Winderous Igloos

By ELLIOTT JOHNSTON

The Winderous Igloos are seeking great songs.

Learning to crawl before learning to walk is superb advice for the toddler crowd. Aping other musicians before trying to unfurl your own singular brilliance on the world — that’s not a bad pointer for a young band either.

Fort Collins indie-pop band the Winderous Igloos’ first project, Halleluiah Darling, was formed with the specific intent of covering the songs of another, similarly teenaged local group, The Boom Bom Deem Bom. That Halleluiah Darling, comprised of principal Igloos Jonathan Alonzo and Rion Hover, set out to use someone else’s material before presenting their own isn’t the anomaly here; it’s that Alonzo and Hover gave the Simon and Garfunkel treatment — two male voices singing pretty over acoustic guitars — to Boom Bom Deem Bom songs, which are mostly anarchical, dance-party punk. Also, Alonzo and Hover sometimes played in the now-defunct Boom Bom, so in a sense, they were learning the Ps and Qs of mellowing out their own disco madness.

“They had good songwriting under the beats,” Hover says of the Boom Bom. “Underneath all the glitz and glamour, there are some good chords and melodies.”

Listening to the Winderous Igloos, it’s clear that good songcraft — the science of catchy tunes, using notes and verses and choruses to unlock a stranger’s ear and yank at his heartstrings — is an obsession of Alonzo and Hover. The two began the Igloos as an acoustic duo in 2005, using only the most skeletal of ingredients: two breathy, harmonizing voices and two entangled guitar lines. However, for their most recent, self-recorded album, ¡No Mas! No More!, the Igloos pulled a move that Hover calls “reverse engineering of what we did originally,” adding a full band of friends, piling volume on the campfire sing-along.

Don’t assume the result is a return to the unruly noise they initially sought to deconstruct (not so far-fetched when noting that their sometimes-bassist Riley Cravens also plays with local noise-rock misfits the Flying Fetus Fortress — incidentally, the best-named band around). No, all amped up, Alonzo, Hover and company still enforce their pop initiative.

As a rock band, their sound veers toward sensitive-dude indie-rock; it’s more intent on presenting lyrical scenes and inner monologues than a swaggering machismo. And they do it well. Their hooks are infectious, and they find a nice balance between sloppy and slick. Though young indie-rock can fluctuate between awkwardly earnest and overwhelmingly mopey, Alonzo and Hover’s more upbeat songs are propulsive and joyous; their more mellow ones retain drama by patient delivery and nonobvious turns of phrase. Most importantly, the band sounds genuinely excited to be making music, and that excitement comes through the speakers.

Alonzo is especially enthusiastic about their first headlining gig at Hodi’s. Because he and a lot of his music-making friends are a few years shy of the drinking age, they are often left out of the bar venues. But recently Hodi’s began booking younger local bands, and more importantly for young fans (who are generally open to more eclectic and adventurous forms of music than their legally-boozing elders), Hodi’s is holding more all-ages
shows.

“That’s really exciting,” Alonzo says. “That’s like the venue in Fort Collins. [Downtown coffee shop] Everyday Joe’s is like our place, because we get shows there, but Hodi’s is like the big venue that local bands can play. And playing 21-and-up and 18-and-up shows kind of sucks, because our friends can’t come.” - RM Chronicle