Robbers on High Street

Think about it: Calling a band Robbers on High Street is slightly redundant. After all, there are few truly original rock sounds – everybody steals, at least a little bit, from somebody else. If you’re in a band, you’re either a smalltime shoplifter or a big time thief. Period. But in the case of this New York band, at least, these three steal from some of the best. This group’s latest release, Grand Animals, is filled with highly literate and equally melodic rock. Thus, the act often draws comparisons to the likes of The Kinks and Spoon, which is not bad company at all. But does it bother the band to see the same band comparisons in story after story?

“It’s not really my responsibility to say who we sound like,” vocalist Ben Trokan responds. “It’s just something I’m used to, I guess.”

Robbers on High Street may sound similar to a few high profile groups, but this trio stands out all on their own due to their smart story songs, especially one titled “The Ramp” off the new release. It’s all about a daring bicyclist. Heck, it even name-drops freaking Leonardo DiCaprio!

“There was a place on 15th street where me and my sister used to ride our bikes,” Trokan explains. “At one point I did fall off my bike and have to go to the ER. I kind of had the first lyric and then I was writing it and I thought it was a cool story. Mostly I liked it because I was writing from the perspective of a kid who was dead. And it was a young kid, and I thought that was kind of dark. And then I was watching Fox News or something and they had this Page Six-like thing of Leonard DiCaprio visiting some sort of Make A Wish thing, all these kids in a hospital, and I thought, ‘That’s it!’ I thought about changing the name, but I just felt like just using his name (DiCaprio) kind of made the parents seem almost more withdrawn from what this dead kid was like. Like, why would some ramp-jumping bike kid want Leonard DiCaprio to visit him?”

Even so, this one almost missed making to the CD’s final cut.

“It was just a weird song and I didn’t think about bringing it up,” Trokan admits. “And then I made a demo and everyone liked it. It’s one of those songs like “Bobby Jean” by Springsteen, where there’s no real chorus. It’s just kind of tells a story with straight, very linear lyrics.”

An artist that’s rarely mentioned in the same breath as Robbers on High Street is John Lennon, yet his is the first name that comes to mind with “You Don’t Stand a Chance”.

“Although I do agree that it’s sort of ’50s based sort thing with chord progressions that John Lennon did with some of his solo stuff; I mean he did that whole record, Rock & Roll, which is his ’50s covers album. Yeah, I think it’s the drum flap, which sounds a lot like ‘Instant Karma.’ I guess the singing is strained, in a John Lennon kind of way.” Yet even during this Lennon-y discussion, the name Springsteen comes up again. “With the baritone sax that Steve (Mercado) did, you could almost sing ‘Hungry Heart’ over it.”

Lyrically, one finds a number of American cars referenced throughout Grand Animals. (Okay. You can make the case this is yet another subtle Springsteen reference. After all, many critics gave The Boss a hard time about all his car songs, back during the early glory days). Robbers lyrics are scattered with the models Grand Marquis and Crown Victoria. Why?

“When I was writing it, I was living way out in Brooklyn where a lot of cab drivers live, so there’s all these big Town Cars and stuff like that,” says Trokan. “I just kind of like the imagery it creates. At least in New York those are the kinds of cars that I recognize as cops and cabs and stuff like that. It just seemed very American and very New York to me. It’s such a squashed little city, and you’re driving around in this boat. I think originally I had some songs and I was, like, ‘I’m going to try and write about some of these folks out here.’ And I only really did it on a couple of songs. I just like keeping that as just a thread of imagery through it.” Trokan writes about the people he sees around him. But he’s said in the past that it’s easier to write about others than him.

“They’re all sort of personal, or they come from me or whatever,” he says of his lyrics. “I think it’s just easier to create another character and project it. At least then you’ve just limited yourself a little bit in what you’re writing about. You sort of have a defined set of rules to write within. Like, this is about that time I worked that shitty job, but I’ll write about someone else so I can change stuff. Even if I’m singing in the first person, it’s a good way to write. That’s how I feel a lot of writers write.”

Robbers on High Street made the unusual decision to hire Daniele Luppi, a man more accustomed to producing Italian movie soundtracks than tracking rock bands, to produce its new disc.

“He did this record with a studio band that played on a lot of these Spaghetti Westerns,” says Trokan. “And then he started doing some arrangements for bands; he worked with Gnarls Barkley. But this is the first rock band he’s done.”

Little of Grand Animals will remind you of Fellini films, although “Married Young” has a bit of that Italian flavor. “That’s exactly the sort of reference we were trying to get,” Trokan admits. “Sort of like, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly guitar sound.” The song’s lyric bemoans a young couple that got hitched too young, for a pairing that won’t likely last long.

“I guess people say you don’t stop growing until 25, or at least men don’t, and that’s the bare minimum,” Trokan explains. But that’s not to say there aren’t also exceptions to this rule. “My parents are a lot older than most of my friends’ parents. But most of my friends’ parents got married and had kids when they were 23.”

Grand Animals is also notable for its striking artwork. Album artwork has been significantly marginalized since the advent of the CD; there’s just so much less space to work with. Nevertheless, Robbers on High Street can be proud of the unique cover for Grand Animals, which features the band members’ portraits stitched into pillows, which are placed side-by-side on a fancy couch. And they can thank Ericka Martins for this colorful cover.

“That’s my girlfriend and she’s pretty crafty,” Trokan brags. But this final throw pillow concept wasn’t Plan A. “We started working on this latch hook rug and it was just taking forever. We’d still be making it.” So they gave this rug the hook, but stuck with the same visual goal. “We just kind of wanted it to look sort of over gaudy. She made these kinds of very ornate looking pillows of us in these sort of very classical portrait kinds of poses. It sort of looks antique and homey and sort of ornate. Plus, it was still kind of goofy, too.”

And just in case you’re wondering, there’s no grand plan behind the title Grand Animals. The phrase appears in the song “Guard at Your Heel.”

“I just kind wrote the lyrics pretty vaguely and just kind of wanted to recreate some sort of like woozy imagery that kind of fit with the song,” Trokan says. “I just kind of put the thing in there afterward, really. I think I said something else, and then when we went to record it, I just said something different because I thought we should probably say the title of the album somewhere on the album. But it just comes from a sign by my old apartment. It’s Burroughs Veterinarian Office. I take a lot of stuff from signs because they make good titles. I mean, they’re already titles.”

Trokan once said that when he and Steven Mercado started writing together, they wanted to sound like Led Zeppelin. But they couldn’t write stuff like that because they’d listened to too much Beatles music.

“I think in the beginning we had some sort of cock-rocky kind of songs,” Trokan says, “but nothing as cool or smooth as that. It was more, like, the MC5, at best. But it wasn’t even like that. It never worked right. We tried it but we felt there were so many other bands that can really rock like that out there now, so why would we do it not as good. It took us a really long time to settle into what kind of band we were.”

When it comes to discovering your own sound, it’s wise to know who to borrow from and who to avoid altogether. Robbers on High Street have smartly incorporated some of the best elements found on Kinks recordings. And we can all be glad they didn’t try to mix these with extended Jimmy Page riffs.

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