Despite having formed a quarter of a century ago, and having played any number of basement shows in town, The Van Pelt will make its first-ever club show appearance Friday night at The State House — ”at least as best as I can recall,” said drummer Neil O’Brien. “If anyone has a flier to the contrary, I’d like to see it.”
For a band completely comprised of non-residents, The Van Pelt has deep New Haven roots. Its members have been connected to New Haven’s indie rock scene for decades. And lately, it has written new material here — material that the Elm City will get to hear first.
The group initially formed while its members were attending New York University. It quickly found a home in a 1990s rock scene in which it seemed that every new genre was billed as post-some-other-genre (perhaps most notably, post-punk and, well, post-rock). The Van Pelt’s brief original output — 1995’s Stealing from Our Favorite Thieves and 1997’s Sultans of Sentiment — found the band leaning on certain post-somethings while driving several new ones of its own. Drawing occasional comparisons to other bands with multiple genre labels attached to them, like June of 44 and Karate, The Van Pelt and its contemporaries were tinkering with a more pensive kind of rock ‘n’ roll. They were part of a palpable attempt to prove that amped guitars weren’t just phallic projectors of machismo; they could be used to convey real human emotions. And while the e word (that’d be emo) has become a sensitive topic for indie musicians since then, it’s easy to forget that, before the genre labels and the hype, the endless rock criticism articles and the videos on MTV, there was just music.
By 1998 the Van Pelt’s initial run had come to a close. As the members went their separate ways, drummer Neil O’Brien joined up with New Haven indie-rock royalty — the Butterflies of Love — taking over for a recently departed Mark Mulcahy. The Butterflies of Love then had their own nearly decade-long run.
Then, in 2009, the internet started to rediscover, reappraise and recognize the work of a whole host of largely overlooked ‘90s bands, The Van Pelt got offered a few gigs, and the band jumped at the opportunity.
“We’ve been doing these reunion shows for almost a decade,” said vocalist and guitarist Chris Leo, “for a band that really only existed for four years, you know? So we’ve been doing reunion shows for longer than we were actually a band.”
Don’t expect a nostalgia act, though. According to Leo, when the band first got back together, the urge to write new material was too strong to ignore.
“We could definitely just play our old songs,” Leo said. “We don’t really need to practice them. We know them really well, obviously. But we all know each other so well musically, it’s difficult for us not to write new songs.”
“The problem is none of us live near each other,” he continued. “Two of our members live in Massachusetts — not near each other — and Neil and I live in New Jersey, not near each other. So we have actually been meeting halfway to work.”
That “halfway” just happens to be here, in New Haven.
In 2014, the Van Pelt released what Leo said was intended to be the group’s final album, Imaginary Third.
“Or almost an album,” Leo said. “Eight songs — I guess that’s an album.”
But the story kept going. The band now have about six more completed songs and are preparing for a couple festival dates in Spain, the home of their Catalan record label, La Castanya.
“We want to air [the new songs] out, we want to test them on you guys,” Leo said. “You’ll be our test market, see if they’re ready to play in front of a couple thousand people in Spain. And also…” he paused for a beat, “work toward a full album, we’re so close, we have a bunch of other parts, it’s just that logistics are making it so hard.”
The Van Pelt plays at the State House, 310 State St., on Nov. 2 at 8 p.m. Check the State House’s website here for tickets and more information.
