The Ultrasounds, an Ann Arbor band that played at the Blind Pig last Saturday, said people often think their name represents a pro-life sentiment.
“I came up with the name and made the logo, this baby fetus with a guitar, and people often think we’re pro life,” said Patrick Betzold, who handles guitar and theremin for the band.
“It’s really awkward,” Sara Griffin, the band’s drummer and vocalist, said.
“We aren’t pro life,” said vocalist, keyboardist and bassist Christopher Smith, also a senior at EMU studying music. “People think we’re Christian rockers and we’re like, ‘No, we aren’t.’ It’s a baby playing guitar. We’re not a political band. We don’t have any music about abortion.”
The three band members are actually tight-knit and good at rocking live. Their show Saturday night was vibrant, classy and a little bit eccentric, with all three dressed in vintage-looking suits — a very professional approach.
And the approach they take to their music isn’t far off — professional, but also collaborative.
“I think that one thing that characterizes us and our song-writing and makes it fun to be in The Ultrasounds is that we’ll have songs, like for instance Sara’s new song,” Betzold said. “It’s just a normal progression, like a pop-rocker, more straight forward, but then we also have songs that have more complicated chords or more obscure progressions.”
“The best part is that there’s a big variety because we all write,” he said. “I’ll write all the parts and then we’ll rearrange it, and then Sara will kind of take that and mold it into her drum parts and Pat’ll take ideas and mold it to one he’s already got.”
Smith, who is studying music at EMU, said he has found excellent support in two of his teachers.
“I’m a jazz nerd,” he said. “That’s what I do at EMU. We don’t have a major for it yet, so I’m a music major. But I take the jazz combo and jazz ensemble classes with Mark Pappas, who was here tonight. And then there’s Joel Schoenhals who teaches piano. Both of them are examples of faculty excellence at Eastern.”
The Ultrasounds’ first album, “The Way Things Were,” consists mostly of a unique mix of Betzold’s rock and blues, Griffin’s more indie style, which the other two band-mates said reminds them of The Cranberries, and Smith’s jazz influence. They also said they sound like Kings of Leon before they were famous, The Strokes, The White Stripes and Eliot Smith, and fans tell them no two of their songs sound alike.
The band is currently working on recording their second, yet-to-be-titled album at Wiard’s Orchard outside Ypsilanti with Brandon Wiard, owner of Pretty Suite Recording.
“We’re recording in a freezer,” Betzold said.
Smith said: “The freezer has these huge metal doors. And so the doors close and obviously if you were in there and the doors close on you that’d be fucking scary, so they have a big sticker on both the doors that says, ‘You are not locked in!’”
“We’ve been working on [the new album] since March,” Griffin said.
The band will have a CD preview on the day before Thanksgiving, Nov. 24, at the Heidelberg in Ann Arbor.
Their next show is scheduled for Friday, Nov. 6, at the Elbow Room in Ypsilanti.
