Chances are you’ve already seen or heard the Robbers on High Street but just don’t know it. The band has been through D.C. a handful of times in the last two years, supporting artists like Fountains of Wayne, The Sleepy Jackson, Ambulance LTD and VHS or Beta. They’ve been the house band on Last Call With Carson Daly and also had songs featured on The Wedding Crashers Soundtrack as well as Six Feet Under and, of course, The OC. The NYC (by way of Poughkeepsie) four piece has received heaps of critical praise for their eclectic sound, which we would describe as Spoon meets Elvis Costello with maybe a dash of Blur thrown in just to get everyone’s attention. The band just started their headlining tour in support of their first full length album, Tree City, and you can catch them Sunday night at Iota in Arlington with openers King of France. Doors are at 8:30 and tickets are $11. In advance of the show, lead singer Ben Trokan was nice enough to answer some of our questions via email.
As a special treat, DCist has a pair of tickets to the show to giveaway to a lucky reader. All you have to do is email us and let us know what one thing in D.C. you’d like to steal and what you’d do with it. The contest is open until 9 a.m. tomorrow morning. We’ll alert the winner via email.
You’re “from New York” but don’t sound like Clap Your Hands Say Yeah or any of their blogger buzz brethren. Please explain. Has this worked for you or against you in the suddenly incestuous NYC scene?
I guess it’s worked for us. People have a tendency to talk about the New York scene as a unified sound when that’s not the case at all. I think the great thing about the recent flux of popular New York bands is that they all sound different from each other. And yes it’s an incestuous music scene and you could play six-degrees of Clap Your Hands, but you could do that in every town. Bands here roll in their own circles and any reference to some sort of unified movement is an illusion created in the media.
Your debut EP sounded a bit different, (perhaps more “indie”) than your full length record. Was this just a natural progression of the band’s sound or a conscious decision to get away from the typical NYC indie band?
It was a conscious decision to do something different from our EP in terms of sound and songs. We saw it as two outlets for two different but cohesive recordings. When we went into record the Fine Lines EP we had half the songs for Tree City written but they didn’t work. So we hung onto them and wrote new ones. The album contains some of our first songs and our most recent songs.
