Do the Elevation
By: Jarret Keene
Seth Trotter’s band the Higher raises the pop-punk bar

Watching the Higher perform live, I can’t help but feel that there are great things in the store for vocalist Seth Trotter and his band. After all, they’re signed to a kickass independent label (Fiddler Records). They’ve got a startlingly good full-length album called Histrionics hitting stores on May 3. And their fans are legion enough that when Trotter directs the microphone toward the front row of a crowd of teenagers at Jillian’s in Las Vegas, the kids sing the song’s chorus for him.

It doesn’t get any better than this, especially given that the Higher is itself made up of kids in their late teens. They’re living a modest rock ’n’ roll dream that the rest of us can only fantasize about. Yet somehow the band has achieved this without the usual attitude and egomania that plagues lesser rockers. Trotter is as approachable as the neighborhood kid who cuts your lawn, only a bit cleaner and more articulate.

After the Higher’s blistering April 14 show at Jillian’s, I’m trying to talk with frontman Seth Trotter, 19, over by the skee-ball machines. It’s a nearly impossible task. For the last five minutes, Trotter has been greeted by one perfectly proportioned teenage girl after another. The greeting always includes a fierce, full-bodied hug, usually followed by a request for the skinny blond singer to sign a shirt or a CD or a body part. None of these young women is the slightest bit homely.

“We’re in the kill zone,” says Trotter without irony, his face a mask of seriousness. “If we don’t leave this spot, we’ll be here for hours.”

Clearly, he’s not joking. We don’t have hours to spare, so we move deeper into the bowels of the bowling alley/arcade and chat with relatively fewer distractions. You know, in between the moments when a promoter or label owner isn’t stopping by to ask if Trotter needs anything.

I start by telling him the Higher has come along away since I last saw them in November of 2003. Back then, Trotter had short, spiky hair and looked 13, maybe 14 years old. He was, in truth, 17, and his band’s debut EP, star is dead, had just been released by Fiddler Records. The band was optimistic about its future and eager to tour and record a proper full-length, but hesitant to boast about its accomplishment at such a tender young age. After all, it’s not every Vegas band that achieves something as simple as getting signed, let alone signing before any of its members are of voting age. Hell, when I first met up with the band at Boston Pizza in seedy downtown Vegas (and adjacent to a first-rate strip club), I couldn’t even buy the kids cigarettes. They were that freakin’ young!

“But the EP was already a year-and-a-half at that point,” Trotter reminds me, as the Rancho Cucamonga, Calif. band Rufio prepares to tear into its set at Jillian’s. “[Star is dead] was supposed to be a demo, but then Fiddler decided it should be an EP. And by the time we signed with the label and the CD was available in stores, a lot of time had passed.”

The title of the Higher’s 2003 EP is a reference, of course, to the band name Trotter and Co. used during high school: September Star. It was a group Trotter and the others had started when he was 15. The EP was recorded a year later, and although Trotter is proud of what the earlier incarnation of the Higher managed to do, he realizes that forward is the only direction worth focusing on. And his band’s brand-new album Histrionics is definitely forward-looking.

“I liked [star is dead] at the time,” says Trotter, “but if you asked me now, I’d have to honestly say that I’m sick of it. I mean, we were bummed that people thought that all we were was pop-punk band. So the biggest thing for me was to prove that we were more than that, especially in terms of the lyrics. This time, we wrote about all the different situations in life — death, drugs, leaving home, the ups and downs. Mainly, though, we wanted to write about growing up and being yourself.”

Indeed, Histrionics is fully mature work, one that avoids getting into a knuckleheaded boxing match with some of the more aggressive, metal-edged pop-punk acts (like, say, Rufio) and instead sidesteps into the realm of acoustic guitars (gasp!), drum programming and that weird vocoder device (an effect that makes the human voice sound synthetic) that Cher uses in her dance music and that Ozzy pioneered with the song “Iron Man.” And yet somehow the Higher transcends the rock-handicapped nature of these elements to create something uniquely alive, something that’s at once challenging and accessible.

Much of the credit goes to producer Rory Allen Phillips, who himself played in bands like the Impossibles and Stereo, and who recently recorded a Universal band called Recover. Trotter claims Phillips as the Higher’s best friend.

“We’d known him ever since he did some pre-production for another Fiddler band, Name Taken,” says Trotter. “We wanted to work with a friend on our full-length record so that it would be fun.”

And yes, fun was had by all, even if the drums, guitar and bass had to be recorded at World Class Audio in L.A. while the vocals were tracked separately at WWIV in Austin, Texas. It proved to be a beneficial arrangement, since Trotter’s pipes sound great, even when its being processed by a vocoder as in the cheekily-titled song “Rock Your Body.”

