Folk and Roll

It may seem “old-fashioned,” but The Eastern Sea are “just five people trying to convey emotion through our voices and instruments,” says singer Matt Hines. The group plays its own brand of “progressive pop” or “folk and roll” and live, “everything that you see or hear is us—no tricks, no cheap gimmicks.” Hines began performing as The Eastern Sea in August 2005, and the current group has played together since last summer—though most of them met when they were younger in Houston. “I do a lot of the initial creation alone and then find new stamina in the group process of arranging and conceiving performed music,” he says. The Eastern Sea released their second album Plague as well as their holiday compilation First Christmas in 2012 and have been in the studio this year working on new material. Hines usually records with Reason and MIDI tracks to get ideas and then brings broad concepts to the band “and we make them more ‘real.’” Solitary creative moments at home often inspire Hines, as do “mysterious places,” hence the nod to C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia in their band name. “It was a frontier in that world—a place where physics and reality eventually fell apart,” he says. “Austin has a really eclectic mix of sounds, from garage rock to cumbia and Tejano. So we’ve drawn from a lot of the more traditional Texas sounds that we couldn’t avoid unless we were denying ourselves. But it’s cool because people from Austin also tell us we don’t sound like an Austin band.”