Tom Lynch

Brooklyn's The End of the World received heaping handfuls of attention far before its new, debut full-length record, "You're Making It Come Alive," was a sparkle in its collective eye. The band's song "This Little Theater" was featured in Jonathan Demme's 2004 remake of "The Manchurian Candidate," and its first release, the self-titled EP from last year, garnered enthusiastic reviews from AP, Pitchfork and even Rolling Stone, topped by the Village Voice spouting that "`This Little Theater' was probably the best song to come out of Brooklyn last year." How does a band musically respond after only one very small release gets such a positive reaction from mainstream outlets?

"I don't think we thought about it too much from the context of the media," says guitarist Benjamin Smith, of the pressure the band felt while writing and recording the full-length. "We certainly thought about it [in the context of] musical growth. The EP was a really fast thing that we wrote quickly, we didn't have a notion of what it was, really. It's difficult to translate what you read or see with what it means to be successful. I still don't really think I have a gauge of how [the EP] was received. I never really feel I have a grasp of what people are thinking. Our feeling was that we could do a lot better. We thought we had a larger musical statement to make."

The band members originally met in Boston while in college, and eventually moved to New York, in essence just to make a band. "We were in search of, well, whatever in New York," Smith says, "and it was a pretty natural progression. Being friends, it just made sense to start playing music together." Though they come with separate musical influences, there was one common thread. "All of us come from parents who were really into sixties rock," Smith says. "When it came down to playing music, I was still really into my dad's Neil Young records, and it was sort of the same for those guys."

"You're Making It Come Alive"--on Chicago's Flameshovel, which continues to be the most exciting label in the city these days--intrigues from the start, when it becomes abundantly clear that the band is dedicated to being true to its instruments--without much flash or layered overdubbing, the sixties garage rock the group produces sounds precisely like a band playing in a garage. The honesty of the recording is striking--it's not that it sounds bad or anything, it's rather refreshing to hear each singular instrument flow with the others without interruption from unneeded sources (in fact, some scratch vocals that were recorded were even kept for the final product). With the inevitable injection of New York City hipster chic, the band's not entirely that original (and with Stefan Marolachakis' Dylan-esque voice, sounds a bit too close to fellow New Yorkers The Walkmen), but "You're Making It Come Alive" is memorable for both its eagerness to explore space with the guitar parts and hesitancy to resort to the tight-panted dance-a-thon one might expect.

"We wanted it to sound like people playing instruments," Smith says of the record's sound. "We didn't want something so produced that it gets away from being able to imagine a human playing it. We wanted it to sound cohesive, but also imagined as people playing in a room, have a resemblance to being organic, not just a processed thing. Also something, not to be too ambiguous, but something that seemed really direct."

Smith says that, being from New York, the band has to fight perceptions but also embrace the inescapable atmosphere of the place. "People attach a significance to it that may or may not be relevant," he says, "but there's certainly an intensity to living here. There are so many good bands here, we see them and admire them. That's something, a standard to live up to ourselves. It's an inspiration simultaneously." However, the band recorded the album in Michigan, to get away from the bustling city. "Life will always feel like more than you can handle in New York," Smith says. "There's so much stimulus. We wanted to go to a place where the first thing we think about is music when we wake up in the morning."

The band's name may seem off-putting to some and humorous to others, but either way, it's assuredly attention-grabbing. "I never know what quite to say about it," Smith says. "I like that it seems to evoke different things from different people. Some people think it's apocalyptic, some think it's more abstract. We always refer to it as a physical place, too. It's nice that it has those variances."

The End of the World plays November 10 at Subterranean, 2011 West North, (773)278-6600, at 10pm. $8.

(2006-11-07)

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