Kevin Bronson on August 28th, 2015

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In late July, the members of Funeral Party tiptoed onto the stage at the Satellite to play their first show in almost two years. It was a tentative first step for a quintet that a few months ago was, for all intents and purposes, finished.

Funeral Party burst out of Whittier around 2007, getting their start as a frenetic dance-punk band and gaining a lot of attention in Europe. They were on NME’s “50 Best New Bands of 2010” list and were signed to RCA, but owing to some epic foot-dragging their debut album “The Golden Age of Knowhere” didn’t come out until March of 2011. By then, many of those songs were more than three years old. And the band — Chad Elliott, James Torres, Kimo Kauhola and Tim Madrid — wanted to move on creatively.

They were marketed as “dangerous cholo skateboarders” (as Torres says now, with a laugh) and sent out on some big tours. But by the summer of 2012, they were slogging their way through the Warped Tour. Suffice to say they were not getting along. “Being in a band is like being married, to four or five different people,” Elliott says. “You love them to death, but there are days when you think, ‘I just fucking hate you, but we have to carry on …’” Torres finishes his sentence: “For the kids!” They laugh.

They parted ways, with Elliott — somewhat ironically given that their first big single was the tune “New York City Moves to the Sound of L.A.” — moving to New York City to explore new horizons. He worked in high-end retail and spent time writing music at night. About a year and some substantial soul-searching later, he visited home, only to find his Funeral Party mates, including drummer Dylan Miller, were interested in rebooting.

They are working on new material at JACO Studios, a 28-room complex in Pico Rivera in which Torres is a partner and manager, and where he has produced music for bands like Levitation Room and Watch for Horses. We caught up with them there:

So how did it feel getting back onstage at the Satellite?

Chad Elliott: It was the same feeling you get when you see an old relative or an old best friend and you haven’t seen them in a while. You want to go hug them, but you’re a little bit away from them and your face is just a complete smile. It felt like that moment of anticipation. …. I wasn’t really evening paying attention to the crowd, I was just paying attention to these guys. It was like, “Holy fuck, here we are again.”

Dylan Miller: We’d had two weeks of practices, and when we were in the back room I thought, “All right, we’re fine.” Then we walk out there and my legs started shaking.

||| Stream the new demo: “TBA”

Take me back to around the time the album came out. By then, you were not really the band being advertised, right?

James Torres: What [the label was] going for with us was more of a pop-but-these-guys-are-dangerous-skateboarders. No, we’re not dangerous skateboarders. We’re not that.

Chad Elliott: And the Mexican thing.

James Torres: That was big with them. They loved pushing that envelope.

Chad Elliott: The Mexican thing was weird. Obviously we’re brown, but we’re all third- and fourth-generation, and none of us speak any Spanish and we didn’t grow up with that culture. When they started pushing that more, it became kind of a joke to us. It was borderline offensive. In one of the videos, there was a Dia de los Muertos thing. On the set, it was like, “Really? Day of the Dead? That’s your concept? Wow, brilliant.”

“No, we’re not dangerous skateboarders.” — James Torres

Years later, do you feel any bitterness about that?

James Torres: No, it’s their job to try to turn music into something that commercially viable. That’s what they’re hired to do.

So you ended up on Warped Tour in 2012 and the label was in the process of dropping you.

Chad Elliott: Everybody in our camp was kinda waiting for something better to come along, something to bring our spirits up. Morale was low. Warped Tour was the cherry on the shit cake that was already forming. It didn’t bring us any closer to one another. … Plus, that tour is really a boot camp for bands that haven’t toured before. So we went from already being on established tours and knowing what we’re doing to being thrown into this one where we’re treated like we just started. It wasn’t healthy for the situation we were in. We were already irritated.

You were at a creative crossroads as well?

Chad Elliott: We had written our first album a long time before it actually got released, and then we had to go out and promote it. My struggle was just that I was tired of the songs and wanted to go forward. Sometimes I jump ahead of myself … but when it finally came time to record what was supposed to be our second album, I had all these ideas already and went into the recording studio and it was funny. It was just us three, me, Kimo and James at the time, we didn’t really discuss any of it. We had all been separate — writing and recording separately. So the songs that we recorded came out in a very mixed influenced way.

James Torres: It was unnatural.

Chad Elliott: Everybody brought their own little box of tricks to the recording studio. We didn’t discuss it and it wasn’t cohesive.

And the other people who heard it?

