Urbanite Baltimore: Sounding Off

Baltimore instrumental band The Water on their new album, Scandals and Animals

by Rebecca Kirkman

Sitting side by side on barstools at Federal Hill's Idle Hour, Dan Cohan and James Klink collect a stack of Natty Boh bottle caps, adding new ones to the pile as they solve the puzzles together. One, with an image of an axe and a mug, stumps them. "At some bars they throw out the caps before they give you the beer," says Cohan, "but I like solving them." Taking disjointed pieces and putting them together as a whole makes puzzles challenging. But it's also what makes them fun to solve—you have to see the bigger picture as it's formed by all the parts. Cohan and Klink face the same challenge when they write music together.

Baltimore natives Cohan and Klink, both 29, make up The Water, a cinematic band that uses loops and extensive layering to create a rich, full sound despite only having two members. The band's first album, Scandals and Animals, was recorded at Baltimore's Mobtown Studios and released in January by Scenic Route Records.

Friends since kindergarten, Cohan and Klink have always lived within a mile of each other. In a high school band they began experimenting with piecing different parts together and layering sound. "We started being gizmo-centric, with all sorts of pedals," says Klink. During the past five years playing together as The Water, they have worked out the kinks and become comfortable with who they are as a two-piece, says Cohan.

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It shows in Scandals and Animals. The album's deliberately crafted melodies move from quiet lows to driving crescendos, building a wave of sound that arcs with the buildup of drums and power chords and crashes to a lull of quiet reverb guitar. The album lacks vocals, but the duo's emotional songwriting expresses different moods through the complex and overlapping tangles of rhythm and melody.

"We basically play four people's worth of parts," says Klink, explaining how he creates the bass with the keyboard, loops it, and plays melody on guitar, while Cohan loops his drum beat and adds rhythm guitar. "We want to do things other people do but arrive at that destination in a cool way," says Cohan.

Figuring out how to achieve a full-band sound with only two people has taken some time. But the evolution has improved their songwriting, says Alex Champagne of Scenic Route Records, who helped record Scandals and Animals. "They've really tightened their sound over the years," he says, noting The Water stays true to its roots through its growth.

Mat Leffler-Schulman, who produced the album with Champagne at Mobtown Studios, agrees. "They've grown as a band. They are in this situation where they're doing instrumental music and telling a story, but telling a story with note intervals instead of words," he says. "They are so much more focused in their articulation in this record.

"There's something so emotive about what they do. It looks like two dudes standing on stage and then boom, there's this gigantic sound," Leffler-Schulman continues. "If you don't feel something, you're lifeless and dead."

For Cohan and Klink, recording Scandals and Animals in the studio was difficult. "It's really fucking hard. It's like the difference between acting on stage and acting in the movies," says Cohan. "You can't build momentum."

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Champagne and Leffler-Schulman worked with the duo to record the album in a way that worked for them. The two played in the same room together, but their amps were isolated in separate rooms for recording. "They were really concerned about getting things done right," says Champagne. "If a loop got messed up it meant we had to start over again."

Or, as Cohan puts it: "If I don't hit the pedal at the exact right moment, the song's fucked."

By the time they finish their beers, Klink has figured out the bottle cap rebus that stumped them earlier. It's Natty Boh cap 198: "Don't act so smug." But that's not something the band needs to worry about. The Water isn't trying to get big; the duo just want to continue doing what they're doing.

"I love playing music in front of people, whether it's at the Windup Space in front of fifteen or at the Ottobar in front of two hundred," says Cohan. "Maybe you get your drinks paid for, maybe you get a few bucks from door admission—it's not about that. For us, we enjoy playing shows around Baltimore and being a Baltimore band."

See The Water July 22 at the Windup Space for a Scenic Route Records showcase with Joseph Mulhollen, The Manly Deeds (Dan Cohan's other band), and A Cat Called Cricket.

Read at Urbanite.