The Catbirds are, from left, Dinty Child, Chandler Travis, Rikki Bates and Steve Wood
By RACHAEL DEVANEY
Eastham native Chandler Travis has been creating bands and original music for years. But he says his latest project — the Catbirds — is a band that allows him to play his rock ‘n’ roll “louder and rougher” than ever before.
A CD release party for “Catbirds Say Yeah” will be held Friday at The Beachcomber in Wellfleet; Travis calls the venue the perfect place “to make a loud racket.”
“Its getting hard to find a place to blast on the Cape,” Travis says in a phone interview. “There are so many bars that are really restaurants … and our music just isn’t designed to be played at low volume.”
The band, formed in 2010, is composed of Travis on bass, baritone guitar and vox; Rikki Bates, dubbed “the drummer in a dress”; Dinty Child on drums, guitar, mandocello, accordion and vox; and Steve Wood on guitar and vox. All of the band members have played in Travis’ other bands — The Casuals, Chandler Travis Philharmonic and Chandler Three-O. But Travis says Catbird members wanted to use R&B and rock ‘n’ roll to “fight the war on boring” and get their fans “moving again.”
“We wanted to play real music and something different,” Travis says. “We all have different bands that we are doing, but the Catbirds scratch the same itch for all of us — and that’s noise — and I need that itch scratched every now and then.”
So with that goal in mind, the quartet converged and in 2011 released the EP “Viborate.” Travis says the recording sessions for the EP amounted to enough material for their current album release.
“We had all four guys in the studio blasting away. I think we recorded 20 songs in two days. We play with voracity (throughout the album) and people dig it, and we just love the music on that album.”
With back-to-back shows during the summer season and an upcoming performance and CD release party at the Knitting Factory in Brooklyn, Travis says the Catbirds will “be under foot constantly” during the fall music season — locally and beyond.
“The climate is different, and it’s tough for noisy bands, but we will persevere; we usually do,” he says. “The Catbirds is ‘Dig in and rock’ pretty much, and it’s fun doing that — we just love the music and we are all music life-ers you know?”
If you go:
Who: The Catbirds.
When: 10 p.m. Friday.
Where: The Beachcomber, 1120 Cahoon Hollow Road, Wellfleet.
Tickets: $10. Information: 508-349-6055 or www.thebeachcomber.com.