Chad Elliott: They were thrown off by the direction, because it was so different. It was a lot more mellow. My voice was different, I wanted to explore different ranges. It wasn’t this loud, aggressive sound that they wanted us to keep having.

James Torres: They didn’t see eye to eye with where we wanted to grow, which was away from the dance-punk shit and toward a more progressive sound. Something that we can truly call our own.

In what ways did you feel you’d grown? Obviously, you weren’t the same people doing backyard parties or the same band I saw at the Echo in about 2007 doing those really good dance-punk riffs … Where did you want to go?

James Torres: We had different opinions about that.

Chad Elliott: At that period of time I wanted to explore my roots and the music that I listened to growing up. I idolized my brother and the ’90s music he listened to. I wanted to be in a rock band, an alternative band. Before we even started FP, a band we all listened to as kids was Modest Mouse. The angsty-ness of it all, living in Whittier and trying to get out. I wanted to hone in on that and bring those feelings into the music.

James Torres: I wanted to make it into this harder rock, dreamier sound, with the all the new tings I’d been learning and all the pedals I started using around that time. Catchy, but tough.

“It’s funny to look back on it now. If we’d put our bullshit aside we could have gotten things done.” — Chad Elliott

There was probably some middle ground to be found there, right?

James Torres: Now we realize we could have done all that shit anyways. We were just being selfish, essentially.

Chad Elliott: It’s funny to look back on it now. If we’d put our bullshit aside we could have gotten things done. We get it now. Back then, if somebody suggested something, you just rejected it because it was them suggesting it.

Dylan Miller: Everyone was gripping. It was like, “I don’t know what’s going to happen, so … no.” Seeing everyone in this power struggle really sucked. But everyone still show up. Ninety-five percent of the time, everyone as still in there trying to get it going, 9 to 5, five days a week.

James Torres: I don’t think it was the music that drove us away. It was the touring. It made us resent each other.

Chad, was there one point you knew it was done?

Chad Elliott: Personally, I was going through a lot of different changes. I finally made the decision to move to New York. I mean, my heart wasn’t in it anymore.

“The good thing is, New York taught me how to be an adult. I don’t think this place would have.” — Chad Elliott

What was life in New York like?

Chad Elliott: You know, you dream so much about what New York is, because of the way it’s portrayed in the media and in movies, and I got there and I couldn’t find anybody who I could relate to musically. It seemed like everybody was so “in” the struggle of living there that there was no time for anything else. And the people who did have the privilege of having time to work had a lot of money, and that’s not where I came from. … I heard less music but actually made more music. That was my escape, I’d come home and write music. The good thing is, New York taught me how to be an adult. I don’t think this place would have.

Did you have an aha moment when you were there?

Chad Elliott: Not really. A lot of the music I was writing was instrumental … shoegazing, electronic, ambient stuff. I didn’t think at that time Funeral Party would ever be anything again. I tried to go out after work and have a social life, but it wasn’t satisfying. The best thing to do for me was to go home and play my guitar. I guess that was the aha moment: Hey, music is still there.

You’ve been back about three months or so? how did you decide to come back?

Chad Elliott: My original plan was not to come back, but to move to Germany. Before I did, I wanted to come back and visit friends and family, you know to say, “Hey, might not see you for a while.” And I wanted to talk to each guy in the band and try to make amends. When I did, everybody was telling me, “I really wish you’d come back home. I really wish we could start this up again.” Hearing that from Kimo was important, because we had had a falling out. … So I went back to New york and thought about it. At the time, I was really annoyed with New York. I decided it was best for me to come back home and get back to the roots, and to try to do it with an adult sensibility.

So what is the status of the new music?

Chad Elliott: When I first got back, we started going back to old ideas, revisiting those, picking out what we liked and what we didn’t like. We wanted to approach writing with more freedom, without any title over it or label on it.

James Torres: It’s safe to say we have about 30 or 35 songs that aren’t finished. It’s a matter of going through them and picking out what we like and don’t like.

Dylan Miller: The other day we were listening to a song and we thought, ‘This is garbage’ until the very end. And then it was “ooooh.” Why don’t we base the whole song around that?

Chad Elliott: Time has been the best way for me to pinpoint what’s good. All I had in New York was time to listen to what we’d done. Some I can’t listen to, but others it’s like, “We were on to something here.

||| Live: Funeral Party plays Sept. 17 at the Slidebar and Sept. 26 at the Chinatown Moon Festival.