Thoreau was onto something when Walden implored that we should “simplify, simplify.” In an age where bands augment their growls and moans with countless bleeps and blips on top of random samples, the Kingsbury Manx are reminiscent of the child who prefers playing with the Christmas wrapping paper, rather than the screeching sirens of the shiny new toy firetruck. It’s aesthetic demonstrated on both of band’s releases, 1999’s eponymous debut and last fall’s Let You Down, both on Chicago indie Overcoat.
With these modest trappings — guitar, bass, drums, synthesizer — this Chapel Hill quartet makes thoughtful, harmony-heavy music occasionally augmented with pedal-steel swoops or plaintive cello that has people talking, trying to figure out the secret behind such sparkling simplicity, and creating a myth in the process.
“We never get anything really together before we go into the studio,” says drummer Ryan Richardson. “Most of it gets written on the spot. I think it’s a function of our all having known each other for so long … somehow our personalities always come back to the same thing. We didn’t start out with any kind of philosophy, this is just all we could come up with.”
The group, which also includes bassist Scott Myers and guitarists Kenneth Stephenson and Bill Taylor, grew up together, playing music in one formation or another, and decided to make an album after completing college. Because they were young unknowns who rarely gigged, they were tagged early in the game as “mysterious,” a musical version of Sasquatch, emerging every so often to play a mesmerizing set only to disappear into the woods again.
“There wasn’t anything to know about us in the first place,” says Richardson. “We were just a bunch of guys who had just finished college and made a record. I can’t say that it hurt, in some ways it worked out for us, but it was never deliberate. Well, kind of deliberate.”
This article appears in March 15 • 2002.