finish the record in time.”

Thankfully Miller’s writing style, which he self describes as “poppy, simple, oftentimes meaningless” fused well with Parson’s more “cryptic...rhapsodic” songwriting tendencies allowing the band to finish the album, now titled “Michigania”, within the allotted time.

With the album fully tracked, the band would drop its first single, “No Backyard” through a premiere on Funeral Sounds. The site declared the band’s new direction to be reminiscent of preeminent noise-rockers, Sonic Youth, as well as Philadelphia’s recently defunct emotive math rockers, Marietta and praised how they, “traded in their clean-cut rhythms and catchy hooks for pulsing feedback, harsh delay, and intricate time signatures.”

With a refined sound, label deals on a physical release and a tentative tour all in the works Parsons says he is heading back to Chicago this weekend to mix and master the record with Dobbins. Despite canceled tours, lineup changes and all other set backs, Mover Shaker is finally poised to release their debut.