photo by Bridget McQuillan

by Chance Solem-Pfeifer

In the EP-length video for their EP Confetti, Phox seems to pull colors from cereal boxes as much as from the blooming palettes of depressed painters.

The treatment of color from the Madison, Wisc., sextet charges and retreats like the songs themselves. Songs like “Blue and White” are given to the gravity of singer Monica Martin’s thin, spirited lilt on top of a pop/rock band playfully fascinated with its own instrumentation. “Slow Motion” by contrast is a Ferris wheel of sounds.

“We’re always going to be a little bit of a mess just because we’re a mess,” Martin said over the phone with humorous resignation. “I think you can have something be chaotic and also have clarity. There’s so many things happening that we like, but without a little bit of focus, it can turn a little bit gray.”

Another marquee character in the video made by Phox banjoist Zach Johnston is the house in which the band lives, rehearses and (to this point) records. It’s a boxy, yellow Madison home with two spacious gathering areas, one that serves as a practice room and the other as a kind of office (and a fun room before their Playstation 3 kicked the bucket).

And though the Confetti video lends varied moods to the rooms of their home, living and working in the same place can be confusing waking experience when impulses to work and play cross each other.

“What’s uncomfortable about doing work in the place where you live is you never feel like you’re fully resting when all the tools you’re supposed to be touching are right by you,” Martin says. “I couldn’t put myself in a place where I was working efficiently or actually resting. Like I want to watch Netflix and not be in a band right now, but it’s hard when you hear someone playing the piano from your bedroom.”

Phox is preparing to record its first studio album, which will feature both previously unrecorded and released material. They will also perform at Slowdown on Saturday night with Lot Walks. Tickets are available here.

Often, Martin stands at the center of a cornucopia of melodic instruments (pianos, clarinet, trumpet, banjo, bass ukulele) — depending on what listeners are drawn to in the music, she cautions — her voice often tiptoeing around the fault line of her head and chest voice. Not only does this vocal transition usher in a high technical degree of difficulty, but the songs take on a state of flux. It’s an aesthetic quality Martin is interested in, but also one derived from her relatively short three-year history of singing, a lasting Brandi Carlile kick and a brief affair with the vocal gymnastics of yodeling. Possibly to the dismay of her roommates.

“I’m still trying to figure out what my voice is,” she says. “It’s still really new to me: playing around with the break in my voice a lot. I’ve ended up writing songs in my mid-range and breaking in and out of my head voice just because I think it’s more interesting.”

Despite the songs’ tendency toward instrumental cirque du soleil, Martin maintains it’s important to her that the complex pop sonics of a Phox song partially support — or at least don’t undermine — the personal nature of the pieces.

“There may have been a few times when I said it was really important that we don’t make this sound cartoonish because this is a song about my childhood,” she says. “I don’t take myself so, so seriously, but it wasn’t a joke to me. We play around a lot so it’s easy to creep past that line of sounding corny.”

For evidence, Martin describes an instance when a member of the antics-given band unintentionally insulted her place in the songs. It’s an episode that’s taught her the relativity of music focus, but also hardened her resolve to respect the spirit of the lyrics.

“One of the boys after a show kind of jokingly said, ‘I don’t even know what you’re saying half the time.’ And I was heartbroken. Like, how are you playing these songs if you don’t know what they’re about? But people can interact with music and get energy from those songs (differently). But it’s important to me that even just once they understand where the song is coming from emotionally for me.”

Martin says the songs can document uncomfortable sexual experiences she has no choice to laugh at. But digging into the details of “Espeon,” Martin is forthright with a story of “acidic” adolescent family life, recently reconciled. Over the phone, the second half of her “Espeon” analysis is stymied by tears and a staggered, muted, “You’ll have to forgive me.” Wrapped up in the emotion are doctrines from a burgeoning songwriter, who says she wants to pen lasting songs, even if that’s “weird” for her to say out loud:

“I don’t want to allow myself to go past cheeky to, ‘Well, I got fucked over, that’s the world for you.’ I don’t want the music to feel like I can’t say how I feel.”

Chance Solem-Pfeifer is Hear Nebraska’s staff writer. His favorite current falsetto break happens in the chorus of this song. Reach him at chancesp@hearnebraska.org.