Martians change name, tour campus

Mike Newmark Assistant Arts Editor

At 5:40 p.m. in the Davison basement, Martians guitarist Morgan von Ancken ’07 hurries down the hall for 5:15 p.m. band practice, holding a tangled mass of cords. He is the first to arrive. After setting the cords down, he explains that the band had lost both keys to their equipment van, and after an exhaustive search they had just found one of them under a bed in the Terrace Apartments. “It’s been a little crazy,” von Ancken admits. Soon the other band members—Andy Connors ’08 (drums), Nick Crane ’07 (vocals/guitar) and Sam Lindy ’08 (bass)—trickle in one by one. Lindy looks particularly haggard—he’s sick with a cold and has a paper to write. But once the Martians pick up their instruments and begin to play, the change in atmosphere could not be more pronounced; it’s all positive energy in that tiny practice room, down to the very last note.

Sounds fly during the aptly titled “The Dance Song,” as Lindy slaps his bass, Connors pounds on his drums, von Ancken noodles tastefully on his guitar, and Crane sings melodically into a microphone hanging down from a water pipe. The band then jumps into the loose-limbed “Away You’ll Never Be,” complete with head-nods and handclaps, before turning a corner with the speedy rocker, “Run Across The Sky.”

Connors’ drumming is ridiculously fast, and he winces and looks away as though he expects to be hit by shards of wood flying off his drumsticks.

The Martians have only been together for three months, but the band members are no strangers to music or to each other. Crane and von Ancken played together as Ugly Nick and the Fat Kids Who Hate Him in their freshman year, and Lindy and Connors made up one half of Landshark 6, who played at this year’s Parents Weekend dance party. In addition, Connors has been a part of a Boston jazz combo for the past four years, and Crane once toured with a rock band in Mexico.

Their experience has turned them into skilled individual musicians, but as the Martians they possess chemistry that comes from a shared vision: to have a freaking good time. Fortunately, they all have the same ideas of what a “good time” means—the Martians grew up listening to classic rock, jam bands, and a heavy dose of 1990s alternative rock, and they use those as touchstones in their own music. If Green Day and the Red Hot Chili Peppers had a lovechild, it would sound a lot like this.

The Martians have already played a handful of shows around campus, including Cushing’s Scantily Clad Night, the Toga Party at South Commons, the music festival Bizarroween in the Students Building, and a show at the Pub, where they are slated to play again in early December.
Despite limited recording time, they have been able to lay down their first original song, “Cessaly,” though they like to joke that they were hung over during recording. Lindy said, “The four of us together were about as useful as one normal person.” Practice space has been similarly limited and the band was finally forced to move to Davison.

Although they’ve gone through many band names—Ugly Nick and the Fat Kids Who Hate Him, Halloway—this frustration hasn’t colored their music, which is consistently appealing, and on campus, there aren’t too many people doing what the Martians do. Check out the Martians at purevolume.com/themartians.