Hockey - Mind Chaos

There’s plenty to love about Mind Chaos, the debut album from Portland guitar heroes, Hockey. Packed with radio-friendly pop tunes, it frames a band enthrall to folk rock, indie pop and dancefloor-friendly shakedowns. Hitch these influences to a collection of catch-all choruses and guaranteed festival anthems and this Portland four piece have delivered a record seamlessly built to a summer blueprint.
 
“I wanted to write songs that grabbed you immediately,” says singer-songwriter in chief, Benjamin Grubin. “Each one should hit the spot within 10 seconds. We’ve always written music that we liked, rather than music that we thought other people would like. It seems to have paid off so far.”
 
The nuts and bolts of this pop ethic can be located in the bedrooms of Grubin and bass player, Jeremy “Jerm” Reynolds. Having struck up a friendship between lectures at the University of Redlands in 2004, the two bonded through a mutual love of classic lyricists. Bob Dylan was the ice breaker, but there were other unlikely pleasures too, including Talking Heads, C+C Music Factory and hip hop titans, Wu Tang Clan.
 
The result of this union was an interesting creative path that took their early bedroom recordings (“guitars, drum machines and vocals”) to Spokane – the northwest town located near Portland, Oregon. Here, the duo swapped computers for a more traditional recording set up and drafted in guitarist, Brian White and drummer, Anthony Stassi.
 
What followed was a fast track to success. With an armoury of songs and a US tour behind them (completed with a tour van that ran on vegetable oil), the band scored a major label deal with Virgin in 2008, gathered word of mouth acclaim a year later with shows at T in The Park and Glastonbury, and drew comparisons with US luminaries The Strokes and LCD Soundsystem.
 
“We went for it,” says Grubin. “We’d played the student tours where you drove in a van for hours only for three people to show up and watch. After five years of being a band we decided we weren’t going to wait for things to happen to us. We were going to make things happen for us.”
 
Mind Chaos matches this positive work ethic. An effervescent pop tablet, it fizzes with call-to-arms choruses, dirty guitars and club friendly disco beats. There are flashes of pop rock (Too Fake), dance funk (3am Spanish) and the Elton John-style, piano stomp of Preacher. Song Away is a radio smash in waiting; Learn To Lose carries an infectious soul groove. Overall, it’s an eclectic sketch of a band brimming with ideas.
 
Grubin is pretty pleased with it too. “I wanted to give the record some character and a personality that changed with each song,” he says. “I think we’ve done that. We’ve made the album we always wanted to make. Now we want people to dance to it.”

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