Meet the Band: The Answer Team

Photo by Dale Heise

Amongst the cacophony of lunchtime chatter at the Dundee Dell on a Sunday, the five members of local post-rock outfit the Answer Team agreed that sharing group meals was a good idea and should become a weekly routine along with other band-related activities.

With a lineup that’s been complete since bassist Dustin Treinien joined in early summer, the members of the all-instrumental quintet have their distinct personalities. The songs usually start in the hands of guitarist Tom McCauley, an intern at Mayor Suttle’s office who also edits the online poetry journal strange-machine.com. Initially, McCauley started the Answer Team with drummer Brandon Bone after the pair’s high school hardcore efforts dissolved. “We’re on the same page, pretty much all the time,” McCauley said in between a barrage of good-natured insults from Bone, who always seems to be joking around. (Bone works at the Web design and marketing firm Phenomblue alongside A-Teams’s second guitarist Jason Bejot, who handles miscellaneous duties for the band like online maintenance and media contact.) Violin player Kaitlyn Filippini may be the closest thing to a vocalist the group has due to the depth and emotion she employs in her playing, which surely comes natural for the professional musician who, when not taking college neuroscience classes, tours regularly with arena acts like the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, Michael Buble and Josh Groban. Treinien is no small part of the overall group equation, either – outside of the band he manages the design firm 1984 Creative, works at CD manufacturing company Media Services and also is a founding member of local metal masters Paria; inside the group he adds counter-melodic bass lines and shares words of advice from his years of experience as a touring musician.

Musically, the group writes atmospheric, all-instrumental music full of rigid dynamics that balance interplay amongst the five musicians, not at all unlike staple groups of the genre Explosions in the Sky and Godspeed You! Black Emperor. It’s the type of music that seems relaxing to listen to at first, but upon paying attention to the subtleties, it washes the listener down a river of colors, sounds and moods, making for a meditative journey within the psyche. (In other words, the music has a more subconscious effect, instead of, say, the straightforward abrasions of a typical Madonna track.)

To date, the Answer Team has recorded only a three-song EP but that’s set to change next year as they enter the studio again to record a debut full-length at the Faint’s Enamel Studios. Next year also will see the group hitting the road for a string of short regional tours. And like most any band that has their act together enough to bring it out of the basement and onto local stages, they dream of one day being financially sound through their  music – no easy feat. But still, we wish them the best of luck.

How long has the group been together and how did it form?
Tom: Well, Brandon and I were in a hardcore band back in high school, called South of No North. In college we kind of shifted from that – I started writing all these songs on my acoustic guitar with weird tunings. We started writing more song-oriented stuff – we used to just write riffs and mash them together. I brought them to (Brandon) and he liked it a lot. We tried to get going for a couple years, but we had a bunch of lineup changes; it was really difficult to find a practice space. But we got really solid last summer, we recorded a three-song EP and (Kaitlyn) came along and really revitalized our band.
Brandon: (Kaitlyn’s violin) give it direction, a lot of clarity, too. It’s like something to write around. Without vocals it’s really easy to get lost with your basic two guitars and a bass and drums.
Kaitlyn: What I did is I came in with these boys in the studio and I actually listened to the songs they gave me. I wrote them out, like I scored it all and I organized it.
Brandon: It made our lives a lot easier because we didn’t have to write as much.

How’d you initially come into contact with the band, Kaitlyn?
Kaitlyn: I found (Brandon) on Facebook. And I was like, “looks familiar,” so I added him. It just so happened that the timing was right. I do a lot of playing, I touched base with other bands before this and I do a lot of contract work for touring and stuff, but this is the first band that actually just fits.
Brandon: It wasn’t intentional either. You were just going to record originally.
Kaitlyn: I had never met them in person before until I met them in the studio. I had Mace
in my purse.
Brandon: We look sketchy, what can I say? I don’t bathe regularly. Sometimes I’m not wearing pants.
Kaityln: I thought Tom was a big jerk because he hated me the first day. He thought I was a singer.
Brandon: And then he heard the violin and he pooed a little.
Tom: I was like, (smugly) “Oh, she’s a violin player. That’s fine, I guess.”
(They all laugh.)

So, what about Jason, then? How’d he come to join the band?
Brandon: Tom and I, he was writing songs and since we didn’t have a second guitar, I was trying to learn the guitar as best I could. So I was writing second guitar parts and I was like, “Man, we should actually get another guitar player so I can play drums again.” I met Jason at the Underwood (Bar) at a random party of a mutual friend. He had gaged ears, so I assumed that he played music somehow.
Jason: (I hadn’t played guitar) in a long time.
Brandon: So, it took you like six months to get back up to speed?
Jason: Yeah, and just to get used to the whole Answer Team paradigm, anyways.

And Dustin?
Brandon: With Tim (Greenup, former bassist) in it we were pretty happy and Tim just happened to have to move and then Dustin joined. We got really close to some hard dates that we didn’t want to back out of. We asked Dustin to see if he wanted to play the first couple shows. He said, “We’ll feel out, but really I think it’d be fun to keep doing this long term so long as it works out.”
Dustin: So far so good. I have no plans on leaving right now.
Kaitlyn: You’ve actually changed a lot of the music. Which is great, I love it.
Dustin: I used a lot of the old parts, but I re-wrote a lot of them, too.
Brandon: It’s taken on a whole new level.

How does the band piece the songs together?
Kaitlyn: I think it took about an entire year to get kind of a good groove with everybody. So now what we do, we just start playing and somehow a song will just come out.
Dustin: It’s kind of jamming.
Kaitlyn: Yeah. It is structured, but it’s not at the same time. But usually Tom starts out with some riff that’s on one chord and all of a sudden he goes somewhere that somehow we all go.

Why did you decide to not use vocals?
Tom: We tried it for a long time. We never had any vocals that could really compliment our music.
Kaitlyn: In a way, I kind of fill in for a singer sometimes with my melodies (on violin).
Tom: Originally, I had all these songs and they had lyrics, but I can’t sing.

What’s the status on a new recording?
Kaitlyn: I think we’re going to record something early next year.
Tom: We’re talking about maybe February to start. Maybe put something out by the summer. From what we recorded last year till now, it’s still along the same lines, but the sound is very much different.
Brandon: It’s more powerful.