Localized: Temples and The Salt, The Sea and The Sun God

Regarding The Salt, The Sea, and The Sun God’s debut album, It’s All For You, singer and songwriter Dakota Miller says, “I was going for a specific brand of shit, and we nailed it.” This preference for a lo-fi DIY feel in their noisy and math-y brand of indie-pop music helped introduce them to local Provo recording engineer Stephen Cope of Studio Studio Dada, with whom they were able to experiment and expand upon ideas that Miller had been working on with the band. “Stephen is a big fan of the lo-fi sound, so we would record it, and then we’d run the drums through an amplifier and record that, and we’d run that through tape,” says Miller. “It’d just sound like shit.”

Most of the band members had been making music together for years before finding their sound as The Salt, The Sea, and The Sun God. “Over probably the first two years we were playing together, we were four or five different bands doing things that were just terrible,” says bassist CJ Sweeten. That all changed when Miller introduced the band to the demo EP that he had recorded on his own, all of which would eventually end up on their debut. “I wasn’t getting what I wanted out of the other music I’d made,” says Miller. “I was playing in a really bad band, and I wanted something that was me. I just wanted to play my music, so I recorded an EP basically just by myself, and I got these guys to do it with me over the course of a few years.”

For these guys, being a Provo band is kind of an awkward position to be in. According to Sweeten, they have “emptied rooms a few times at Provo shows.” Many of the bands in Happy Valley are of the gentler type that aspire to play at Velour, but for a band that gloriously sounds like how my hangover last weekend felt, sharing the stage with the more palatable side of the music scene can be a bit of a hard sell. Luckily for them, they’ve been able to find a home at Muse Music. “It’s mostly thanks to Stephen, Darcie [Roy] and Debby [Phillips] at Muse that we got our start,” says Miller. “They’ve given us a show every time we’ve needed one, and they have always tried to book us with other bands that would help us with connections and whose fans would hopefully like us.” Since Muse closed down their old location (they’re opening a new location on Center Street in Provo on Sept. 11), The Salt, The Sun, and The Sea God have taken a bit of a step back from playing shows and have focused on both writing new material and expanding their lineup.

Their first batch of songs came as a result of Miller’s dissatisfaction with the music he was then making, and his experimentation with new styles. “I started getting into math rock and tapping, so I practiced and decided to make some songs out of it,” he says. “When you write to a looper, you can have as many guitarists as you want.” This ultimately led to the lush and fleshed-out sound that is present on their debut album, despite the fact that there were, at the time, only three members in the band. To overcome their limited ability to play these songs live, they recently added former roommate Robert Dahle as a second guitarist and have been teaching him old songs while working on the new ones. According to Dahle, it was an easy fit since they’d all lived together at the time. “I’d come home from work and hear the song, so I knew them pretty well by the time they asked me to join,” he says.

As a four-piece, things are a little less one-sided and more collaborative when it comes to writing material for what will hopefully be their second full-length record. Instead of building songs based on loops that Miller has come up with, they jam as a band to come up with new ideas. Miller says, “We’ll find a riff we like and play for a half hour and maybe we’ll get a song out of it.”

These guys also stand out from much of the more “mainstream” part of the Provo scene in that they’re not necessarily out to conquer the world like most of the more popular bands in the city are. The Salt, The Sun, and The Sea God are more about “just making the music that you like to listen to,” according to Sweeten. “When I first heard the first EP that Dakota had recorded himself, I liked all the music on it and knew I wanted to be a part of it, because I wanted to play music that I really enjoy listening to.” To put it simply and in the words of drummer Mitch Hawkins, “It’s fun to play.”

Find The Salt, The Sun, and The Sea God on Facebook at facebook.com/SaltSeaSunGod, on Bandcamp at thesalttheseaandthesungod.bandcamp.com and at SLUG’s Localized on Thursday, Sept. 17.