The Slaps

Photo by Ky Vollmar

The Slaps are the Midwest's biggest smile. Real sharp and kind-like, sweet with tobacco and cola. They’re young and they possess a Golden Corral appetite for their craft and its explorations. The Slaps truly don’t consider things that might attach to limits. And for that they can fly.

The Slap boys; Rand Kelly (gtr), Ramsey Bell (bass), and Josh Resing (drums) that is, come from many places and they take and leave many parts of themselves along the way. From Kentucky to Chicago and back, with some even laying stead in Atlanta. That makes them local boys in my book, at least till that lease runs out in October. There’s a perfect blend of Midwest stock and southern charm to The Slaps. The music started some point a ways back and it doesn’t ever stop. From pop-adjacent indie to post punk with all the starts and stops to life-considering journeys of frozen still balladry: The Slaps are fishing for every human emotion, attempting to build a lodge and sweat it out of ya then and there. The music is now growing new limbs with far reaches in improvisation and avant-garde fencing. And that’s all there is to it, a world of opportunities Slapping like waves against the napes of three imaginations. Hear it come crashing down.

The Slaps joined great friends Lunar Vacation for the last of their two shows of 2022. 'Twas a great double feature run at The Masquerade. Both sets were incendiary, and it’s times like these that I miss from times like now.

The Slaps boyos were nice enough to gather after the shows for a little bull-shoot. We talked about gardens and bodies and mourning and the military. About what the audience is owed and the blood of Mick Jagger. Borat would say it was very nice. This interview was very prophetic. Things kept being right on track. There was some telepathy going on. It was a real good jam. Made us all real giddy.

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I wanna talk about this almost militant dedication to craft y’all have when it comes to rehearsals and sonic exploration. Where did this stem from?

Kelly: Josh comes from a practiced, thing.

Resing: Militant. Militant for sure. I come from drum lines, which is military. When we practice, I have been conditioned to approach it in that way. It’s serious, but in the same stroke the music can be silly.

Kelly: It matters that the song is performed correctly. Even though we do a fair amount of improvisation, it’s good to project the song how it sounds in your head and get as close to that as you can.

Do you find it all sounds the same in your heads from the beginning or do you have to work to find a common path?

Bell: It’s never graspable, but it’s never a let down.

Kelly: We do compromise. Just because when we play together, that’s not just three frequencies, but three instruments playing all these frequencies that are colliding. Something that you never expected to hear is gonna happen in that space, physically. We work on songs in hundreds of different ways.

Bell: I feel that our practices have been less like: “Let’s nail this song”. We practice more with writing, jamming different structures, seeing what works, and then playing that a few times to lock it in. I feel like our practices are more like a show. It’s definitely not intense.

How are slaps songs a different body from the bodies who create them?

Resing: I was actually talking to my parents a little bit about this. And something I didn’t come through on was this continuous idea of disassociation in our generation. Which is that you can still be yourself without being completely on track with your history. That’s liberation within our age group, writing songs that aren’t necessarily you, but they live within a different space. Because if you look at things as a single root coming from a tree, you can have different branches and stuff, but fuck, maybe I’ll just grow a different plant. It’s more about a garden than it is one rose bush.

Bell: With the songs being their own entities, for me there will be a demo, and then we’ll all try and play it and it’ll inherently change be that now there’s two other parts. Or the whole feeling of the song will change. Like the last song we played tonight. There’s a transition period of months or years where you know it’s not right and you’re hunting for the right way to do it. In that way the song feels like it’s own thing and you’re trying to crack the code of what it actually is.

Resing: The essence.

Do you think the essence is something that is always there? Before the song has even been conceived?

Resing: It’s already alive. We’re giving it a full life. I think that’s the truth. A lot of times a song gets invented and you wanna make sure it runs its course. And that’s kind of our job. I have a verse that I like. I have a structure of music that I like. Now how do I make it live? Our job is to make it live over a period time. Our general progress comes from time and patience. Honestly there haven’t been a lot of songs where we sit down and go “This is what we’re doing”. It hasn’t happened honestly.

Kelly: It’s a timestamp really. The song is a place you were feeling in the moment, and even though you’re still playing those songs, you may not feel that way anymore. It doesn’t have to be part of you anymore necessarily. Everyone changes every day, every second.

Do you ever find yourself mourning past iterations or decisions you’ve made sonically?

Resing: For a fact. I sing songs and I’m like: “I don’t feel that way anymore”. But I know the crowd may feel that way. That’s when songs have a life outside of us.

Kelly: I know Josh does. Because people wanna hear “Being Around” all the time. Maybe it’s not for me to speak of lyrically. But I just know that we can’t reach for that energy. Everyone wants to hear “Being Around” because it’s a great song, but that’s a lot of emotional effort and stuff you gotta dig up. You can try to look at it objectively, but that’s hard to do as an artist. Perhaps you have to relive some parts.

Does any part of you feel like you owe it to the crowd to relive these certain things for the sake of playing the song to them? Even if it’s painful for you?

Bell: We talk about that a lot. Like what is the audience owed? When people yell “Oh we wanna hear this song” do we owe it to them? They paid to be here. They paid to see us. We wanna play new songs obviously, because it’s fun and exciting to still try and work them out. Sometimes it feels good, even if we don’t wanna do it, to play the songs they wanna hear. But sometimes if it’s not there, then we’re dead on stage.

Kelly: I think that’s how you claim agency as an artist. It’s about balancing pleasing the fans that have supported you and taking charge and trying something new. Every band has to play a song live for the first time, try to break that ice. That’s how you get better as a band. And sometimes it doesn’t hit. It could not hit in Atlanta and then we go play it in Utah and people go off. It’s risky.

Bell: It’s also a unique position we’re in because when these old songs that are popular and people really like came out, we were touring and playing them live all the time. And now we’ll tour a bunch and we have twenty new songs. And damn, you shoulda seen us three years ago if you wanted to hear that song. Which is no fault to them, they probably didn’t know about us three years ago. But we did play those songs a bunch. In that sense it feels like we laid our ground work on it and those people got to experience it. But I always wonder about those legacy bands like The Rolling Stones, like how many times are those people going to see The Rolling Stones play the same set? Obviously a bunch. I mean I wouldn’t really wanna see a band play the same set two years apart.

Resing: If you see Journey and they don’t play “Don’t Stop Believing” did you really see Journey? That’s the culture we live in.

Kelly: If you see Buckcherry and they don’t play “Crazy Bitch” did you really see Buckcherry?

Now that Charlie Watts is dead are you really seeing The Stones?

Kelly: And Mick Jagger’s had his blood fully replaced.

Bell: but I think it’s cool with The Dead, those songs always lived.

Kelly: And you saw it because it was different every night.

Resing: They set it up like that. They had the foresight.

Kelly: I think that’s what it’s all about. They planter the perennials dude.

Bell: I think you just gotta hope people are excited about the band in its current state and what they’re playing live. If they get to see the song that they really like live, that’s special, but hopefully they’re really excited about seeing anything live. Like us as artists and not as a song.

Kelly: We’re not a machine.

Photo by Asa Harding