It wasn't long after I first moved to the great
state of Kansas that I realized nearly everyone had a
Kansas story. Not the "I was once in a tornado in
Dodge City" variety, either -- I mean
once-removed tales, such as "my dad played drums
with Kerry Livgren" or "my aunt dated David
Hope in high school." Even now, some 25 years
after the eponymous group from the Sunflower State
peaked in its classic-rock career, Kansas still finds
a way to influence the region's young musicians.
Take Topeka's The Billions, for example.
What started as an innocuous meeting between
churchgoers (Livgren and Mr. and Mrs. Billen) has
blossomed into a prosperous relationship between
Livgren and the Billens boys. "He's really like
an uncle to us," says Dan Billen, who plays bass,
guitar and keys and sings.
If Livgren were the boys' uncle, naturally, he'd be
the cool one they never saw. Instead, he's just a nice
multiplatinum artist living out his salad days on his
ranch outside Topeka who liked the Billen brothers'
work enough to let them record at his private studio.
This arrangement at first produced discs that offered
a few memorable moments, but the studio knowledge the
group accumulated eventually resulted in Quiet As
It's Kept, one of the most solid local releases of
the past year. However, despite Livgren's presence as
the band's mentor, the group's swirling guitar rock
never wanders into progressive-rock territory, and
Billen's lyrics never incorporate unicorns, crystals
or the river Styx.
"I don't know if I'd call myself a fan of
Kansas' music," confides Billen. "I've
always been kind of in awe of their music because it
was just so out there, so growing up I didn't really
get it, but now I can say that I respect it. I don't
listen to a lot of Kansas, but I will totally wear a
Kansas T-shirt at a concert. Seriously, I don't think
we'd be doing what we're doing now if they hadn't done
all that back then."
That's a rather shocking statement from a member of
a trio whose songs last about as long as a Steve Walsh
solo, but Billen isn't just giving props to his
musical kin in hopes of securing more studio time. He
says progressive-rock pioneers set the standard for
groups such as his that go beyond the
"traditional a-b, a-b song structure."
Many musicians get lost along this path and end up
sounding like watered-down versions of Radiohead. The
Billions aren't immune to displaying Radiohead's
influence, as indicated by the handful of tracks on Quiet
that could pass as outtakes from the Bends
sessions. Still, Billen insists, "[The Billions]
have found a sound that doesn't just reek of being
someone else, and that's sort of new for me. As long
as I've been playing music, I've tried to be somebody
else, but now we've pinned something down for
ourselves that you can't really put a finger on."
Indeed, Quiet sounds like the work of a band
that has finally found its voice. The Billions pair an
emphasis on melody with occasional brutal outbursts of
noise, creating their own unique variation on the
soft-to-loud formula. Lyrically, drummer/songwriter
Sam Billen, just a year removed from high school, pens
unusually weighty lines, the result of selecting the
best efforts from his prolific output. Dan, who
contributed two and a half songs to Quiet, says
he writes "about one good song a month,"
while "Sam can come up with about 100 good ones a
week."
That ability proved helpful during the recording of
Quiet; the group scrapped most of the tracks it
had originally planned to record in favor of a new set
written just weeks before the band entered the studio.
It's here, really, in Sam Billen's songs that you can
truly see the influence of progressive rock in The
Billions' music: The lighthearted takes on wine and
women that normally accompany this sort of melodic
fare have been replaced by prosaic takes on redemption
and religion. With a kiss, betrayed by a
friend/slave struck by the sword/his hearing impaired,
and still he was healed/this was their hour and the
power of the darkness/one day: waiting, two days:
weeping, three days: arising -- with power and glory
-- these are the kind of lines that make you regret
missing a holy day of obligation. But that's what
separates The Billions from the other modern rockers
that litter the elysian fields, and in a way that
makes the band a lot like Kansas was when it started
in Topeka more than thirty years ago: progressive.
| pitch.com
| originally published: March 8, 2001 |
