By Brian Truitt
Examiner Staff Writer
Published: Tuesday, September 27, 2005 12:11 AM EDT


Keyser Soze may have inspired the deceiving characteristics of Kelly Carr's music, but it's Polyphonic Spree leader Tim DeLaughter who's responsible for putting those songs in record stores.

Carr's band, Pilotdrift, had been playing for a little more than a year around Texas when it played an in-store show at Good Records, the Dallas shop owned by DeLaughter and his wife, Julie Doyle. The employees had been hyping Pilotdrift to their boss, and he fortuitously was in town, became a huge fan and released the band's debut, "Water Sphere," on his Good Records label.

Like The Spree, Pilotdrift's songs tend toward the complex, with several changing moods and textures right in the middle of a phrase. That's where Keyser Soze comes in. After seeing "The Usual Suspects," Carr was intrigued with the idea of the music encompassing a character, using what looks like a weakness as a trap in order to deceive the listener.


Usually his songs are finished so fast, Carr doesn't know they've altered much until he hears them in the studio.

"Seeing its personality is like hearing somebody's voice and then meeting them for the first time," says the singer/pianist/acoustic guitarist. "It's like, 'Oh, that's what you look like.' "



Examiner: What was it about you guys that hooked DeLaughter?

Carr: He said when I met him that things would be going in one direction, and then all of a sudden you'd be hit from the side and whips you around in the other direction. It's totally unexpected - you're just along for the ride. It was an aspect that really just grabbed him and he loved it. For someone who's never heard us, that is one of the advantages, I guess.

Examiner: Has the band always tried to surprise listeners with its songs?



Carr: Some of them do something unexpected but that's not the prime directive. A lot of my songs, I've always been interested in film scoring, music that goes along with an image. I'm very visual that way, and a lot of times the concept or the story of a song, it's kind of like I'm writing music as a score to that. There's times when it calls for the music to change and to respond with what the story's saying this moment. It's not one whole color - there's a lot of different [colors].

Examiner: Because of your cinematic bent, if you were going to score a movie, what genre would your musical abilities best be suited to?

Carr: Porn, definitely. [Laughs] Yeah, I mean, because stuff happens unexpectedly. That's the whole point. Didn't see that coming, did you?

Drifting away

- Kelly Carr wrote the song "So Long" for his high school graduating class, and performed it at a commencement ceremony.

- Carr lives in Texarkana, near the state lines of Texas and Arkansas.

- It took Pilotdrift a week to work out a way to perform its epic "Jekyll and Hyde Suite" live.

Pilotdrift

"Water Sphere"

Good Records

There's classic rock, classical crossover and symphonic rock. So why not symphonic indie rock?

And no, I'm not talking about Mozart running around in Converses and a Bright Eyes hoodie, or Beethoven whining about how Jeff Tweedy is so much better than Jay Farrar.

Like The Polyphonic Spree after a music-appreciation course, Pilotdrift is awash in complex musicality on its debut CD, with hints of Freddie Mercury charm and the catchiest progressive nature this side of Peter Gabriel-era Genesis.

Frontman Kelly Carr throws in driving chants, burping low brass and grandiose electronic harmonies in "Caught in My Trap," "Bubblecraft" is like a Burt Bacharach show taken aboard a space-shuttle mission, a weirdly swinging circus march is one of the odd little inhabitants of the schizophrenic "Elephant Island," and the bouncy "Late Night in a Wax Museum" namedrops Marilyn Monroe, Napoleon and Doris Day.

All of that is just a precursor to the main course: the 10-minute epic, "Jekyll and Hyde Suite," a track that came out of Carr's own personality struggles within himself. You half expect Lon Chaney to come crawling out of the ground after the grand and spooky organ intro, and it turns into an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical gone wrong after that, with bells tolling and freaky voices dancing in a waltzy manner.

Indie rock has sounded weird, but never in such a classic or brilliant way.

Brian Truitt