The Gentle Guest

    That careful choice of location is heard and felt throughout each of the ten tracks. The Gentle Guest didn’t just capture the sounds of instruments, they captured the sounds of them filling whole houses. Banjos and guitars ring with clarity while brass and woodwinds fill bedrooms, beaten drums and vocal chants echo down hallways and an upright bass booms its way across floors. “Each space sort of lends its own specific feel to the recording,” Rykal says, a trait that helps give We Are Bound... some of its rustic mystery.

    Playing the new songs live has been a bit of a chore for the band, if not for trying to recreate the feeling of the album, than just for the simple task of fitting all the members and instruments on stage. “We’ve had upwards of 8 or 9 people,” says Rykal. “We wanted it to be some sort of rowdy, theatrical spectacle. We figured having a ton of people on stage was the easiest way to accomplish that.”

    The band’s latest challenge to prepare for is gearing up and dwindling down for a tour this fall. For the sake of simplicity in numbers, The Gentle Guest will travel with only half of its members, which means that those five will need to find a way to play the music that ten once did. The band welcomes the challenge, though, and looks forward to figuring out their next steps.

    “The best thing for me about The Gentle Guest is the fact that I get to play music with some of my closest friends,” says Rykal, “and the cast of characters is always changing. It’s the change that keeps it interesting.”

    The Gentle Guest (CD release) + The Nick Jaina Band + Laarks. Saturday, Sept. 20 at 7pm at the Grand Little Theatre, 102 W. Grand Ave. $6. ALL AGES. www.myspace.com/thegentleguest.