Timeflies stakes claim to boy band image

 

Inside the Pepin Gymnasium on Friday night, with stage lights blazing in all directions, hundreds of students aglow crowded around the stage, feet moving to the beat, hands reaching for a leather-jacketed band-boy with more cool strut than flashy flaunt. Hip-hop duo Timeflies blasted the house with thumping arrangements colliding from electronic, pop, dubstep and rap in this year’s spring concert, an annual event curated by the Middlebury College Activities Board (MCAB).

“They are a cross between Maroon 5, White Panda and Wiz Kalifa,” MCAB Concerts Committee co-chair Nick Mallchok ’14.5 said.

No stranger to the NESCACs, Cal Shapiro and Rob Resnick, nicknamed Rez, of Tufts University interweaved their performance with Midd Kids in mind, spinning Ke$ha’s “Die Young” into a narrative of the Middlebury party life. Lobbing this track would seem to pander for cheers if it weren’t for their earnestness in engaging with the audience.

“The wildest moment of the show was definitely the Middlebury freestyle,” MCAB Concerts Committee co-chair Molly Sprague ’13 said. “Before the show, Cal requested a list of Middlebury specific terms and then took it from there.”

With Shapiro carrying the vocals and Rez producing music, the up-and-coming duo impressively stretched across the stage: Rez dialing big beats raised at center stage, Shapiro frequenting all corners of the stage with the flashing lights and thrashing music overcoming the audience with boom and bass. Still, the boom and bass seemed to overcompensate for the lack of pull onstage. With Rez stationary, leaving Shapiro on duty to raise energies, the stilted and somewhat cohesively void gravity on stage spread across the room as some stacked against bleachers and dance circles strayed to the outskirts.

Still, rounding the edges was the multistory of LED landscape screen that stretched across the stage, a giant clock and raised DJ booth. In paralleling Timeflies’ genre-blended soundscape with a glittering display of lights, the concert took the audience to new terrains.

But Timeflies did not exactly throw us in new terrain; rather, they gently guided us. The duo remixed and covered familiar songs like the timeless Little Mermaid’s “Under the Sea” and Calvin Harris’ “Sweet Nothing” putting a Timeflies spin on the usual formula.

At first blush, Timeflies might be construed as another uniform pretty-boy-band — only in the sense that they simply are pretty boys with — my only gripe — the squint of a Jonas Brother. But they move beyond those labels, self-identifying their music as “Electro Hip Pop Dub-Something.”

However much they may be akin to boy bands, Timeflies, it seems, is all about sonic variety, covering a broad range of tracks from rap to introspection.

“We’re mostly just hoping you don’t know what to call us afterwards,” Timeflies said in a Sunset in the Review interview. “That you can put it on when you’re out on Saturday night and then again when you’re hungover in bed Sunday morning.”

Timeflies is best known for their weekly Youtube-released tracks series “Timeflies Tuesday,” under the channel name Timeflies4850. Ranging from dulcet acoustic tones to piano ballads to dubstep remixed covers, their in-studio videos rack up as much as 2.5 million views, the most popular of which: a remix — sans irony — of Carly Rae Jepsen “Call Me Maybe,” Celine Dion’s “I Will Always Love You” and Flo Rida’s “Wild Ones.”

But what is perhaps most interesting about Timeflies is their ironic claim to fame: where idiosyncratic meets the hackneyed. They delineate themselves from the very songs they cover, namely, from the Top 40 music catalog. They make original out of what was originally not theirs without posturizing, running the sounds through so many alterations that it ends up being a different product while maintaining its singular beauty. While this is what all cover bands essentially do — recrafting popular songs — Timeflies reinterprets and repurposes the tracks entirely, layering springy synths, freestyling over remixes, dropping pulsing beats, heavy on its hits.

Now the duo has broken free from strictly relaying tracks, releasing their own content. In November 2012, their six-track EP, “One Night,” shot to number one on the iTunes overall charts. Their lead-off track, “Swoon,” was released a few weeks ago off their second all-original album slated to drop this summer.

As long as Timeflies can innovate, there are good things ahead.

All to say, Timeflies’s concert was flashy, forcing stage energies that landed kind of flat. But out of that light, for only two guys, their sound is loud and as diverse as they come. Still, with an evolving interest from imitation to imagination, Timeflies is indeed a product of its processes.