Santa Dads

Lemon Hill April 10

Even in a town where oddness is a heritage industry, a performance by Santa Dads sticks out in your personal inventory of the wacked and wonderful. Joshua Kelberman wears a battered red dress ringed with a white lace collar; it's like something Edith Bunker would wear while vacuuming. Tall and lanky Connor Kizer sports a faded orange and very frayed tiger costume that looks like it hasn't been washed since his mom first stitched it together.

"I got the tiger costume because I was Hobbes and my friend Mason was Calvin for Halloween the first year Santa Dads was together," Kizer explains on a conference call in late March from deep in the heart of the Midwest while Santa Dads are on tour. "And Josh had gotten this awesome bear costume. . . . We brought the costumes [on our first tour] because we were going to be playing a furry convention in New York. But Josh had forgotten the bear costume and got a purple lion costume. No, it was a blue lion costume."

Of his own uniform's origins, Kelberman says that "Dan [Deacon] just came over to my house one day and had found the dress in the street on the way there. It was just absolutely beautiful, so I have to wear it now."

OK, tiger suit, beautiful dress found on the street--we're still somewhat in familiar territory in an era when every other underground noise-cum-weirdo band sports one kinda furry, funny, or scary suit or another. But unlike a band like Providence, R.I.'s White Mice's--playing loud and ugly metal in ratty rodent costumes--if many people would think Santa Dads' music plain odd, it's also downright beautiful. This week they play an album-release party for their Anima Mundi debut at Lemon Hill, Mount Vernon's small venue devoted to hushed, intimate performances of acoustic (or at least quiet) music.

Live, Kelberman picks prickly, repetitive notes and simple chords on an electric ukulele plugged into an infant-sized Peavey amp. Kizer occasionally breaks out a trumpet. Both sing--Kelberman in flat and quizzical melodic drone, Kizer in a deep, arch baritone like a church choirboy perverting his lessons. He also provides the band's percussion, what can only be described as a gentle beatboxing. A good example is "Open Portals," from Anima Mundi. Kelberman strums a sharp, choppy run on the ukulele, singing "When I come through/ Open portals/ I won't tell you/ I will be true" in a drowsy murmur as Kizer provides two low "vroom vroom"s in place of a kick drum and two "tssh tssh"s in place of a high-hat.

The disconnect between music and presentation--especially with the trumpet, you almost hear the stoned, fey post-bossa nova of Caetano Veloso if the Brazilian legend performed liturgical a cappella hip-hop in a bunny suit--is only slightly less jarring than the hypnotically tranquil compositions, sometimes stretching to 10 or 20 minutes, flaring up into moments of total whimsy. "For me, I like the epic feeling that a long-form song can have," Kizer says. "I like taking the emotions to very different places, all within the context of one song. It makes you feel like something's actually happened."

Kizer's sudden moans in "Theme From Victory" certainly take the song to very different places, sounding like he's trying out for the role of a ghost in a Warner Bros. cartoon during the middle of an indie-pop song. At a recent performance at the Walters Art Museum, the two held a packed house enrapt, the voices trailing the ukulele's baby steps in crazy-straw twists and turns of melodic gibberish. "I've always been into albums like Dark Side of the Moon or In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, where it's all these different songs but they all form one giant song if you want to look at it that way," Kelberman says.

Even with all the recent out-of-town goodwill toward Baltimore's fringe and semifringe music scene, Santa Dads might befuddle even the freakier-than-thou huddling in warehouses and galleries across the country. "We pretty much have the same reaction at every show we play," Kelberman says of the band's most recent tour. "We kind of alienate half of the audience, and the other half--half of those people are kind of confused and then the other half are kind of into it. And then there are the people not sure how they feel. But there are always a couple of people into it--and a couple people who are definitely not."

As part of Wham City--the crazy-quilt conglomeration of visual artists, musicians, noisemakers, actors, dancers, comedians, DJs, and mutant DIY combinations of all of the above--the two met as college students in the early part of the decade at New York's Purchase College. Typical of the incestuous kind of friendships out of which artist collectives grow, Kizer, now 26, was rooming with Wham City's Dan Deacon, who was then dating Kelberman's older sister. When the original covered-wagon expedition of Whammonites traveled down to settle in their Baltimore warehouse in 2004, Kizer came with, and Kelberman, now 25, followed shortly thereafter.

