The Sixth Man

[June 17th, 2009]

Every live show by the Builders and the Butchers is an exercise in faith. The band counts on its audience to rise and take over—with hollers and the percussive instruments the band members pass around—where the songs demand it. And the crowd counts on the Builders to deliver something strong enough to unlock their bodies and voice boxes.

Here on the Builders’ Portland home turf, both sides of this agreement know its terms. When the band’s dark folk-blues builds to full rock locomotion, a Builders show starts looking like a big tent revival. In a small room (the group cut its teeth at venues like Valentine’s and Mississippi Pizza), the entire crowd shakes, shimmies, claps and screams; they stop just short of speaking in tongues. The band returns the favor with sweat and bombast, even if the latter has been toned down a touch since the group’s 2005 inception—it’s rarer these days for the Builders to unplug and lead an audience out a club’s front doors and into the pouring rain.

All this spectacle feels loose and unpredictable from the middle of the crowd, but the Builders and the Butchers is a well-honed act. In contrast to Alaskan transplant and Builders frontman Ryan Sollee’s old hardcore outfit the Born Losers, the Builders and the Butchers were built with a laser-specific aesthetic in mind: coal-dark Americana. It’s a sound the group literally street-tested—busking around Portland—to perfection. Sollee became the head of the snake; a wobbly voiced, fire-and-brimstone preacher entirely preoccupied with death. It didn’t take long for crowds to fill out the choir.

“In a way it’s nice because you can focus on that in your writing,” Sollee says of the funeral-folk theme. “But in another way it’s really hard because you don’t want all the songs to be about the same thing. You have to find ways to re-thread the needle.”

The band’s eager crowds, whom Sollee calls “the sixth member of the band,” can provide another songwriting challenge. “As an artist, it’s a hard line to toe of staying totally true to what you want to do and not alienating the audience,” he says. Not alienating the Builders’ crowds means keeping things energetic and sticking to the script: A word cloud of the Builders’ frequently used lyrics would reveal a handful of earthy nouns—bones, dirt, hands, blood, water, roots—and avoid any mention of technology or, for the most part, tenderness. One wonders where Sollee, who’s humble and slightly dismayed by a running tape recorder in person, keeps all his love songs. The closest thing to a ballad on the band’s forthcoming second full-length, Salvation is a Deep Dark Well, is “The Wind Has Come,” a tune with a cuddly chorus of “And everything fades to black.”

That’s not to say the Builders and the Butchers’ music is devoid of feeling. The group’s stark 2007 self-titled debut utilizes a chorus of alcohol-warmed friends to add life to Sollee’s rants, and on Salvation is a Deep Dark Well, the warmer aspects of the Builders’ sound seem warmer yet. Decemberists guitarist Chris Funk, who produced the album, was intent on recording the record quickly (the core band had about five days to lay down tracks) and layering the Builders’ sound heavily with contributions from over 30 special guests. The result is more a wave than a tornado: The accordion chords of “Hands Like Roots” mingle with hyperactive cellos and an encroaching army of finger-picked guitar and banjo that matches Sollee’s organic warble.

Even Salvation’s lyrics, as unflinchingly dark as they tend to be, have a life-affirming quality. Though Sollee elicits images of nature at its most cruel and humanity at its darkest, we find ourselves singing along, the very act of which feels like a rejection of the songwriter’s thesis.

By “we,” of course, I mean Portland, which always sings along. With the exception of a few favorite cities, no one’s quite sure what to expect as the group embarks on its first national headlining tour this week. There will likely be good crowds and bad. It’s when there isn’t a crowd at all that things get ugly. “Those shows suck. They suck so bad,” he says with a laugh. “You just play the songs and pretend like you’re having a good time. But then that show ends and there’s another one the next night.” Hopefully in a town with an eager choir.