And here it is:
They're not the same old Features
By CINDY WATTS
cwatts@dnj.com
FYI
The Features will play Nashville's 3rd & Lindsley, 818 Third Ave., 9 p.m. Sunday, June 12.
Tickets are $10 and are available at the bar or by logging on to www.3rdandlindsley.com.
The last time The Features were featured in The Daily News Journal, they were a local band with a local gig, a rabid following and an EP that focused on the impending birth of the singer's twins.
A few things have changed for the band since then, but first, here's the bit that has stayed the same.
The Features are still a local band, in that singer Matt Pelham still lives in Murfreesboro. The guys have a local gig June 12 at 3rd & Lindsley in Nashville.
However, The Features are now much more than a local band: popular international recording artists seems to be a more accurate description.
Since the band last appeared in the newspaper four years ago, The Features inked a deal with Universal, one of the largest entertainment conglomerates in the music industry. The group — which consists of Pelham, Roger Dabbs (bass), Parrish Yaw (keyboards), and Rollum Haas (drums) — released its major label debut "Exhibit A" in 2004 to rave reviews, and toured the U.K. and Europe withKings of Leon. Plus, singer Matt Pelham's wife gave birth to twin girls.
After a recent telephone interview with Pelham, it seems the not-so-new additions to the singer's family — the girls are now 4 — have been a more drastic life change than the long-elusive record deal.
"We went into the studio for a month and then came home and went back to work," says Pelham. "We all kept our (day) jobs until we went on tour last year with theKings of Leon, and (our lives) got pretty hectic and we had to quit."
The "deal" is something band members worked toward for a long time. For years, The Features packed venues to capacity in the Southeast, yet ardently toiled for recognition on a higher plane.
"A couple of years ago we recorded some demos and management started shopping them," says Pelham of the band's journey toward stardom. "Universal seemed more interested and it eventually worked out, but the process of waiting and not knowing was brutal."
The band then went into the studio to record "Exhibit A," which the singer says holds few surprises for Features' fanatics.
"It's a little energetic, a little rawer," says Pelham of "Exhibit A." "But it's a collection of the band's favorite songs from the last two years prior to recording the last EP.
"I know we all draw from different influences," continues Pelham of the band's music. "We're very eclectic. If you took what each person listens to and put it together, it doesn't really fit. With 'Exhibit A,' the songs are all different. One will have a disco feel or a punk feel and then there's slow songs. We don't tend to stick to one particular sound. We get bored with that quick. There's not a conscious effort to make each song different; it's just what everyone brings to the table."
And evidently fans like the band's eclectic mix of music. When the group went on tour with Kings of Leon in support of "Exhibit A," members found their new found success a bit startling, Pelham notes.
"We did the tour in the U.K. with the Kings of Leon and we started playing to about 4,000 or 5,000 people a night," says the singer. "It doesn't seem like you can take two minutes to tune when you're standing in front of thousands of people. How we write songs hasn't changed, though. Our attitude hasn't changed."
Daigle is all we need to make the night complete
