Piano Their Forte
Andy Lansangan moved to Chicago from Saint Louis on New Year’s Eve 2000, enticed by what he’d heard about the music scene from Cayce Key, a friend from home who was already here. While Lansangan studied drumming at Webster University and the Percussion Institute of Technology in Los Angeles, Key had come in 1994 to learn sound engineering at Columbia College; he ended up playing drums in an art-punk three-piece called the 90 Day Men. He invited Lansangan to come check out a practice, and as he and his bandmates bashed out a jagged postpunk wall of sound, Lansangan began noodling on an electric piano nobody was using. By the end of the practice the trio had become a quartet.
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It’s not the first time a lineup change has radically redirected the band’s aesthetic. The 90 Day Men formed in 1995, when Key and bassist Chandler McWilliams, another Columbia student from Saint Louis, were home for the summer and began writing aggressive post-hardcore songs with guitarist Brian Case. That fall Case came to Chicago to attend DePaul, and the following summer the trio set up a tour with a band from Kansas City called Sevasch, which broke up before the first show. The 90 Day Men went anyway, and Sevasch’s bassist, Robert Lowe, tagged along for the hell of it. “He brought a cornet, even though he didn’t really know how to play it,” says Case. “He started synching into the shows, standing at the back of the stage and playing this cornet. It started with one song, but by the end of the tour he was doing it for the whole set.” When the trip was over, they asked him to join permanently–on cornet. But shortly after he and his horn arrived in Chicago, in early 1997, McWilliams quit. Key went over to the apartment Lowe shared with Case to discuss the band’s next move. “When I walked in the front door Rob was playing, note for note, one of the bass lines from an old song with a big grin on his face,” says Key. “It was understood then that he would be the new bass player.”
The quartet spent most of the next year and a half on the road, reshaping its songs, improvising to incubate new song fragments, and just generally jelling as a live act. By the time they began writing in earnest again, last summer, they’d decided that melody would play a more significant part in their music, a shift that brought Lansangan to the fore. “I was always saying, ‘You can’t do that,’” he says. “Brian would be playing a minor chord and Rob would be playing a B, and I’d tell him he couldn’t do it.”
