Robber Robber Get Unpredictable

Up in Vermont, a small indie scene has been quietly thriving in Burlington—well known as where Phish started 41 years ago, where Caroline Rose’s home base was when their career began catching on and, now, is where Greg Freeman hails from. With a population of just under 50,000 people, the amount of talent hidden along the banks of Lake Champlain is astonishing. Fueled by UVM college students, bands are popping up all over the city, playing in local venues like the Radio Bean, setting up backyard jams and hopping on open mics. Amongst the throngs of twenty-somethings looking to make their mark, Zack James and Nina Cates—along with bandmates Will Krulak and Carney Hemler—are putting their stamp on the burgeoning scene.

Carving their own niche in the folk-heavy scene, the echolalia-named Robber Robber are hell-bent on putting experimentation first and finding a space to fit in never. “Someone said it sounded like 2000s blog rock,” James, the band’s co-founder and drummer, says of their repetitive name. “I like the image that it brings up,” vocalist and co-founder Cates adds. “I enjoy that our name sounds like gibberish when you say it really fast. I like that it’s the same name twice, too. Not a ton of people are doing that right now. I thought the level of seriousness associated with it was cool.”

The two bandleaders were captivated by music from a young age, and both of them grew up going to shows that their family members were playing in and being sung lullabies. They were generally eager to just get their hands on any music they could. “One time I asked my grandparents for Beyoncé and Rihanna CDs when I was a child, and they got me Destiny’s Child and Beyoncé CDs in Spanish, which I didn’t really know existed,” Cates recalls. “I used to know some of the lyrics to ‘Irreplaceable’ in Spanish instead of English. None of them stuck all that much, but that was silly.” “I was always messing around with the CD player as a baby. I remember the first time my mom let me pick out a CD. I bought It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back by Public Enemy,” James remembers. “I think it looked cool to me. But also, I think my parents maybe showed me some of that music before, or maybe my uncle showed me it before. I thought it looked familiar and cool.”

The pair have been playing music together since they were teenagers as the rhythm section of the Brattleboro band The Snaz. “The first time that we met—Zack doesn’t actually remember—I had been playing an open mic that his band (that I later joined) was also playing. A couple of weeks later, I auditioned to be in the band, and he totally did not remember meeting me the first time,” Cates laughs. After high school, the Snaz disintegrated as the members went to their respective colleges, but Cates and James headed to Burlington together to attend the University of Vermont. The first iteration of their project together, Guy Ferrari—named after the beloved spiky-haired chef Guy Fieri—was the first taste of the curiosity-forward music that would become Robber Robber.

“When we started out with Robber Robber, it was exciting to be in a new band dynamic that we hadn’t been in before,” Cates explains. “We always thought it would be cool to try and write music together because it wasn’t ever a main focus for either of us,” James elaborates. “We were very much testing the waters—especially with all the earlier stuff we were working on. We recorded ourselves in Zack’s basement just seeing what we could do,” Cates replies.

Robber Robber’s commitment to a playful approach put them out of their comfort zone and miles away from James’s basement. They entered a real studio for the first time, where they mixed tracks with Krulak and Hemler involved as well as a few with just the duo of Cates and James present. “When you record with a full band, you definitely surrender some amount of control—I think it’s a good thing to know how to do,” James shares. “Some of the songs that we tracked with the whole band were songs that maybe we had a concrete idea of how it would come out sounding, and then when you track it with the whole band, it becomes its own thing that is the result of everybody’s effort.”

Wild Guess is a gorgeous assembly of curiosity, with tracks like “Sea or War” propelling doggedly forward like a six-foot wave of anticipation, and the funky undulating intrigue of “Backup Plan” flecked with Krulak’s biting riffs accenting a uniquely asymmetrical drum pattern from James. “Dial Tone” lives in the realm of punky noise rock while maintaining a healthy amount of eccentricity from the unsettling wailing guitar to Cates’s persistently frustrated tone venting about chasing connections. The playful “How We Ball” brings a bit of Blondie into the mix and, even in Cates’s delivery, some Le Tigre—but it maintains that Robber Robber individuality with its zoomed-out, unpredictable song structure. Naming their debut Wild Guess is an expert way to categorize their sound. It’s not stuck in a generic box but instead is an experiment in blending noises that feel correct in the world of Robber Robber. The chaos is the formula.

Similar to how they named themselves, Robber Robber’s music follows a similar impulse-driven energy—Cate and James looking for things that excites them and pushes their shared musical expertise forward. The aptly titled Wild Guess is an enthralling exercise of tension and release driven, first and foremost, by the pair’s interest in playing around with what it means to relieve that tension and what happens when you don’t. “Even when it’s not immediately clear, tension is always an important part of any song, and you can use the songwriting and production—the way it’s arranged or engineered—to have control over the pressure and relief in different ways,” James explains. “Some tense music has that anxiety-inducing quality to it, which is kind of cool to have peppered throughout a record.”

“‘Seven Houses’ is a very, very tense song,” Cates adds. “I think that’s what I find interesting about that song—there is a lot of anticipation throughout, and you think that there is going to be some sort of break or release, and it winds up teasing you right up until it’s over. I love writing a nice, tense song. I often lean towards making more intense songs, but if the record was just tense songs all the way through, it’d be really demonic to listen to.”

One of the most significant factors in crafting the Robber Robber sound is working in the heart of the Burlington music scene. Both Cates and James agree it has considerably impacted their work. “We are so lucky to live in Burlington right now,” Cates gushes. “Many of our best friends are making some of my favorite music coming out right now. It’s been inspiring to want to pursue music more seriously, too. Being surrounded by better people also makes me take it more seriously.” James echoes his bandmate’s pride: “It’s amazing right now. More and more people are moving up here for it, and I feel like everyone is in a different corner, but they are all going full throttle. No one’s really half-assing with their products—not saying that many artists do, but I just recognize all the work that our friends are putting into it, and that in itself is so inspiring, you know?” “Especially because who knows how long a scene like this will last, but everyone within it, I feel like, recognizes that it’s pretty special,” Cates adds.

For Wild Guess being their debut as Robber Robber, Cates and James’s maturity and confidence as musicians who have been working with each other for about a decade now sits front-and-center. “Writing this record was like a funny, pivotal moment for us. We were finishing up college and doing a lot of self-reflection on what we want to do with our lives—the whole big scary career question—and I feel like in the act of just working so hard on this record and putting it out, that’s been kind of self-assuring,” Cates confesses. “Of course, music has always been the thing that we really want to do, but I feel like there is a lot of scary stuff that goes into trying to pursue music as a career to make a living. While writing this record, I finally reached the point where I thought, ‘That’s okay.’ Those details are going to sort themselves out. We’re just going to go and do it.”

Olivia Abercrombie is Paste‘s Associate Music Editor, reporting from Austin, Texas. To hear her chat more about her favorite music, gush about old horror films, or rant about Survivor, you can follow her on Twitter @o_abercrombie.

Robber Robber Get Unpredictable

Zack James and Nina Cates discuss the Burlington music scene, surrendering control while recording and their debut album, Wild Guess.