MASKS & MUSIC

Weekend show highlights new album release

Get out your cardboard, glue guns and paint; it’s time to dawn a mask and dance. Local band, Attic Ted, has just released a new album, Starfish as Man, and will be celebrating its release by performing on the square at the farmers market along with the Telephone Company. The show starts at 10:30 a.m. on June 1.

Lead singer Grady Roper describes Attic Ted’s music as “weirdo cabaret country carnival performance art punk music from Texas with masks.” The band is composed of Roper, who sings and plays various instruments, and Coby Cardosa on the drums. The shows are unique in that the band members wear cardboard masks and play different characters throughout the performance. Often, the band will have a stand set up where crowd members can construct their own masks, which adds an extra level of fun to the experience.

Attic Ted has been playing music since 2002 and has gotten better with time. As Roper put it, “we seem to just keep refining ourselves into this really unique category.”

Starfish as Man has a broad array of songs.

“There's some weird dark songs, but then there's some really sweet, pretty songs mixed in. There's even a kind of a sentimental love song in there,” Roper said. “It is a kind of a beautiful mix.”

Attic Ted’s previous album, Kafka Dreaming, was released in 2020.

“We have been collecting and writing songs that whole time. Though, on this album in the weeks leading up, I think I wrote three new songs that all ended up being on the album just in the last few weeks before recording,” Roper said. “It's kind of weird how songs just kind of come in waves. You won't write a song for a year, and then all of a sudden three or four come out all in one week. I don't know why it's like that, but I was really hit with a burst of creativity right before going into the studio.”

When writing songs, Roper starts with a “cool melody,” and the lyrics are inspired by the music itself. One of the songs on the album, La Dee Da, came to be after Roper showed his girlfriend the Woody Allen movie Annie Hall for the first time; the words in the song come directly from the film, “I don’t want to be a part of any club that would have a member like me.” Another song, Judgement Day, was written about the last time there were solar flares in the area in the 1800s, which really wreaked havoc causing electrical lines to burst into flames. Roper said it was a complete coincidence that shortly after writing this song, there were solar flares and an Aurora Borealis in San Marcos on May 10.

Many area artists have contributed to Attic Ted's latest album, including the photographer Alan Michnoff who did a photoshoot with the band, which appears on the record itself and the front and back of the packaging. Roper said Michnoff reached out wanting to do a photoshoot with Attic Ted preceded by an hour long interview to “get the spirit right.” Unfamiliar with Michnoff’s work, Roper said his expectations did not meet the high quality of the work that would come out of that photoshoot.

“And then these photos just turned out amazing,” Roper said. “We're really grateful to Alan for the contribution.”

Two other contributing artists were former Austinites – one of which was Audio Technician Mike Vasquez who is the owner of Sweatbox Studio.

“We recorded the first half of the record in Astoria, Oregon, with [Vasquez,] who forever lived in Austin and recorded all kinds of cool punk bands over the last 20 [to] 30 years,” Roper said. “Then I went to New York to finish the synthesizers and the vocals with a different friend out there [Paul D. Millar of Bug Sound East], so it's actually all Austin people that have moved away.”

The show this weekend at the farmers market will be fun for kids and adults as the other band performing, The Telephone Company, is a duo with “hilarious, quirky kids songs.”

“They're non-traditional kids songs. Adults can love this music while the kids can also,” Roper said. “For instance, one song is about two friends, Mustache and Beard, and their adventures of riding bikes around town. And actually one of them gets arrested. … They have a song about a grumpy old man, and … he builds his own coffin. And he's tired of this world, and he gets in the coffin and dies. But then it's a happy theme because he had a good life.”

Starfish as Man can be found on Spotify, Apple Music and Bandcamp.