The Builders and the Butchers

By Brandon Seifert
Photo by Ilan Laks

Seeing Portland five-piece The Builders and the Butchers for the first time can be a shock. Three men attack acoustic instruments while another two hammer on drums. There’s a knot of fans shoved up in front of the stage, clapping, stomping and singing the back-up parts. The singer puts down his guitar to sing through an old bullhorn, and sometimes leads the band and the crowd outside during the last song, singing gospel all the way.

It’s a striking live show. It’s also a lot of fun. “My roommate compared us to the Andrew W.K. of folk rock,” the band’s singer and guitarist Ryan Sollee says, looking a little sheepish.

The last two months have been big for the band. They played the Doug Fir Lounge at the end of August — their first show headlining a major Portland venue. They have a slot this month at Musicfest NW, and they grudgingly turned down a coveted set at Portland’s premiere festival PDX Pop Now! because not all the members could make it. They’re also about to release a split 10-inch with local chamber pop favorites Loch Lomond. Pretty good for a band that’s just trying to have a good time.

Sollee transplanted to Portland from Anchorage, AK with his rock band The Born Losers in October 2003. Two years later he was looking for a different sound than the Losers’ loud garage rock, and he and Adrienne Hatkin of Portland folk act Autopilot started talking about starting a “funeral music” band. Sollee started writing folk and bluesy songs full of dark imagery and call-and-response, and when he played them for some friends from Alaska, everybody started jamming. “We didn’t really think it was going to be a band,” Sollee says. But a band it was.

The Builders and the Butchers are Sollee, his Born Losers bandmate Paul Seely on bass drum and trumpet, Ray Rude on snare drum, Alex Ellis on bass, and Harvey Tumbleson on mandolin and banjo. Hatkin initially played accordion, but left the group to concentrate on Autopilot in the spring of 2006, although she and violinist Annalisa Tornfelt still sometimes accompany the band. The group got together in September of 2005, played its first show that Halloween, and recorded a demo soon after. But their first release, a self-titled LP, didn’t come out until this March on new Portland label Bladen County Records.

The band’s goal was to be “more than just people playing acoustic music,” Sollee says. Most of the members’ backgrounds were in loud rock ‘n’ roll, and they wanted to apply that live aesthetic to instruments people wouldn’t expect. “In the way that punk rock breaks the audience barrier, we wanted to do the same thing and get people involved,” says Sollee.

The volatile stage show and use of call-and-response to break the ice with the audience was, to some degree, planned. The group’s other forms of audience-involvement seem well-crafted now, but they came about totally haphazardly. The band started handing out instruments to the crowd on a whim at one show, and it worked out well so they kept it. And the show-stopping finale where they leave the stage and take the crowd outside or to another part of the venue, was even more impromptu than that — at the end of one set they played, the band just decided to leave. “We were like, ‘Let’s go!’ and ‘Okay!’” says Sollee.

Not every new bit the band tries works out, and the group’s core concept has changed in the two years it’s been together — The Builders and the Butchers originally planned to be a guerilla band, and they used to perform in the round without microphones or amps until their crowds got too big to hear them. But the willingness to try new things even if they sometimes fail is what’s making them successful.

“Don’t have expectations about anything” is the lesson Sollee says he’s learned. The Builders and the Butchers have shifted seamlessly from militantly-unplugged guerilla band to polished venue headliner because they aren’t attached to ideas of who they are as a band or where it’s going to get them.

“I try to go into every show expecting nobody to show up,” Sollee says. “And it’s always fun.” It is indeed.

www.myspace.com/thebuildersandthebutchers

Catch The Builders and the Butchers headlining Slabtown at Musicfest NW on September 7.