In true indie fashion, South Jersey new prog rockers, The Tea Club, make their art in an attic practice space in a house that guitarist/vocalist brothers, Patrick and Dan McGowan, share with a few friends. The band's independently produced, debut album, General Winter's Secret Museum, received modest worldwide distribution and a resounding thumbs-up from various critical sources when it was released in 2008.
The Tea Club envisions using its as-yet-unnamed second release as a launching pad for the next "touring" phase of its lifecycle. "We've just finished mixing, mastering and pressing the new album. We hope to release it and start touring later in the summer," says Patrick McGowan, a soft-spoken, contemplative man of 26, who bears a striking resemblance to the recently deceased writer, David Foster Wallace.
"It's like a dirty secret, but we're pretty big prog fans," says Patrick, who rattles off a list of influences, which includes Gentle Giant, King Crimson, Soft Machine, Yes, and other several other niche-y, '70s-era prog bands. "Now it's kind of a four letter word, but prog was pretty popular in its day," he says. "My brother and I got into it from our parents."
Patrick explains that it was his dad - whom he describes as a singer-songwriter of estimable, if unrealized, talent - who "first instilled a passion and love for music" in the McGowan brothers. At least initially, that passion found its outlet in the rarified worlds of jazz and classical music, where the brothers gained an appreciation for compositional density and technical boundary pushing. Patrick says that when he made the "logical step of getting into rock music" at around age 16, "prog bands just made more sense to me, personally, than bands like Slayer."
After a few years of tinkering with the guitar and writing and arranging in his spare time, Patrick decided that he would try to pursue music professionally by putting together a band. Patrick's younger brother, Dan, was an obvious first choice for a creative wingman. The McGowan brothers met drummer, Kyle Minnick, at church; they were three longhaired, rock-and-roll kids who didn't quite fit in. Bassist, Becky Osenenko, joined the group about a year ago and has yet to make a full conversion from her punk roots over to the prog rock dark side.
The McGowan brothers are The Tea Club's main songwriting force. "Our lyrical content has a lot of questioning," says Patrick. "The idea of loss of innocence is something we're extremely sensitive to."
Patrick describes sharing an "outsider childhood" with his younger brother, and grappling with heavy, existential questions at an early age. He offers a verse from the new song, "He is Like a Spider," as a way of summing up the world-weary, wistful pessimism that has come to define so much of the band's creative output: "And it turned out that life was exactly the way I hoped it wouldn't be."
Through its music, The Tea Club seeks to give a voice to the downtrodden, disaffected and overlooked of the world. "We see what the prevailing cultural attitude is toward people who have failed and we're dissatisfied with it," says Patrick. "There's definitely a feeling of not being at home here."
The Tea Club incorporates certain Christian themes and symbolism into its lyrics, but resists being pigeonholed as a Christian band. "[Faith] is something we try to be very honest about, but we're too ADD to write about just one topic," says Patrick.
The thematic eclecticism of many of The Tea Club's songs lends itself to the long, meandering format common to the prog genre. The band composes wide-ranging, seven to nine minute arrangements with multiple interludes and melodic transitions. "I love music that is always moving from one island to another," says Patrick. "These are exactly the kinds of songs that don't get much radio play nowadays."
Despite this fact, Patrick remains confident in his band's ability to make a name for itself on the touring circuit. "This band has been through a lot of hardship, he says. "We're going to continue to go forward with this whether anyone helps us or not."
