Dot Dash appear to be the anomaly on this weekend’s Chickfactor shows. WIth the exception of Frankie Rose, Dot Dash is the only band on the bill that has emerged in the past decade. That said, the men of Dot Dash—singer/guitarist Terry Banks, guitarist Bill Crandall, bassist Hunter Bennett and drummer Danny Ingram—have been putting out interesting music for the entirety of the time that Chickfactor has been in print. Banks, in particular has been an indelible power pop presence having appeared in bands like Glo-worm (with Black Tambourine’s Pam Berry), Tree Ford Angst and most recently, Julie Ocean.

Unsurprisingly, Dot Dash sounds like the solid work of people that have been crafting and listening to power pop for years. The songs on last year’s release Spark>Flame>Ember>Ash have some fiery songs like the bass-heavy “Dissolve” and they aren’t afraid of throwing in some dissonance but more often stick to melodic toe tappers like “Learn How to Fly.” They’ll round out tonight’s bill at Artisphere nicely.

We talked to Banks and Bennett about playing unconventional spaces, naming a band after a song title and the quickest turnaround they’ve ever experienced in releasing a record.

Find them online: http://www.facebook.com/dotdashdc

See them next: Tonight at Artisphere for Chickfactor 2012: For the Love of Pop! with Honey Bunch, Frankie Rose and Stevie Jackson

Can you tell me about the small Canadian label that put out your album?

Terry: It’s this really little label called The Beautiful Music and they’ve been around for like, ten years and our record’s like the nineteenth or twentieth. It’s this really small, tiny, little label but they’ve been going for a long time and they’re nice dudes. It’s pretty low-key but that’s alright.

How did you even know about them?

Terry: I played in this other band called The Saturday People a long time ago. It was on the Slumberland label and that guy asked us to do a song for a compilation that he was doing. We never really pursued it just because any time we recorded we did our own stuff, but we sort of stayed in touch. He liked this thing and he put it out like a week after we sent it to him. Usually, labels take forever to do stuff, but he got it and said, “It’ll be out in a week!” I thought, “That can’t be true.” But it was.

I had kind of figured that your appearance on the Chickfactor show was due to Slumberland ties.

Terry: I played in this band called Glo-worm which Pam Berry was the singer in. She and Gail O’Hara were the founders of Chickfactor. So, I know those guys and Gail reached out to our band and offered us a show so we said, “Sure.” This seems like it’s going to be a fun thing to do.

That’s interesting that it’s your current band and not another reformation of a former band.

Hunter: Well, they wanted Tree Ford Angst, right?

Terry: Yeah, Gail asked about Tree Ford Angst which was a jangly pop trio — kind of a Postcard/Orange Juice sort of band, in theory. But those guys live in Richmond and it would’ve just been impossible so we sort of said, “How about this band?” And they said okay, so that was nice. We formed this group about two years ago and it’s been enjoyable, so we keep doing stuff as and when we can.

So, I was watching your video for “Learn How to Fly”. Were you playing at the Quarry House?

Terry: The ones with the sparkly lights is the Quarry House. The other stage is at Montgomery College. We opened for Hugh Cornwell, the guy that was in The Stranglers. It felt like a big pro stage and then Quarry House was a very groovy smaller setup. So, that’s what those two things are. But [The Quarry House shots] looked cooler.

Hunter: Yeah, with the cases of beer stacked up.

Who did the video?

Terry: My daughter. She’s a little kid but she’s into that stuff, so she knocked it out in about twenty minutes.

Have you seen a band play at Artisphere yet?

Terry: I haven’t been there yet and I don’t know anything about it, but it looks nice.

Hunter: Cain and the Sticks played there.

Terry: Have you been there?

Yeah. It’s a museum.

Terry: Well, in February we played at this place called Dunes Gallery, which is, as you would expect, an art gallery. We played with this band from South Carolina called The Explorers’ Club who are a total Beach Boys sound type of thing. They were actually really fun. And that was a gallery and we sort of like, “Oh my god, we’re going to melt the walls” because we don’t mean to be loud, but it just sort of is loud.

Hunter: Danny plays really loudly.

Terry: And I just thought they would just cut us off after two songs.

Hunter: I didn’t think we would even make it through one.

Terry: But it went fine. So, we’ve played in non-traditional spaces before.

Hunter: I’m sure we’ll be the loudest band at this.

