Gazing Upward

For Stratford 4 guitarist Jake Hosek, the point of making music is to break the 20-foot rule. "Anywhere you play, especially on the West Coast, there's the 20-foot [gap] between you and the crowd," he explains. Facing the cold sea of crossed arms that's sometimes called an audience, that distance can feel like 20 miles.

A few months ago the S.F. band found a way to circumvent the 20-foot rule during a show at the CMJ Music Marathon in New York. It was a month after Sept. 11, and the audience was watching the opening act with lethargic, glazed-over eyes, stuck in the same depressed funk as the rest of the city. Something needed to be done. Three-quarters of the way through the Stratfords' standard closer, "All That Damage," singer and guitarist Chris Streng skipped the chorus and ad-libbed a few lines from the "Theme From New York, New York." Suddenly, that 20-foot barrier of space vanished, as the crowd rushed the stage.

Breaking such rules is central to a band whose music both draws on and departs from the sound of the "shoegazers," late-'80s and early-'90s British acts that plied a lush brew of distorted guitars, washed-out vocals, and buried melodies, all the while playing as they stared at their feet. That music provides a fertile starting point for the Stratford 4 -- Streng, Hosek, drummer Andrea Caturegli, and bassist Sheetal Singh -- which picks up where shoegazing left off and takes it in unforeseen directions. For, while the Stratfords' feedback-drenched, atmospheric sound recalls their British progenitors, the band's earnest presence and Streng's frequent stage banter counter the image of the self-obsessed shoegazer who mumbles lyrics into his shirt. The Stratfords abandon indifference in favor of interaction, pushing their listeners to feel something, for better or worse. With last month's release of The Revolt Against Tired Noises on New York's Jetset Records, the group seems primed to take its sound nationwide.

"Suddenly, we're exactly where we wanted to be when we started this whole thing," says Hosek, during an interview in Singh's Mission District apartment.

While getting to this point may have been a difficult process -- "We worked our asses off," Hosek says -- meeting each other wasn't as much of a stretch. In the late '90s Hosek and Caturegli moved to the Bay Area from Seattle, a town Hosek remembers as "no longer really thrilled about music," and formed a short-lived band named Triplo with Singh, who'd recently returned from a stint of living "sort of illegally" in London. After Triplo disintegrated, the trio met longtime Bay Area resident Streng through mutual friends in the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club (a similarly noisy group that's since gone on to sign with Virgin Records).

In 1999 the Stratfords self-released a four-song EP with the same title as the new album, The Revolt Against Tired Noises. The debut mixed a host of British influences, crossing the atmospheric guitar layers of My Bloody Valentine and Spiritualized with the '80s neo-psychedelia of the Church. Avoiding the unintelligible vocal style of early shoegazers like the Jesus & Mary Chain, Streng elevated his voice above the chaos of Hosek's guitar slides and tremolos, with occasional harmonic help from Caturegli. The EP was -- and remains -- a near-perfect tribute to the shoegazer sound, filtered through a couple of decades and 5,000 miles.

Optimistically, the Stratfords attempted to follow the usual path to success, shopping the demo in the hope of getting signed. It didn't work out. "We sent it out to tons of labels," Singh says. "We really pimped ourselves out. A handful wrote back, saying they were interested but wanted to hear more. We had this major collective sigh."

Eventually the band returned to the studio, recording last year's follow-up EP, This Could Be Heaven. Diversifying its sound, the foursome added upbeat pop tempos, abstract balladry, a danceable remix, and the sprawling, wondrous 15-minute epic "All That Damage." ("We lost a year recording that one," Streng says about the amount of time he and Hosek spent twiddling with their guitar pedals in search of the perfect tone.)

On the strength of the two EPs, Jetset Records -- which has released albums by such renowned indie bands as Mogwai, Arab Strap, and the Go-Betweens -- signed the group and released the Revolt full-length, a combination of the best songs from the EPs and two new tracks.

"The album is the process of us finding our feet musically," says Hosek.

"The new stuff sounds different," says Streng. "We're evolving our style."

While last year's EP started the push, the new tracks off Revolt reveal a band eclipsing its early influences and sound. Instead of using drone and distortion as the tunes' foundations, the band applies them as accents; where it used to embrace style, now it favors song structure. On "All the Fading Stars," the lack of lengthy detours into aurora guitarealis lends clarity to the singer's storytelling, while the lovelorn anthem "Displacer" builds a catchy tune from power chords and squalling guitar.