Signature Spokane sound

This weekend’s Volume festival has an ambitious goal: prove to Northwesterners that they should never again pass Spokane on Interstate 90 without stopping. The festival, featuring 80 bands playing eight different venues today and Saturday, seeks to showcase the city’s burgeoning arts scene, which is often lost in the Seattle-Portland-Missoula shuffle.

Few bands embody Spokane’s cultural emergence as well as Terrible Buttons, the seven-piece “horror folk” band formed five years ago by Whitworth students Kent Ueland and Sarah Berenston. The band will play its final show at Volume, ending its career as one of Spokane’s most popular groups. We spoke with Ueland recently about what’s changed in the city since his band formed, what makes Spokane music tick, and what makes him think things will only keep getting better in the years to come.

Q: Your album cover to 2013’s “Runt” shows you all camped out beside a just-cut wheat field. Does the landscape of Eastern Washington influence your music?

A: I’m not sure if it’s the landscape or the culture, but it’s a very different vibe here than in Seattle and that definitely goes into the music. There’s definitely a believability in the despair that isn’t in cities that have better reputations. We do dark music well. Seattle’s got sort of electro-pop thing that’s on the rise and incredibly popular, and we’ve in general as a scene gone the opposite way and gotten darker. There’s a darkness that can’t be ignored and is believable on account of the wasteland that surrounds us.

Q: Is there anything like a Spokane sound?

A: There’s the LA Weekly article going around saying that if you’re not a jam band then just forget Spokane. Yeah, there are good jam bands here, but it’s very strange to me that that has become our reputation because the things that we do well are the farthest from that, like intricate songwriting and complicated arrangements. The darkness is something that is decidedly Spokane.

Q: What that LA Weekly article was really getting at was that not a lot of touring acts come through Spokane, and I think there’s some truth to that …

A: Absolutely.

Q: So it’s the local bands that are going to be topping the bills at a lot of shows. How does that affect what you do?

A: As part of this renaissance, Spokane just opened the best live music venue I’ve every played. I’ve been to the Mississippi and back and I can say the best venue I’ve ever played is here. The Bartlett, which opened in November, it has the best shows, consistently the best shows, it’s just the cream of the crop and the sound is phenomenal and it has already, since November, put us back on the map. Bonnie Prince Billy is coming; the Antlers are coming; Future Islands has played.

Q: Let’s talk about the renaissance you mentioned. You guys have been around five years and I understand that your last show as a band will be at Volume. Over those five years, how have things changed?

A: It was tough going getting started in this town. It’s not as hard now getting going. We put out a record that was produced by and engineered by Ryan Lewis and Macklemore – that was within our first year of being a band, and it still took us two years to get our name into the local alt weekly. We had to fight tooth and nail to get where we are. Now it’s like, you start a band and you play these awesome shows and they make sure you sound good and you can get your foot in the door. It’s just a whole new place.

And other cities have that, but the difference is the self-awareness of all the people who put these things on. People think we’re a piece of … and we work harder because of it and put an emphasis on how local these things are because of it. We book regional talent for all these festivals and that helps … but these are our bread and butter. This is where locals go to play to sold out crowds, and that’s what the whole thing is meant to be about. You won’t see an ad for it that doesn’t have “local” plastered all over it. There’s a certain amount of pride that comes from being the … little brother of the city that thinks it’s the hottest … in the world (Seattle). There’s really something to the underdog appeal.

Things have changed drastically the last few years. I’m glad we got the trial by fire. It made us the band we are and it made it that much better. And we played some shows – there are horror stories that you will not believe. But I like to think those are happening to less and less people in this town.

Q: You and your girlfriend went and busked in Portland and that was the genesis of the band. Then you came back to Spokane. What keeps bands from decamping to Portland and Seattle; what keeps them in Spokane?

A: I would say intelligence. It’s one of those things, if you want to be a road dog, if this is the life you choose and you will not compromise that no matter what law school will accept you, you don’t want to live in those cities. You want to go to those cities, and you want to be sought after in those cities, living there and playing twice a month in some … bar is not the way to do that. (In Spokane), you pay the cheapest possible rent, if you rent at all. You have to live in a place that loves music but ain’t got the price tag attached. And that is Spokane. I get the allure of being in the scene and meeting the people, but these people who think you’ll meet Jack White at a bar and the next thing you know you’re playing Jimmy Fallon, it’s delusional. I live in a cheap city where you can make serious money playing music as a ratio of your income and book those tours and hit that road hard.

There will come a time when people realize that’s not the way to make this your lifeblood. You can be the coolest weekend warrior in the world but you ain’t spending nine months on the road in a nine-piece band paying Seattle rent.

Q: Why are you guys calling it quits?

A: I guess the biggest thing is different levels of dedication. For me this is like the only thing I’ve ever really been good at, and I’ll be doing this 10 years from now, and who knows what that means, if I’ll be just as poor or whatever. There was just some ambitions that weren’t shared, but there’s a lot of side projects already happening. Sarah, the keyboard player and vocalist, is in one of the most popular Spokane bands, Mama Doll. I’m in a country solo project called The Holy Broke, and I just got done cutting a record in Minnesota. There’s exciting stuff happening among the band, it’s just one of those things you should end when you’re on top, as on top as we’ve been. It’s relatively amiable and we’re all brothers and sisters and we’ve been through the wringer and that’s all been together.

It’s a good thing in the end, it is, and I have no delusions about (our) importance to the Spokane scene. This place is built on blood, sweat and beers, and that will continue with or without us. I’m just happy to see where this town goes. I’m happy to be a part of it. It’s been a blessing.