Terry: Well, hopefully not. We don’t try to be, but stuff gets loud. Just any combination of two guitars, bass and drums. It’s not a chamber pop thing. But we’re not really loud by design. I hate really loud bands.

What do you prefer to listen to?

Terry: I guess you’d get a different answer from all of us. I love really melodic stuff and I like a lot of bands from days of yore like The Jam, Orange Juice…but I like ‘60s bands like The Byrds. I like Joy Division. But I also like current stuff. I don’t like self-consciously retro stuff, like bands that are like, “Let’s pretend it’s 1966!” I hate that kind of stuff but I do like a lot of music from that era.

Hunter: Well, I like The Jam. Pretty much every bass line I play, I try to rip off from The Jam. I’m listening to Really Red a lot who broke up in 1994. Then on Friday, I saw Guitar Wolf with this band The Transistors from New Zealand. They were one of the best bands I’ve seen in a long time. But they got up and they were sort of strangely dressed and they looked like they were about 19 and I think they are about 19 and the guy was like, “Hi, we’re the Transistors from Christ Church, New Zealand” and they were just awesome. It was relentless. They have the early Black Flag guitar sound. The dude kept doing the Wilco Johnson shooting through his guitar.

Terry: I feel like the other two like a lot of the same stuff. Danny comes from a punk sort of a background — Dischord label stuff early on. Then he played in Swervedriver, the English band, for awhile. Bill likes a lot of the same sort of stuff as we do as well as some sort of more atmospheric stuff. So, we’re on a similar page, I guess.

Are you particularly excited to see anybody on the Chickfactor show?

Terry: I’m excited to see everybody but I knew the Black Tambourine people back in the day and still know them and I’m excited to see them reform and do their thing. Honey Bunch, who are playing the same night we’re playing, is a band we played with once twenty years ago and they were really good. Jeffery does a nice melodic jangle pop thing. Just lots of stuff. I’m interested in all of it.

Hunter: I really like The Lilys. So, I’m particularly excited about that. Those new Frankie Rose songs are pretty good.

How does songwriting work with you? I guess based on the disc you just gave me it looks like Terry writes the songs.

Hunter: Terry writes the songs and then he comes in and he goes, “Guys, I wrote a song!” Then we work from there.

Terry: I mean, I write them, but then these guys drop in and play their own thing. Hunter comes up with a bass line and Bill comes up with the guitar part and Danny does his drums and songs just kind of come in fully formed — beginning, middle, end — but they kind of do their own thing so it ends up being a collaborative thing in that sense, for sure.

Hunter: Terry’s sort of amazingly prolific. You go in spurts where from time to time he’ll be like, “I have three new songs.” Then we’ll work those out for a couple of weeks and then there might be some more. And I amuse myself when he goes through the first time by guessing what chord he’s going to play next.

Terry: Speaking of that, the details are still shaking out but we’re going to make another record. Hopefully, we’re going to record it in May. We’re still finalizing where and all that sort of stuff. But we’re shooting to do it in May and we’d love to get a second album out in 2012. So, we have ten new songs that we’ve been doing live for awhile. So, that’s our next big thing — to get those recorded. Our first record we recorded super super quickly. And this one we’re going to do quickly but maybe not as quickly. We had done it on three Saturday afternoons spread out over a couple of months. Then we didn’t do anything with it for awhile. Then we sent it off to the guy and he was like, “Yeah, I love it. I’ll put it out.” We sort of thought it would take awhile. It didn’t take long at all. So, we’re going to record what will be our second record and then keep our fingers crossed that we can get it out quick but you never know.

Since Dot Dash is the name of a Wire song, it’s really easy to focus on your influences from that era and specifically the influence of that band. Was that intentional?

Terry: If you call yourself that, you know that people are going to go to that. Personally, I would have rather we come up with a name — and it’s my fault, I’m the one who came up with Dot Dash — but other bands like Tree Ford Angst were just made up. It was just, “Oh, I like that sound or that feel.” This one and Julie Ocean, the band before it, I personally just wasn’t coming up with any out of the blue stuff. So it’s like, Plan B, what’s a song title? But then you have to sort of like the name and feel like it could stand on its own. I mean, you wouldn’t name it after some band that you didn’t like. But it’s not intended to be some clue.

Hunter: If we could manage to avoid being called “Jangle Pop” that would be arlight.