Students in search of sunshine during this period of uncertain weather need look no further than Portland’s The Dimes, which will deliver a warm slice of indiepop to Eugene in each of its three appearances. The band, which comes through Eugene near the beginning of its spring tour of the West Coast, plans to show off its songs to the students, playing today on the University of Oregon campus, and this weekend during Saturday Market, and later Saturday at Sam Bond’s Garage.
Johnny Clay, lead singer and songwriter for the Dimes, is especially excited about playing The Dimes’ new material.
“The cool thing about the new material is we have so much that we just have fun with,” Clay said. “There’s so many combinations in a set we could do where we’d have a great time and I think people would really like it. It’s sort of in experiment mode.”
The Dimes’ willingness to change and experiment is evident in the difference between their first EP, “Atlanta,” and the more recent “The Long Arm Came Down,” which the band released this year. The new EP sounds scaled back compared with the first, which Clay attributed to a few different factors, including the change from five to four members, but emphasized The Dimes’ growing comfort with its identity as a band.
“The reason the new stuff sounds different is it’s a lot more straight up and sincere. It’s centered around the acoustic guitar more, which is definitely the instrument I learned on and I learned to write on,” Clay said. He also cited the move to more story-based songs as a major influence on their lyrical direction, saying, “We’ve definitely had a lot of fun with the song topics, especially the last half-dozen or so. Anything from reading strange articles, AP articles that are in the current news or stories of friends, crazy friends – ‘Catch Me Jumping’ is about a crazy friend who actually jumped off of a Navy ship in the middle of the Persian Gulf.”
The band has taken these new sources of inspiration in stride, and “The Long Arm Came Down” is a more focused, mature record for it. The songs, drawing on influences from the Beatles to fellow Portlanders, exhibit their basis in acoustic guitar openly, but incorporate the rest of the band’s talents as well. This ultimately comes back to the band’s collaborative songwriting and similar thoughts regarding its musical direction, said Ryan Johnston, the Dimes’ bass player.
“The way we’ll start is, Johnny’s at home, he’s doing songwriting, so he’s got an acoustic guitar and a melody and he’s maybe got some words or whatever. So, he puts it, you know, as a demo, brings it to the band and he’s like, ‘OK. This is a song, this is kind of where I’m going with it,’ and pretty much everyone in this band is still in this band because we’re all on the same page musically,” Johnston said. “Everyone’s got their comfort zone as far as playing goes, so Jake (Rahner, the drummer) might do something that everyone’s familiar with, or I might do something that everyone’s familiar with and kind of just start with the basics and then go from there, kind of just groove it out and see how it feels.”
The results fall on the mellower side of indiepop, staying true to pop songwriting conventions but with the melancholy undertones so often associated with acts from the rain-soaked Northwest. Two opportunities to see The Dimes for free leave fans of pop music little reason not to.
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