bill. Credit: Gingerinjury Photography / c/o bill.
Bill.’s new album is not a casual listen. Simultaneously dense and expansive, the seven-track outing clocks in at just under 27 minutes, but it’s not the kind of LP that warrants an immediate playback. Instead, the Tampa band has put together a record that forces a listener to exhale.
Featuring members of popular art-pop band Hello Joyce, bill.’s debut full-length is the most mature and fully-realized collection work that longtime songwriting partners Cameron Grant and Nico Remy have put together.
“It feels momentous to us,” Grant told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay with Remy adding that bill. (stylized all-lowercase) deliberately worked towards an almost experimental sound that was still rooted in familiar structures.
Nico Remy of bill. Credit: Gingerinjury Photography / c/o bill.
For fans of bands like They Are Gutting A Body of Water (TAGABOW) or Ovlov, bill.’s strain of rock and roll is prevalent in the northeast, but less common on the Gulf Coast.
“Living in Florida, we almost work harder to achieve more of a complex sound because a lot of people down here play something totally different than what we’re into,” Remy said.
“I think that only makes me want to just be more eccentric and dramatic with the music that we’re creating,” Grant added, “to leave even deeper of a stamp.”
A graduation from the DIY recordings done in garages and closets, Wimmer finds bill. loading the tape with contorted, gnarled-up guitars, aggressive drums masterfully-recorded by Nathan Doyle, snippets of Ableton sessions, and the sounds of not just pro synths but toy electronics with origins in the ‘90s.
Remy—a lifelong percussionist who’s earned high marks since his days at Mitchell High School—acquired the synths through Facebook Marketplace or eBay, but one of them has been in his life since he was three years old.
“My oma bought it for me because I needed a distraction,” Remy, 30, said. “That synth survived this whole time up until now, and that synth is actually the secret sauce of this album.”
Despite its ambitious nature, there’s not a song on Wimmer longer than five minutes, so listeners aren’t getting pummeled by music. And for an album with so many LAN cables attached to it, Wimmer feels infinitely more human than the increasingly AI-assisted music hitting streaming services every day.
Remy, who has a music performance degree from the University of South Florida, said that heartbeat is key to the bill. aesthetic.
“My degree is rooted in performing live as a human, not through a computer,” Remy, who graduated from USF, added. “But computer music has always interested me. We’re at a weird precipice right now where computer music is trying to sound acoustic and human, but I think computer music is way more interesting when it sticks to more of those like bits and bloops and bops.”
The record, he said, feels like a bunch of people made it because the band made a deliberate choice not to sit at a digital audio workstation mapping out notes for every instrument.
“For every synth part we played, there was a physical synth in our laps and we were plucking away at it, doing a billion takes until it sounded somewhat right,” Remy added.
Wimmer is out now care of Philly and Atlanta imprints Julia’s War and Rope Bridge; the former is a revered underground label that’s embraced obscure sounds under the tutelage of its leader Douglas Dulgarian, frontman of TAGABOW.
“I love it when Tampa bands get their time,” Theo Severson—co-founder of the Emo Night Tampa collective that celebrated its 10th anniversary last summer—told CL.
Chris Wood—aka beatsmith, drummer and DJ Mes McDonald—co-founded Emo Night Tampa with Severson. Going back to their days DJing at Ybor City’s long-shuttered Pulp party at Czar, Wood and Severson have literally been on the forefront of local music for three decades.
On Thursday for Emo Night Tampa’s takeover of Rock the Park, bill. makes up the heart of a lineup that includes more pop-punk-oriented bands Bad, Bad Things and Pet Lizard.
Bill. is a regular on Emo Night Tampa shows on account of that sound, which Wood describes as raw, but technically proficient at the same time. He’s been playing a lot of music in the same lane as Wimmer on the Emo Night Tampa radio show that airs overnight Fridays on WMNF 88.5-FM.
“People are into it,” Wood added about the feedback from the listening audience. “And they’re definitely into bill.’s live performances, so I think they’ve always been a natural fit.”
Grant, for his part, wonders what the Curtis Hixon Waterfront Park crowd is going to think about a band that’s played its best shows at American Legion halls and DIY spaces. Those audiences, after all, have told him that they often feel fatigued after a bill. show.
Bandmates Alix Herard, Jorge Sotomayor, and Leonardo Joseph will add another layer to the show, and Grant, who’s not much for in-between song banter is clear about how he’s always wanted the crowd to feel the set in their chests.
“When the song is over, I want you to exhale like you’ve been holding your breath, experiencing every moment,” he said.
Let’s go.
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This article appears in Jan. 29 – Feb. 04.
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