There are holes in Ryan Woodring’s jacket where pockets should be. Brown leather, creased and beaten to hell, the jacket is completely worn through after years of standing with his hands in his pockets, nodding along at concerts. Now, though, Woodring will have to take off the jacket as he begins having concerts of his own.
Woodring is one half of Pittsburgh-based Alternative Indie outfit The Wrong Airport, along with bandmate Patrick Torrez. Today, October 1, the duo will officially, independently release their first album, Arrivals and Departures, on via their website, http://thewrongairport.bandcamp.com/ (you can purchase the digital album Radiohead-style, for as much or as little as you like; hard copies are $8).
Arrivals and Departures is the first release from Woodring and Torrez. The two met while attending Carnegie Mellon University, where they graduated with Art degrees (Woodring’s painting “The Cargo Cult” is on the cover of Arrivals and Departures). Though the two were both interested in making music throughout college, they didn’t actually collaborate until their senior year when they wrote just one song together. But they haven’t stopped writing since.
As a two-person band, Woodring and Torrez share an equal responsibility for creating The Wrong Airport’s take on the Alternative Indie genre, combining the genre’s own elements with those of Shoegaze, Lo-Fi, and even Electronica to produce a richly layered sound. The Wrong Airport manages to intelligently blend influences like The Police, Explosions in the Sky, and The Promise Ring, among others, into a unique cocktail that is simultaneously plaintive, crashing, somber and pulsating. “Despite our beat-ridden songs, we are probably more influenced by rockers of the ‘90s and beyond,” Woodring says. “Because of these influences, we try to write songs …that take the listener into parts both loud and soft, fast and slow. We like sincere writing and try not to be too self-reflexive.” These details are especially audible in Arrivals and Departures tracks “Highway” and “Build It Up to Blow It Up.”
In addition to their influences, a large part of The Wrong Airport’s sound is looping, which the band uses to record their beats. “Our more electronic songs use a mixture of pre-recorded beats that often derive from beatboxing mixed with looped live samples of beatboxing, humming, etc.,” says Woodring who, as the group’s beatboxer, produces wonderfully sandpapery and thumping beats. The two also play several instruments at once, while incorporating electronic sounds into their work. In addition to beatboxing, Woodring plays bass guitar and sings “while also pushing buttons on our midi-keyboard, kicking the bassdrum and controlling the loop pedal.” Torrez is the band’s guitarist and keyboardist, who “has a heavier hand in the midi loops…along with providing vocal harmonies and other sounds and hitting [the] electronic drum set.” Thankfully, though, the group’s more technical aspects get lost in the smoothness of the sounds, leaving the listener wondering how there really are only two people in the band.
When they’re not the only two people in The Wrong Airport, Torrez and Woodring both work at Carnegie Mellon University, Torrez in the Tepper School of Business and Woodring as an animator in the School of Art. The two are also housemates who “like to go to Giant Eagle [a supermarket in Pittsburgh] and make epic Thai and Mexican dinners.”
As Woodring and Torrez meander on their own life paths, their music reflects this, ringing of honest, beautifully uncertain melancholia: the sound of moving forward in the world without knowing where to go next. Very much like getting lost in The Wrong Airport.
What’s Next: The Wrong Airport are planning a summer 2011 tour across the U.S. In the meantime, they continue to perform all across the greater Pittsburgh area.