There’s been a big upswing in synthesizer-based music in recent years, and Nebraska is no exception.
The music is called darkwave, goth, new wave, synth wave or a dozen other names associated with the instrument. Lincoln-based duo Vempire has been at the heart of the area’s contribution to that sound. The duo features area music veteran Mikey Elfers, who played in pop-punk band JV Allstars and in recent years performed with THIRST THINGS FIRST and Pure Brown. Lindsey Yoneda is the less experienced and younger member of the pair who is also known for being in Lincoln band Ghostlike.
Vempire released their new album “Everything is Temporary” on Oct. 16. The album represents a growth and confidence in their music. At its core, the album is a happy, synth-dance-pop work with lyrics that betray its sonic mood.
Vempire will celebrate the release of the album with a show at Coven on Friday with Redder Moon, Toilet Rats and Dereck Higgins. On Saturday they will be at Zoo Bar in Lincoln with Hair Person, Ex Lover and Luna River. Yoneda and Elfers talked about the album, finding the right synth sounds, their current attitude and letting loose at shows.
Yoneda and Elfers formed Vempire from just being around the area music scene.
“I don’t even truly remember where we met,” Yoneda mused, “I think It’s kind of one of those music scene things where you just start knowing someone, and you don’t exactly remember when it started right? We both played in bands. I played in Ghostlike, and you were, I don’t know what bands you were playing in at the time. THIRST THINGS FIRST, and I was starting to post some videos of me playing music and singing on the internet, and Mikey said we should start a band.”
They started by making playlists of artists they wanted to sound like and found that they were in a very similar mindset.
“There’s a lot of sweet, I hate the word dark wave,” Elfers said, “you know, newer synth music with dark tones…. We found a lot of similarities in our mixes.
What if we did this? But you sang, like, really pretty instead of like an ogre?”
Another thing Vempire has brought back from the past is the maxi single. In the 1980s and 1990s you could find multiple remixes of a single on vinyl or CD. Vempire has been releasing remixes and collaborations for most of their singles over the past couple of years.
“I think the big start was that we were a brand new band, and we had zero material and that was scary for us, because we hadn’t booked a show yet, and we didn’t have enough songs to play a show,” Elfers explained, “So we wrote and recorded our first little handful of songs, and that’s all we had recorded, and we were excited and eager to put it out. And then what better way to make the album meatier than to get remixes and alternate versions, but that was also just kind of like hijacked by Tommy Rehbein from Toilet Rats (Minneapolis), who was a friend of ours and immediately liked our project and started remixing our music. And when he did that, I think we had kind of a eureka moment, of ‘Oh, we could put out remixes of this type of music, because you can’t do that with THIRST THINGS FIRST or Ghostlike or, you know, the Kiligans.’”
The duo said they were going for a darker vibe on the new album.
“But then, truth be told, the outcome was, I think, a lot poppier than either of us expected it to be. For some reason it is pretty poppy. That attitude kind of stayed strong in the lyrical content and I think, the overall outlook. But the music, I think we were listening to a lot of, well, I was listening to a lot of Tiffany and Madonna, and so what we ended up with were kind of these pop songs that sound pretty bubble gummy until you start paying attention to the lyrics, and then you’re like, ‘God, these guys need help.’”
Elfers added that themes of loss and sadness are present throughout the album.
“We lost a lot of people we care about between this album and the last, and what sucks about losing your peers is that you start kind of looking at your own longevity,” he explained. “I think that kind of fear and sadness dripped into a bunch of the songs. So, there’s kind of a lot of songs thinking about the loss of friends or overcoming addictions and seeing other people not follow suit, and kind of taking their lives.”
The synthesizer sounds on “Everything is Temporary” have noticeably evolved as the duo has continued.
“I’ve always played guitar and drums and bass and stuff, but I’ve never really given a shit about gear because I was super poor, and I just played what I had,” Elfers said. “Lindsey, you played what you had in Ghostlike and like, we’re aware when something sounds horrible. When you download packs of synth shit, you have billions of options. And how do you write a song that way if you don’t even like a snare drum to start with? And so this time around I think we had more of our own opinions on where sounds should go, rather than clicking a pad and we’re like, ‘Oh that sounds sweet, let’s do that.’ I think we pushed the software forward.
“I had this eureka moment, there is this YouTube channel, it’s this nerdy guy that’s in his 60s, he breaks down hits from the 80s, and he rewrites the entire drum part to the song on a LinnDrum, like an old LinnDrum that still works. I was like, ‘So why am I going through thousands of snares and kicks when every song I’ve ever liked has used the same LinnDrum samples?’ And as soon as I realized that, I didn’t have to worry about that anymore, and then we got those samples back from the engineers, and we’re like, ‘Oh, these songs sound bigger and better already.’”
Yoneda was very blunt when asked what she likes to see at Vempire live shows, saying she wants fans to have fun.
“I’d like people to realize that being too cool is lame,” she said. “I just want people to have fun and not take things so seriously, even though it’s kind of ironic as we’re talking about some serious things, but I think that’s part of why we like to make music that sounds happier, is to just not take things too seriously.”