“Oh man, it even smells new,” says New Faces drummer Conor Sisk,
taking a whiff of the band’s just-pressed debut album, Two
Years. “Do we get to keep these?”
This is the first time New Faces have gotten to hold a finished copy
of their record. For the next few minutes, the three Port Townsend
teenagers stare at the lyric sheet, flipping from front to back again
and again with wide eyes and excited grins.
“Nico, they spelled your name wrong,” jokes Sisk to the band’s
guitarist/vocalist, Nico Janssen.
“What? Dude, you’re joking. That’d be sad.”
The record—a collection of 11 frenzied new-wave
tracks—is just one of many highlights in New Faces’ 2008. They
kicked off the year by winning Sound Off!, EMP’s annual underage battle
of the bands. (They entered last year’s competition and didn’t even
make the semifinals.) Still riding high from the ego boost, the band
announced they had signed to local label Loveless, making them
labelmates with a band they’ve long admired, the
Shackeltons. Not
a bad run for a bunch of high schoolers. Janssen graduated in the
spring; his bandmates will be seniors this fall.
Instead of taking the usual route of shopping around a demo in hopes
of finding a label to pay for their first recording, New Faces funded
Two Years themselves; the signing to Loveless came afterward.
The title is the amount of time it took to write and record the
record—some of the songs were written when New Faces weren’t
legally old enough to drive. But despite their age, the band play their
intriguing songs with the confidence of rock veterans.
The opening track, “Impulse,” starts with a dark, animalistic bass
line. Then comes a gnarly dance beat beefed up with some bratty,
singalongable whoas and heys. It quickly turns into a catchy anthem
about a fucked-up, confusing relationship—what teenager can’t
identify with that? What human can’t identify with that?
In “Melts Like Ice,” the beat bounces happily along under a bright,
quickly strummed guitar. Janssen’s croon is glaringly reminiscent of
Interpol’s Paul Banks—Janssen is 18, but he has a deep, mature
swagger when he sings: “You don’t move me; you don’t thrill me/It’s too
easy/I don’t want you because you want me/You’re too easy.” The guitar
is playful, jangly, and rough around the edges… it sounds exactly
like the guitar on the Strokes’ infamous 2001 album Is This
It.
For just over 30 minutes (a fine length for a debut), the album
switches back and forth between infectious dance pop and darker rock
moods. Janssen, Sisk, and bassist Kyle Hove wear their inspirations on
their sleeve—they list the Strokes, Franz Ferdinand, Interpol,
and New Order as a few of the bands that have inspired them to make
music in the first place, and Two Years is clearly an homage to
those idols.
It’s common for young musicians to find their own sound by emulating
those who inspire them, and it’s how the New Faces really show their
age.
“You have to be inspired to make your own art,” says Janssen.
“That’s really the only genuine motivation you should have—really
feeling the power of some art and trying to make it your own.”
Of course, that path comes with some risks—if you sound like
your inspirations, even with an element of your own flair, you’re going
to be compared to those sources.
“I feel like bands like Franz Ferdinand and the Strokes, they’ve got
a monopoly on the genre and it can be frustrating,” explains Janssen,
who seemingly hasn’t listened to a lot of music predating his
generation. “On the other hand, they make records that we really love,
and that’s all there is to it.”
He adds, “You can’t just not write something ’cause you’re afraid
it’s going to sound a little bit like someone else. I think that’s
pretty much unavoidable these days. A lot of the press we’ve gotten
mentions the bands that they think we sound like, and that’s fine. We
really loved a lot of records while making our record, and we tried to
interpret them in our own way. But I think how you should evaluate
music is just, ‘Is it good?’ That should be the question: ‘Are they
making good music?'” 
