Seryn Truth Serum

Seryn's Nathan James Allen talks new album, touring highs and the brink of the big time

What does it take for a band to hit the big time? Hard work, luck, ambition, brains, money, rabid fans, a solid music catalog, television appearances, luscious beards?

Denton's Seryn, the headliner for CultureMap's first anniversary party October 10, has some of that stuff right now. Vocalist/guitarist Jenny Moscoso can't have one of those things without hormone injections. That could be asking too much. Everything else cannot be ruled out. Maybe, just maybe, big times are around the corner.

The six-member group is putting the finishing touches on its second album for release next year — a follow-up to their 2011 debut, This Is Where We Are. Also in 2014, an Austin filmmaker plans to release a Seryn documentary called A Canvas of Sound.

If a bluegrass/folk band and gospel choir got married, their kid would be Seryn.

"We’re really looking to blow it out next year," said guitarist and singer Nathan James Allen.

If you've seen them live, you know they can blow it out performance-wise. If a bluegrass/folk band and gospel choir got married, their kid would be Seryn. And the kid would play a ukulele. And an accordion. And a trumpet. And a banjo. And an electric guitar. And a xylophone. And the drums. And a kalimba.

What’s a kalimba? I don’t know; the kid asked for one for Christmas. Google it. Thumb piano, thank you. Kalimba is the fancy name for that.

Since its formation in 2009, Seryn has toiled. This year, that work earned them West Coast tour dates with the Polyphonic Spree. An invite to South by Southwest. Plus more shows than ever before, and in places they've never played.

Not just cities. Some outfit in in Avon, Colorado, said, "Let's cram some bands in a Vail Valley ski gondola and record it." Okay, let’s applaud that, because not everyone gets invited to bring the house down in a gondola, or bring the gondola down. Ah, wait. Let’s make sure that stays in the land of idioms. (See video above.)

"I think this is it," Allen says of the group’s fortune. "This is the time when it’s either going to happen or it won’t. But I don’t know. If I were going to start a band right now, the things I would be thinking about doing would be like, get on Letterman, get a big corporate sponsor and a picture of you with logo in the bottom corner, get everyone talking about you.

Singer Nathan James Allen compares the relationship between band and crowd to a drug deal. "Except the drug dealer is getting higher than his customer,” he says.

"When does all that happen? Well, it happens when you have a new record. It’s this weird deal that everything starts coming together for people only when you have a new album to put out."

That didn't happen when Seryn's first album came out. But that’s okay. Be patient, right? Recording the second album was a grind compared to the first.

"It took a while to finally do," he says. "We had to deal with a lot of internal stuff between everyone in the band, with group dynamics that we hadn’t faced before. In order to get to that second record, it took a long time for us to bring something new to the table. But now that we’ve recorded it, we’re already stoked to start the third one."

The group rehearses in Argyle. Allen used to fret about everyone being on time for practices. Now everyone knows to just roll in earlier than the planned time, and they start when they start. They’re also mellower on the road.

"It used to be, every time you go on tour, it’s like you’re going to see a movie you’ve been dying to see for a while," he says. "Everyone says, 'Man, this movie is going to be freaking incredible,' and you’re so stoked. Then you watch the movie, and afterward you realize you weren’t expecting it to be that sad or that loud or that serious.

"In the past, when we go on tour we’d expect a big take-off, and it starts off great and doesn’t let up until it’s over," he says. "But the reality is that it goes up and down, and you don’t know how it’s going to turn out. I think we were kind of surprised about that. It’s the same when we play. We’ll play great one night and then one time you’re just not going to be on.

"This last time we went on tour, we were expecting the ups and downs. Going on tour will wear you out, but secretly everyone in the band loves it."

Openly, everyone in the crowd loves the band. At least it's nice to think so. Maybe it’s not just love but an enslaving demand to be entertained. Allen compares the relationship between band and crowd to a drug deal.

"Except the drug dealer is getting higher than his customer,” he says. “When you’re playing for someone, and even if it’s just 100 people or even 20 people, if you perform the best you can and put all the love you can into it, and all the people clap, it’s just an amazing feeling.

"It’s like, 'We've got music for you, and all we what we want in return is cheering and applause.' When you’re playing and you look into the crowd and think, I don’t even know any of these people, that’s what makes it all worth it."

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The CultureMap first anniversary bash takes place October 10, 8-11 pm, at the Crow Collection of Asian Art. Tickets are $10 for general admission and $25 for VIP and can be purchased online.

Denton band Seryn performs at the CultureMap first anniversary party October 10.

Denton band Seryn

Photo courtesy of Seryn

Denton band Seryn performs at the CultureMap first anniversary party October 10.

Movie Review

Comedy all-stars Jack Black and Paul Rudd can't save Anaconda sequel

Jack Black and Paul Rudd in Anaconda

Photo by Matt Grace

Jack Black and Paul Rudd in Anaconda.

In Hollywood’s never-ending quest to take advantage of existing intellectual property, seemingly no older movie is off limits, even if the original was not well-regarded. That’s certainly the case with 1997’s Anaconda, which is best known for being a lesser entry on the filmography of Ice Cube and Jennifer Lopez, as well as some horrendous accent work by Jon Voight.

The idea behind the new meta-sequel Anaconda is arguably a good one. Four friends — Doug (Jack Black), Griff (Paul Rudd), Claire (Thandiwe Newton), and Kenny (Steve Zahn) — who made homemade movies when they were teenagers decide to remake Anaconda on a shoestring budget. Egged on by Griff, an actor who can’t catch a break, the four of them pull together enough money to fly down to Brazil, hire a boat, and film a script written by Doug.

Naturally, almost nothing goes as planned in the Amazon, including losing their trained snake and running headlong into a criminal enterprise. Soon enough, everything else takes second place to the presence of a giant anaconda that is stalking them and anyone else who crosses its path.

Written and directed by Tom Gormican, with help from co-writer Kevin Etten, the film is designed to be an outrageous comedy peppered with laugh-out-loud moments that cover up the fact that there’s really no story. That would be all well and good … if anything the film had to offer was truly funny. Only a few scenes elicit any honest laughter, and so instead the audience is fed half-baked jokes, a story with no focus, and actors who ham it up to get any kind of reaction.

The biggest problem is that the meta-ness of the film goes too far. None of the core four characters possess any interesting traits, and their blandness is transferred over to the actors playing them. And so even as they face some harrowing situations or ones that could be funny, it’s difficult to care about anything they do since the filmmakers never make the basic effort of making the audience care about them.

It’s weird to say in a movie called Anaconda, but it becomes much too focused on the snake in the second half of the film. If the goal is to be a straight-up comedy, then everything up to and including the snake attacks should be serving that objective. But most of the time the attacks are either random or moments when the characters are already scared, and so any humor that could be mined all but disappears.

Black and Rudd are comedy all-stars who can typically be counted on to elevate even subpar material. That’s not the case here, as each only scores on a few occasions, with Black’s physicality being the funniest thing in the movie. Newton is not a good fit with this type of movie, and she isn’t done any favors by some seriously bad wigs. Zahn used to be the go-to guy for funny sidekicks, but he brings little to the table in this role.

Any attempt at rebooting/remaking an old piece of IP should make a concerted effort to differentiate itself from the original, and in that way, the new Anaconda succeeds. Unfortunately, that’s its only success, as the filmmakers can never find the right balance to turn it into the bawdy comedy they seemed to want.

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Anaconda is now playing in theaters.

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