Reports
By Meredith Turits
Photo by Patrick Piasecki

Martin Pavlinic is too smart to be a rock star. Sometimes it’s easiest to kick back, let the music and the lifestyle — whatever it may be — take the band where it will. There are blinding stage lights, blaring PA systems, endless road trips and the occasional bout of sex, drugs and whatever else is on tap. But Pavlinic — well, he’s too busy being focused, eloquent and grounded to be enveloped in the chaotic underpinnings of such instability. “We’re just passionate about playing and making songs,” he says succinctly, perhaps understanding his constantly epigrammatic expressions.

The 28-year-old Pavlinic on guitar and vocals and his bass and voice counterpart, Ben Macri, are the nucleus of Boston’s Reports. They’re the band’s guts, its heart, and for right now, essentially every organ of its infrastructure. As the only two consistent members of a cast of fleeting musicians, Pavlinic and Macri’s seven-year collaboration, both as friends and musicians, anchors their desire to create music together, outstripping all of those who have had to move on from Reports, or can only offer a temporary presence in the band’s endeavors.

Reports began in 2004 as Pavlinic’s brainchild when a couple of his friends — Johnny Allen and Pants Yell!’s Sterling Bryant — decided to see what they could create.
“My previous band, The Autumn Rhythm, had broken up that summer and the other band I played in, Soltero, had moved back to being a solo project for Tim, the leader. I was itching for something to do, music to make, so it started off as a sort of jam session,” Pavlinic explains.

By the end of the year, the band had enough material to squeeze out a demo at WMBR. A few months later, beginning to play shows, Reports tracked a song for a split 7-inch with friends Carlisle Sound.

“From there things moved briskly,” Pavlinic recounts. Around the time of the 7-inch release, Reports became keyed into a “two-guitar attack” — the ideal enrichment of their sonic profile. After a little more line-up shifting, the band added Allen’s younger brother, Thomas, to play guitar.

The summer of 2005 then cued Bryant’s departure, so Reports added Macri, Pavlinic’s ex-Soltero bandmate, on bass. The four-piece line-up lasted slightly under a year — Reports’ longest-running configuration, Pavlinic explains. They took the band to Chicago and back in May 2006, where they laid down the framework for a full-length. However, the Allens departed in the summer to work more seriously with their other projects.

“With some pretty fiery demos and no band on our hands, Ben and I decided that we would rebuild those demos into an album and instead of finding permanent replacements for the Allen brothers, we would just mine our talented pool of musician friends with revolving line-ups from show to show,” Pavlinic says.

Fast-forward to May 2007, which brought the release of Mosquito Nets. The effervescent, warm full-length, built from the momentum of “brisk” demos and revolving line-ups (which included faces from Keys To The Streets Of Fear, Hallelujah The Hills and Clickers), finally saw life on vinyl with Pavlinic’s own imprint, The Paper Cities.
Pavlinic and Farhad Ebrahimi (of Night Rally), with whom the band recorded and mixed, took almost a year to bring Reports’ original recordings to fruition, rebuilding the tracks piece by piece. “We added a lot of tape echo to just about everything, re-amped drums and vocals, and basically spent months mixing, about two to three long days a month, until we came to something we liked,” he adds. “We [wanted] to be able to get in and hash out details when appropriate, but also [have] the freedom to just quickly throw songs on tape and call it ‘it,’ and figure out what will constitute a record later.”

As Mosquito Nets picks up speed, exercising rock star prowess isn’t at the top of the list for Pavlinic and Macri. “The shuffling members experiment was hugely educational and a lot of fun, but also somewhat stressful, as we needed to figure out who Reports even was for each show,” says Pavlinic. “As new material starts popping up, Ben and I want a more steady line-up that we can hash the songs out with, and have a band where everyone can really devote themselves to it and work to make it grow.”
Everything else is about simply keeping it intelligent and dynamic — exactly like Pavlinic and Macri.

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