Character: Promises Promises
by Marc Hirsh

originally published in Amplifier, January-February 2005

When Eric Williams refers to Character’s music as cinematic, he’s not just speaking out of his bottom end. The bass player remembers being a fan of the film scores of Hollywood legends Bernard Herrmann and Elmer Bernstein as a kid and describes the band’s first full-length album, We Also Create False Promises (Fictitious), by saying, “I think the best way to describe it is, it’s music that’s waiting for an image, basically,” before divulging his hope that the band would one day make the jump to the silver screen, or at least to the Dolby speakers on both sides of it.

Williams knows whereof he speaks, having come to Nashville from his native Alabama to attend film school. That sort of lateral thinking extends to the band itself, a four-to-eight-piece collective that swells or contracts as need or availability dictates (a trick they perhaps acquired from guitarist William Tyler, who also plays with the similarly flexible Lambchop). Despite the seeming mismatch of creating trancey, instrumental post-rock drones fitted out with lap steel, theremin, xylophone and electronics while calling the country music capital home, the bandmembers had no trouble finding like-minded musicians. “I think that if it had been another city, we may not have all met each other as easily,” says Williams. “Maybe that is more reflective of being in Nashville, just because there are so many different groups of people that slowly now are all starting to know each other, and we all just kind of use each other for projects.”

For now, the focus is on Character. The band’s first record, 2002’s A Flashing Of Knives And Green Water EP (Set International), got a fair bit of radio play in town and secured them a handful of gigs around the South, most notably at the Mid-Atlantic College Radio Conference (MACRoCK), a South By Southwest-like festival held annually at Virginia’s James Madison University. Produced by Yo La Tengo knob-twiddler Roger Moutenot, False Promises seems likely to raise the band’s profile.

Still, those cinematic inclinations don’t go away quite so easily. While waiting for those opportunities, Williams participates in the dramatic arts in his own way, mentioning the project he just finished and that he’d like to take on the road as Character’s opening act. “It’s hand puppets,” says Williams. “We do an original story once a year on Halloween. This year it was ‘Eddie Van Helsing.’ It’s about, Eddie Van Helsing goes and kills all the former lead singers of Van Halen. Because they’re monsters, basically.”

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