Good Compan T
he biggest band from Charleston, S.C. named Company — at least according to a Google search for the phrase “Company band Charleston” — is a nonet featuring two vocalists and a three-part horn section. According to their resume on Gig Masters, a website that enables one to secure “the life of the party,” The Company Band carries a $2 million event-insurance policy, can expand to a 12-piece lineup if the money is right, and can supply a medley of Sam Cooke, Outkast and Van Morrison, if the crowd is into that kind of thing. “The Company Band,” reads their biography, “is putting its own spin on the music industry by giving people a combination of music genres creating delectable sounds the ear can only imagine.” This bit of market research is symptomatic of the way Brian Hannon, the 26-year-old leader of an enthusiastic Charleston indie rock quartet also named Company (or Co. for short), feels about his adopted coastal city: Better known for tourist lures Fort Sumter and Rainbow Row than its legacy of indie rock, it’s not that Charleston is without its own musical past or present. From the blues to beach music, and from the indigenous sounds of the nearby Gullah people to the pervasive misbelief that Hootie & the Blowfish came from Charleston, the place often called the Southeast’s “Holy City” certainly has a tradition of sound. It’s just that most of it has nothing to do with how Hannon’s Company sounds. “Here in South Carolina, most people don’t know about music like that, while Chapel Hill has such a legacy of that. People are already inclined to it,” says Hannon, who moved to Charleston five years ago after a stunted stint at the University of South Carolina. “Some guys here are talented, but they don’t really know about indie rock. They wouldn’t really like to play music with me.” On its two LPs and debut EP, Company embraces the most affable bits of the core comprising what’s historically considered “indie rock.” Company can twinkle like The Go-Betweens and sprawl like My Morning Jacket, slink like Built to Spill and smile wide and wink narrow like The Shins. Their latest, Dear America, even ends with a requisitely brooding atmospheric tune called “Dreams.” Like exit music for a college radio segment, the six-minute song trusses images of isolation 20 | company
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Photo by Brandon Fish
and anxiety to string-girded rises. “In dreams/ I’m right there with you/ In dreams/ I’m smiling at your doorway,” Hannon entreats at the song’s apogee, standing proudly not at a doorway but at a three-avenue intersection of Weezer, Explosions in the Sky and Red House Painters. In interviews (found, of course, after wading through a litany of pages about Charleston’s other Company), Hannon has long worn the classification of indie rock as a badge of honor, a strange distinction within a wide genre built and maintained mostly by musicians who regard such descriptors and tags as anathema. In 2010, however, Charleston City Paper ran a short story about Company ahead of a Friday night gig. Their debut EP was due soon on blues-and-buzzband syndicate Fat Possum. In less than 600 words, the piece used the adjective “indie” six times, punned on Guided by Voices with the photo caption, and gave Hannon room to ruminate on his band’s place in the wider cultural context of rock & roll: “I would still call my music indie rock. There’s definitely a distinguishing point between what indie rock technically means and how people use the term to define a sound.” Ahead of the release of Dear America, Company’s earnest and wide-eyed second LP for Brooklyn imprint Exit Stencil earlier this year, Shuffle’s Jordan Lawrence queried Hannon about the threads of indie rock that the album ties together. “Thank you so much!” he began the answer. “I’ve always been drawn to indie rock. It’s a lifelong obsession.” Hannon admits now that he might have overstated the length of his interest in indie rock. He actually studied jazz in his Greenville, S.C., high school, playing guitar alongside kids who were preparing to head to Berklee College of Music and The Juilliard School. He came to understand the language of composition and performance through his jazz studies, but he also to came realize that this wasn’t what he’d spend his life doing. The jazz and classical lifers, he found, were just too good and too devoted. Luckily, he did find indie rock. When Hannon was 17, he and a few friends took a road trip to Boston. He’d been spending time on Amazon. com, clicking from one band to another, trying to find a new sound. In Boston, he recognized a name on a concert bill from his research — Yo La Tengo, the indie rock co-architects, were in town from New Jersey