Bands on the run

“None of us really make a lot of money,” said Mike Sparks, the 21-year-old vocalist and guitarist for Sacramento’s Mister Metaphor. “We’ve been eating Top Ramen and Taco Bell burritos for the last few weeks.”

With tour mates and fellow Sacramentans, the eight-member An Angle, shoved into a pickup and an overheating Volvo, “There’s basically no comfort level whatsoever,” adds An Angle vocalist Kris Anaya.

This will be the first time these two bands have toured together, but since both bands come from the same group of friends, the members are used to being starving musicians.

Anaya is the rock ‘n’ roll maestro. His mini-orchestra An Angle—an ever-changing indie-rock band of misfit cellists, accordion players and the like—is far from the philharmonic. But that doesn’t mean its members don’t take music seriously.

"[An Angle] is just friends helping out friends, making music what music is supposed to be—just beautiful,” Anaya said. “We’re making art.”

When Anaya decided to get a band together, he enlisted the help of his close collective of musicians—all of them.

For the current tour, which will take the bands up into Washington before a Thursday-evening Chico show at Moxie’s, Anaya has brought along only seven of his nearly 20 “band members.” Fifteen of them appear with Anaya on An Angle’s first LP, And Take It with a Grain of Salt.

“I want musicians to come and go,” Anaya said. “They’re my friends; I want them to willingly play with me as long as they can.”

To keep everyone in sync, Anaya practices with each musician individually at first. He pushes them to learn the parts and also to learn new instruments.

“No one ever gives the kids with a bass or a guitar the chance to play another instrument,” he said. “But a lot of them do. I just want them all to be awesome musicians and have fun too.”

Whatever the practice method, the results are stunning. Anaya’s voice wavers over the top of heart-wrenching strains of strings and keys, and incorporating the sounds from so many different instruments makes An Angle unlike any other band in the region.

But if fancy instrumentation isn’t your thing, tour mates Mister Metaphor are almost the antithesis of An Angle, a solid rock ‘n’ roll quartet that prides itself on having one of the most energetic live shows around.

“I think the best part of Mister Metaphor is our performance,” Sparks said. “And I think that’s why we get any kind of attention. It’s really high energy; it’s a good time.”

The attention he refers to is the buzz in the Northern California music scene surrounding Mister Metaphor. The group has toured up and down California and has even been told by Sacramento News & Review critic Christian Kiefer that it “probably would have been a superstar act” in 1973. In a nod to its prog-rock predecessors, Mister Metaphor artfully mixes harmonic vocals and instrumentation over rhythms that are unpredictable from one song to the next.

Neither Anaya nor Sparks has any formal music training, which is amazing considering the high level of musicianship displayed by both bands. They both say they’ve been playing music for years just for fun.

“This is like my passion," Sparks said. "I’m in the age bracket where I can take advantage of it. I have a couple of years where I can do this full-time and then go back to school if that doesn’t pan out."