Newcity Chicago: Urbanites
Published by: Newcity Chicago
Date: February 19, 2009
Format: Web (www.music.newcity.com)
Type: Music Feature
Urban Legend: Indiana’s Urbanites in the “Electric City”
A typical night out in Northwest Indiana may lead you to some bar called Franco’s or Growlers where smoking is still legal indoors and bottles of Miller Lite are cheap. Most times, there is a game of Cornhole set up somewhere on an outside patio, regardless of the weather. There is usually a steady stream of people who look like the people who you hated in high school, still tanning and wearing polo shirts from Hollister and pre-worn Corona ball caps. If you are lucky there may be some cover band butchering Lit’s “My Own Worst Enemy.” Sometimes, on the rare occasion amidst all of this, you might come across some poor band trying to play original music to those ungrateful people who only came out to hear some butchered Lit.
To Steven Burkholder, this did not seem like the way to get his band noticed. Urbanites, while from that same Northwest region of Indiana, have been trying to distance themselves from that scene. “We want to do things that benefit us, opposed to hold us back. Playing shows in Indiana at the bar and grill or whatever, that really doesn’t pay off,” Burkholder says. Instead, they’ve been playing shows at venues like Metro and Double Door and will be heading down to SXSW next month to play a series of showcases.
With a sound that is much more fitting for a room like Metro or a stage in Texas in front of industry heavy hitters than a suburban bar in Indiana, Urbanites has made the right decision. The band’s debut EP, “A Ghost in the Electric City,” blends commercial sensibility with simple, straightforward rock songs. In “Say What You Want,” the standout track on the recording, Burkholder’s vocal arrangement is playful and repetitive, and the instruments are given room to breathe, not bogged down with over-production.
Although the band is making the trip to Austin to play a festival that most bands view as an audition for many of the people who matter in the music industry, Burkholder is taking it in stride. “First and foremost [our goals are] making the best music that we can make and playing great shows,” he says. “We feel that if we continue to make the best music we can make and play the best shows we can play, then what needs to work out will.”
In the mean time, Urbanites is busy continuing to write more material for an upcoming release. “We learned a lot,” says Burkholder on the process of independently releasing “A Ghost in the Electric City.” “We learned a lot of things we’re happy with and we learned a lot of things that we don’t ever want to do again.” But regarding the new material compared to the band’s current EP, “It’ll be better, for sure. We’ll try to take it to the next level.”