Husbands
The Vanguard
Tulsa
Oct. 22, 2023
If you inextricably entangled your young adult emotions with the early 2000s Los Angeles pop rock scene — think Rilo Kiley, Phantom Planet, and Rooney — despite being plopped squarely in the center of the country, then either you are me, or you need to get into Husbands.
Husbands self-describes as “indie, garage, surf, pop, rock, what-have-you” and was founded as a long-distance recording project a decade ago between Danny Davis, then living in Oklahoma City, and Wil Norton, who lived on the East Coast (Norton has since left the band).
Despite Husbands now being based in OKC, Davis’s leanings are completely coastal, both geographically (he has recently been living in Costa Rica when not on tour) and melodically, as in the Beach Boys-esque harmonies that are part of his songwriting signature. At its core, Husbands is about rock band harmony riding in on salt air.
During the band’s recent tour kickoff show in Tulsa, this was presented in a few ways. There was Davis’s lead in three-part vocals with multi-instrumentalist Zach Zeller and bassist Ethan Wilcox. There were twin guitar solos between Davis and Zeller. And there was syncopation, like the call-and-response live performance of “Old Town,” from the band’s new album Cuatro. Davis proclaimed, “I’ve been feeling stressed out,” and a gang vocal called back, “Lay it on me!”
The exchange is a great example of the hurry-up-and-relax ethos that presents in the uptempo of the band’s sadder songs and in the sheer prolificity of Davis as a self-producer. (You have to scroll on Husbands’ Bandcamp music page to see all the releases. More than once.)
There’s also profound technical skill from everyone onstage, all of them departed from their day jobs (what the band’s website calls having “put all their eggs in the Huzz basket”). The delicate nuances of these songs could only be supported by a mindful, thoughtful drummer, which the band has in Alberto Roubert. Zeller, who also plays keys, has a Telecaster tone that vacillated from sounding like the Cure to mimicking a squeaky robot, depending on what the song required.
The squeaks are, on purpose, chuckle-inducing, a common theme for the band whose last record, Full-On Monet, was a reference to the movie Clueless. Each song was a complex pop confection, anthemic and also tongue-in-cheek, that listeners could connect to in myriad ways. On “Face Molt” alone, Davis’s deadpan opening lines recalled both Olivia Rodrigo’s “deja vu” — Davis sang about cell phones while Rodrigo drives to Malibu — and the drudgery of a crawl between two Oklahoma City bars during a self-improvement binge. I guess it isn’t all sand and saltwater.
The crowd at Vanguard had some requests and clear favorites including “Manhorse,” from 2020’s After the Gold Rush Party, with its New Wave choral chant, “Do not interrupt / it’s a process.” The last song headed south to “Mexico,” a bona fide hit based on the crowd response, closing down the show where Husbands belongs: within reaching distance of the ocean. “We could find ourselves a beach house in Mexico,” Davis sang, with much of the fifty-plus crowd singing along. “I’m so down.”
Next for Becky: Vanguard Halloween show ft. Nuns and The Brothers Griiin, October 27
