Christopher Pappas, main songwriter for Boston-based, New Hampshire-bred indie band the Everyday Visuals, is well-aware of just how the indie/mainstream continuum works. In fact, Pappas blogged about this matter in a little entry entitled, “Pop is fucking (aka. Everything to all people? / aka. Coldplay is just as bad as Wavves” posted to his band’s website.

Elsewhere on the band’s pages, Pappas provided a helpful Venn diagram to illustrate exactly where the Visuals merge between pop and indie. Figuring out where their audience is poses a practical dilemma for the Northeastern band, whose recent self-titled and self-produced third album will likely appeal to Fleet Foxes fans for its downbeat, harmony-rich vocal sound while possibly alienating said fans by also veering into poppier, Vampire Weekend (or even Split Enz) territory. This dichotomy clearly weighs heavily on the bearded singer’s mind.

“The indie world,” Pappas explains, “is completely insular and self-satisfying, and the pop world is just as lame and just as self-satisfying. When I was growing up and first listening to music, Nirvana, Sonic Youth, and the Breeders all had this really underground indie-rock aesthetic that critics loved, and yet they were all on MTV, too… and Nirvana was selling out stadiums! Nowadays, there seems to be such a schism between the pop world and the indie world. So the main point I was trying to get at [in the blog] was that often I feel like the Everyday Visuals fall in between the poppy, catchy world and the indie world.”

Over 12 songs on their new album, the Everyday Visuals—Pappas on vocals, guitar, and keyboards, his lifelong pal Joe Seiders on drums and vocals, guitarist and keyboardist Kyle Fredrickson, and multi-instrumentalist Eli Scheer—run the gamut from acoustic Crosby, Stills and Nash-like numbers to Pitchfork-friendly indie-rock workouts.

Pappas started the band with lifelong pal Seiders back in New Hampshire when the two were still in high school.

“We definitely have a musical partnership,” says Pappas. “He’s my right-hand man, as far as the band goes. Usually, I write the songs but sometimes I’ll just have chords or lyrics or a melody, and I’ll go, ‘I don’t know what I want for the drums, Joe.’ He always knows just what I want and gets it.”

After a hushed acoustic opener, “Intro [Morning Star]”, recorded live in an elementary school basement, the band cuts straight into uptempo rock on “Limb from Limb.” While, at first, it appears to be yet another lament about the sad state of radio, Pappas hastens to add that it could also be an expression of his band’s impatience on the road to global domination.

“There’s that whole lyric,” says Pappas, “about ‘the radio is tearing me limb from limb, and they’re singing about the places I’ve never been.’ But it’s also about feeling frustrated with not being able to break through. So the refrain, where it goes, ‘Talk to me, talk to me, tell me a story,’ is about trying to hear and collect all the stories from the people who have actually done it. Tell me a story that’s gonna inspire me, because I’m feeling stagnant. That’s why, when we hit the second chorus, the drums are so haphazard. It’s supposed to be unsettling, like we want to move on but just keep hitting a wall.”

One wall the band doesn’t mind hitting is the wall of harmonies adorning most of their songs. Pappas, surprisingly, insists he is drawn to vocalizing out of basic, primal fear.

“It’s a terrifying instrument,” admits Pappas. “I approach it very cautiously. Your voice truly is, literally and figuratively, a part of you. I think the reason the Visuals hang so much of what we do on our vocal harmonies, though, is that we enjoy meeting those vulnerabilities head on. That’s why we love playing acoustic shows and stripping away a lot of the things that artists often hide behind. In ‘Limb from Limb’, for instance, we suddenly drop it down to just voice and handclaps to break it down into its simplest form.

The Visuals’ multi-part harmony blend is best exemplified on “Florence Foster Jenkins”, a song named after the famously untrained American opera singer from the early 1900s who soldiered on despite widespread critical rejection of her inherent lack of pitch or tone. Pappas says he often identifies with Jenkins’ unabashed enthusiasm for expression in the face of overwhelming odds.

“I really strive,” says Pappas, “to have that almost childlike obliviousness to public opinion and to just sing because it’s all you can do. You know? I’d love to have Florence’s bravery. One of my favorite quotes from her is, ‘My critics may say that I can’t sing, but they can never say that I didn’t sing.’ I think that we have a lot of that mentality in the band; it really is our ethos to play music we love, for ourselves alone. It all comes back to my own fears and my own self-criticism and doubt. That song really is about trying to kind of channel Florence Foster and escape those ghosts, you know? That doubt that looms over us.”

In the end, Pappas says that he hopes listeners will approach the album like a field recording, overheard passively at first, but inspiring further exploration from the adventurous listener.

“Our main goal, always,” he insists, “has been to just give as many people as possible a chance to at least hear our band. Not that we expect everyone to like it, but just get them to listen and choose. I feel like we could be a ‘fan’s band’; I don’t know if we’d be a ‘critic’s band’ or a ‘blogger’s band,’ but I think we have a chance to speak to a large cross section of audiences. It’s like Marketing 101: Where’s our audience? Where do they discover new music? I don’t know. So that’s one of the Everyday Visuals’ goals, I think. To just find our own audience.”

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Album review: Fleet Foxes, self-titled 

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