"When we moved into Wham City together for the first time, we really hadn't hung out very much," Kelberman says. "We weren't really even friends, I'd say. And [Santa Dads formed] only five or six months after we first moved into Wham City. So we were friends at that point, but we certainly hadn't played music together. I'd never been in bands before--I'd written music on my own and written music on the computer, but I'd never really performed in front of people before."

Like much of the smart-ass, gently provocative, and knowingly dumb splooge of Wham City, Santa Dads began two years ago as a gag so basic you couldn't even really call it a prank. "At the time, Dan [Deacon] was really into putting fake bands on all the [Wham City show] fliers, and one of the fake bands he put on the flier for this particular show was `Santa Dads,'" Kizer says. "And Josh and I were just sitting in our living room and we said, `Dan, who's Santa Dads?' And he said, `You're Santa Dads!'"

Thus pressed into musical service, the duo had yet to figure out what Santa Dads was beyond a name on a flier, but in typical Wham City pants-seat fashion, it wasn't a process they agonized over much. "The first show was that Friday, about three or four days" after seeing the flyer, Kelberman says. "So Connor and I were like, `OK, what are we gonna do?' Well, I've always wanted to play ukulele. And Connor was like, `Well, I've always wanted to beatbox.'" The band's first show was as improvised and haphazard as its birth, but since then Santa Dads has become a very serious going concern, despite the duo abjuring some of the related being-a-band business.

"Connor and I, we don't do any of the things that musicians are supposed to do besides the writing of the music and the playing of it," Kelberman says. "Like booking tours, recording, and things like that, we're sort of like . . . "

"Lax," Kizer says.

"Yeah, we're very lax about that side of it," Kelberman says. "So it's very helpful to have someone else be, like, `Do this.' And yeah, great, we'll do it. Fantastic. Thank you.

"It's a little bit of not wanting to take it too seriously," Kelberman continues when asked if this laxness is a way of keeping the music fun. "But neither of us like having to book tours and stuff like that. Neither of us really know how to use recording equipment that well. We're much more into the writing of music and the playing of music and the performing. The other side of things doesn't appeal to us, and so we just continue to ignore that we're supposed to be doing those things."

"And, well, it always seems to work out that we kind of fall into things just coming together," Kizer says. "Things fall together, which is something that I find very appealing.

"There's been periods when I get up in the morning and we go rehearse Santa Dads stuff all day and then we play a game of Risk," he continues. "There's been pockets of time where rehearsing Santa Dads is all I've been doing. Particularly for the longer, 20-minute pieces, I think if we didn't rehearse as much as we did, they would suffer a lot for that."

The duo has now practiced innumerable hours, presumably played many games of Risk, performed at dozens of shows around town, toured several times, usually under the aegis of Wham City, and now recorded its first album, soon to be released on the new label of under-the-radar show promoters Wildfire Wildfire.

"We actually recorded it in the house I was living at on Jasper Street, which is like a block north of the H&H [Building]," Kelberman says. "Just like a little townhouse. We worked on it for the month of September last year every day, or at least five days a week, with Jared Paolini. He's awesome, he really knows his stuff. He borrowed a bunch of fancy microphones, and we actually did some recording in the Charles Theatre, the trumpet stuff and the chanting in theater number one, because the acoustics are really echoey and stuff."

Paolini definitely captured Santa Dads' childlike mix of playacting as songwriting. Like bedtime performances for happy if slightly confused parents, Santa Dads use their tiny instruments and mouth noises to put on hermetic little musical dramas, semicomprehensible story-songs set to gnomic little tunes. But despite the occasional inscrutability, the lyrics are also funny and sweet, smart and sardonic. And even if Santa Dads' music isn't "catchy" in the same way as Cole Porter or Mims, the songs' right-angled repetitions will put down roots in your head until you're beatboxing along in line at the Safeway.

But while this minimal and mesmerizing sound has found Santa Dads an audience in Baltimore, Kizer and Kelberman talk about moving beyond the sound of Anima Mundi and their current live shows, visions of strings and French horns and keyboards and even more new instruments dancing in their heads, talking about chasing an even more crystalline, detailed sound with their next recording.

"We definitely have places we want to go after this album," Kizer says. "Vastly different places. And the niche that we've carved out will have to change to accommodate that."

"Neither of us really like playing shows for one or two people, but we're definitely used to it," Kelberman says. "And we definitely don't really care. We're definitely just trying to write music that both of us like to perform and that . . . "

"Challenges us," Kizer says.

"Yeah, challenges us," Kelberman agrees. "And expresses what we want to express."