Whale meat again

When you name your band after one of the more famous opening lines in American fiction, you set yourself up for inevitable questions about your literary inclinations. But Bryan Valenzuela, who plays guitar and sings, sheepishly admitted that his band is more interested in the classic-rock canon than the nuances of Herman Melville. Call Me Ishmael is just a name.

The four members of Call Me Ishmael—Bryan, bassist and vocalist Nathan Webb, keyboard player Andy Babcock and drummer Robby Dean—grew up together in the suburban lowlands of El Dorado County. They insist on being called by their first names. Today, they share a house with two Doberman pinschers—Steely, who is very friendly; and Bud, who is not—in East Sacramento near Bertha Henschel Park. They moved there in March after a brief time living in what they called “the shitty house” in nearby River Park, where passing trains on the railroad tracks in their backyard would rock them out of bed.

And, even though Call Me Ishmael practices at home, the neighbors don’t seem to mind as long as the band knocks off by early evening. The living room is set up with drums in one corner, amps and keyboards in another, and guitars and basses leaned casually against the fireplace like garden tools. A mixing board is stuffed into an alcove in the hall. Six of the seven tracks on the band’s new CD, Effervescing, were recorded at the house. The CD, the band’s second, was just released on its own label, CMI, through local independent label The Americans Are Coming.

Effervescing’s sounds range widely, including the kind of trippy, early-Pink Floyd-isms favored by The Americans Are Coming labelmates Low Flying Owls (on “Who Do You Know” and “Invite to an Overture”); very Yes-like, melodic vocal tracks (“Fell Asleep in a Pool”—go on, admit you always wanted to hear Jon Anderson wax rhapsodic about getting dead drunk); Bitches Brew-influenced fusion-jazz workouts (“Catch the Drift”); and the kind of energetic pop/prog/nu-metal numbers that get young bands signed to major labels (“The Salt on Your Soul”).

One of the disc’s more startling and satisfying tracks is “Blackout Lullaby,” a nice piece of musique concrete that started when someone in the band tuned in an emphatic female evangelist on the radio who was prophesying about the Israelites coming out of Egypt. The metaphor, of course, is that the holy must remove themselves from the domain of see-in, a message that gains added irony when looped with other Southern-accented preachers and placed in a psychedelic context. “She was saying all this stuff, and we were saying, ‘Press record!’ Like scrambling around yelling, ‘Get the microphone!’ ” said Nathan, laughing.

If there’s fault to be found in the CD, it’s in the lack of focus; Effervescing sounds like a compilation of several really good bands. “We’re into, like, creating a universe of songs within the rock idiom,” Bryan said. “Get a whole range or spectrum.”

“Kinda like what Smashing Pumpkins does,” Robby added.

“I think, over time, we’re going to weed out things that aren’t working and just go with things that are working,” Nathan said.

Like plenty of young musicians, the four non-canine members of Call Me Ishmael have been woodshedding with piles of records, from classic rockers of the 1960s and 1970s to this year’s so-called rock Renaissance: the Hives, the Vines and the White Stripes. “We’ve been into Coldplay quite a bit lately,” Andy admitted.

Call Me Ishmael’s Big Pink approach to finding its sound—living together, writing, experimenting and recording—likely will evolve again once the band begins to tour. Most bands try to capture a live sound in the studio, but this band is going at it backward: learning to play its studio creations onstage. And, no, the band doesn’t plan on moving to Orlando anytime soon.

“I was just waiting for something to kill the pop thing, the whole Britney Spears thing,” Robby said. “I wanted that to die soooo bad. And now, something else is emerging.”

That it is.