“We had recorded my voice normally on that track,” confesses Trotter, “but then Rory wanted to mess with it. We tried it, and we fell in love with it.”

In love with an effects processor? Wait, it gets worse for all you rock purists out there. Some tracks are even adorned with (shudder) keyboards.

If this all seems too wild for you, don’t worry. There are still plenty of brutal tracks — like the soaring opener “Diaries,” for instance — that will whack you in the chest, leaving you dazed by the wallop of guitarists Tom Oakes and James Mattison, and the pummeling rhythms of bassist Jason Centeno and drummer Pat Harter. Or like the blistering “Gone with the Guillotine,” a dark meditation on the death of love, in which Trotter screams out lines like “Give me one more chance to protest this execution,” Or the stomping “Lo,” which, when played loud enough, will shatter your neighbor’s good china.

But it’s hard to get around the fact that Histrionics represents a step forward not just for the Higher but for the entire pop-punk genre. Trotter says his band collaboratively wrote 10 songs, and then guitarist Oakes provided three acoustic pieces. “We decided they were really good, and in the case of the title track, we added this cool little Michael Jackson kind of beat and jazzed up the arrangement a bit.”

The result is a sweet confection that somehow doesn’t sound out of place among the other, harder-hitting numbers like “Darkside” and “Circle of Death.” But heavy didn’t always make the cut for Trotter.

“The original version of ‘Guillotine’ actually had some screaming in it. I know, huh? But we didn’t want to sound like we were ripping off Hawthorne Heights or something, so we got rid of the vocal-shredding. It’s weird, because I feel like my band has become a lot more rock ’n’ roll, and I just add the pop.”

So then what’s poppy about “Guillotine”? After all, the lyrics are some of the most disturbing Trotter has ever composed: “And I’d say I’ve come here to confess/And to admit everything I’ve done/You say you had no clue/So hold your head up high/To keep your neck exposed/And take all of my words/As I shoot an arrow through your neck.”

Not everything in Histrionics is drawn with a black crayon, however. A song like “Pace Yourself,” for example, is a clever kiss-off to player-haters who rip on bands for using the same chords. “You can’t the same song over again,” Trotter sings on the album’s final track. “It’s in the same key/You guys were doing so good.”

“It’s a song about songwriting, I guess,” says Trotter. “Music fans who are musicians always pick apart bands like Green Day for, like, using the same notes, the same chords. Well, Green Day’s songs are in the same key, because that key suits Billie Joe Armstrong’s vocal range, and he knows he sounds good there. Everybody who’s heard that [‘Pace Yourself’] loves it for the way it breaks down into an electronic groove.”

Indeed, “Pace Yourself” transforms before the listener’s ears, proving that inspiration often lies in a band’s stylistic approach rather than the chords it selects. But why is Trotter discovering inspiration in a recording studio instead of in a bottle of booze like a real rock ’n’ roller?

He laughs the next day when I playfully accuse him of getting trashed the night before and waking up for our interview late. “I’m not a drinker. I was up late because of ex-girlfriend drama, that’s all. Seriously, I can’t relate well with other people when I’m drinking. I was raised Mormon, but I still like to party a little.”

When I point that being Mormon is at least one thing he and Killers frontman Brandon Flowers have in common, he quips, “No, then I’m not Mormon. Just kidding. Whenever we’re on the road and people learn we’re from Vegas, they always say, ‘Oh, do you guys know the Killers?’ I’m happy for those guys, though. They write great songs, and I think it’s cool that they’re bringing attention to Vegas.”

Speaking of attention, what’s it like being on the same label as Hollywood starler-cum-punk singer Juliette Lewis & the Licks? “She’s everywhere, man,” Trotter says, obviously impressed by her career turn. “I love her. Her band is totally cool, and she’s just a straight-up show when you see her live. With costume changes and the whole bit.”

Trotter himself has switched his look, ditching his short, spiky hair in exchange for long, flowing locks that would make Farrah Fawcett green with envy. In fact, looking at Trotter as he commandeers the stage at Jillian’s, I can’t help but be reminded of an old ’70s-era Jack Kirby-created comic book called Kamandi, the Last Boy on Earth, in which a tough, spindly kid with blond locks wanders a post-apocalyptic Earth chock-full of walking, talking animals. Of course, in the ’70s, Trotter wasn’t even a wet dream, but now with his hair past his shoulders he seems to be infallible chick magnet.

“Everyone made fun of my short hair, so I grew it out and liked it. And it’s fun to rock out with. Besides, the girls are digging it.”

Long hair? Rocking out? What will these crazy kids think of next.