Soaking up the sun on a bar patio last week, Dave Simonett seemed unfazed that the June-like temperatures were sure to bog down his band's first April gig. He and the other members of Trampled by Turtles were headed up to Lutsen ski resort the following night.
"There probably won't be any snow, but we'll still have a good time," he said.
Trampled by Turtles remain some of the happiest players you're liable to come across. Getting to play two CD-release shows at First Avenue this weekend would give any Minnesota band reason to cheer. TBT's new album, "Palomino," is their first with widespread national distribution.
It looked as if TBT actually splintered over the past year in various side projects. As "Palomino" suggests, though, the Turtles are as unified as ever. "We still love playing together and are excited by it," said Simonett. "I think having our other little projects helped a lot. It gave us time away, and adds a nice perspective."
The Turtles are operating on such a fine-tuned level that they were able to record "Palomino" on the fly in a variety of locations and still make a cohesive album. They even wound up laying one track ("Gasoline") in a dumpy hotel room on a rainy day in Washington, D.C. "The plan was to just get rough, raw demos of new songs as they popped up," Simonett explained. "We took a long break and planned to go back in the studio and do a more formal session, but when we looked back on those original recordings, we really liked 'em a lot."
The Turtles pretty well cemented their formula on 2008's "Duluth," balancing rapid instrumental jams with Simonett's slower, down-and-out songs. The same fast/slow/fast game plan defines their live shows. When a heckler good-naturedly yelled, "Play faster, why don't ya?" at the band's SXSW gig last month, he was immediately made the fool as the quintet slid from one of its high-revving instrumentals into the skidmark-like "Separate," an especially miserable breakup song that may rank as Simonett's finest to date.
Married and settled in his personal life, Simonett said he wrote a lot of these songs "while watching someone I know and care about, in one way or another, go through something that's incredibly difficult, and having this helpless feeling that I can't help out." Pretty heavy stuff for such an upbeat band. In Turtlesville, this is where you cue the strings and pick up the tempo.
