Nautics Grows Into the Spotlight
I sat down with three members of Nautics at the Bus Stop Café, the relaxed West Village spot, and instantly noticed their evident bond, both within and outside of their bandmate relationship. I recognized their impenetrable rapport as they hurled good-natured insults at each other over a plate of rapidly-vanishing chicken tenders. "A lot of... us... is just arguing until we stop arguing and then that means it's done,” Repola said at one point of how they chose the band’s name.
Nautics' distinctive sound is new wave adjacent and frenetically upbeat on their recorded tracks but leans into something punkier live. The influences they list are eclectic, including Gorillaz, The Strokes, XTC, and Elvis Costello. “We do a lot of ska stuff accidentally,” bassist Van Cameron laughed. It was the verve of Nautics’ performance style, however, that first caught my attention, as I watched Repola make fevered forays into the crowd at a January 25 show they played at Sour Mouse, his eyes wide under stripes of graphic eyeshadow as he encouraged audience members to sing along to the gory lyrics of “Fruit Punch.”
This commitment to face-to-face engagement and displays of visceral intensity is how they realized their ethos as a band; again and again, the band locates themselves in a sort of reactionary cohort relative to the heyday of withdrawn, irony-tainted indie acts. “There was a space in the indie community where everyone was just too cool for school. We realized that wasn't cool and I think that's the conclusion everybody else is coming to as well, that it's actually cooler to be honest and to just shout and to cry and to whine,” Repola says.
This tension between presenting an obligatory facade of detachment and feeling internal discontent is the throughline of the band’s latest release, “Shotgun Shack,” the narrator constantly anticipating a misinterpretation of their feelings: “I’m not bitter/I’m just a reject/I’m not frowning that’s just a reflex/Heart beats starting only when needed...I’m not angry/I’m just sour.”
Though they’ve been a fixture of the local live music scene, seasoned at playing the Brooklyn and downtown Manhattan venue circuits for over seven years, the band retains an admirably humble self-awareness about the realities of creating and aspiring to be recognized for it. “Being a band is inherently a little vain. You have to think that you're worth watching and being paid. It's incredibly narcissistic, which is why you have to have a lot of reverence for the people that come to see you because they're giving you everything to feed your ego. That's a very sensitive thing,” Repola says, asserting that their “core value” is putting on a show “worthy of being seen.”
Their show at Arlene’s Grocery delivered on this promise, complementing the momentum they’ve picked up from their recorded songs. On the way out, I’m intercepted by a self-described “Nautics groupie” named Franklin, who discovered Nautics on Spotify and raves openly about the poeticism of of the band’s lyrics and the performance of Shotgun Shack we had all just seen; a taste, perhaps, of larger-scale success to come.
