Manager will see you now

One thing that we can take for granted in Columbus – and more generally in the wide swath of America between the coasts – is the idea of space.

Years ago, when I first interviewed Joe Casey of the great Detroit post-punk band Protomartyr, he talked about the way the abandoned warehouses open for the city’s bands to rehearse in helped to shape the group’s cantankerous sound, allowing the crew the needed distance from neighbors to refine its concrete-pulverizing songs undisturbed.

Jon Chinn experienced the inverse when 13 years ago he relocated from Columbus to Brooklyn, New York, recalling how the needed downsizing led to him all but abandon music for the few years that followed the move. 

“I was doing a little writing and self-recording, but I didn’t really have a space set up because we just had a little one-bedroom apartment,” said Chinn, who has since settled in Jersey City. “Eventually, I found a super tiny closet rehearsal room where I could work on mixing and mastering, and I slowly built my clientele back up. And that’s really what got me wanting to play [music] again.”

Just as he had to rebuild his production capabilities after moving, Chinn was forced to begin at the ground level in starting a new group. It helped, of course, that Chinn is married to bassist Lori Cantu, who joined him in the newborn Manager and has since evolved into songwriting foil and vocalist whose presence is felt throughout the band’s new EP, HOT-LINE, which surfaced earlier this week on Texacobra Records. Gradually, the group expanded to a four-piece, adding drummer John Dorcas and guitarist Ron Hester, who left the band prior to the recording of the new songs.

“Right out of the gate, I was concerned [when Hester left], because I had gotten used to this bigger, messier sound,” said Chinn, who knew the guitarist’s days in the band were numbered when Manager booked a rare, out-of-town weekend gig and Hester spoke up and said that the thought of playing the show didn’t seem like fun to him. “I mean, the idea of acting like we’re 18 and driving to Philly to play a show for no money, that still sounds like fun to me, but I get it. I don’t expect everyone to think that sounds like fun. But now we get to do that and stay in nice hotels.”

Facing the defection, Chinn said there was no thought given to calling it a day, with the musician overcoming his initial trepidations and beginning to explore the possibilities inherent in a three-piece and the different ways the space that opened up in the band’s sound could become a feature rather than a bug.

“I think we realized we could be more agile as a three-piece, we could be more concise as a three-piece, and we could maybe not lean into some of the trappings that other bands fall into, where there’s just another instrument filling up space and making noise,” said Chinn, who is still best known in Columbus for fronting the 1990s indie-pop band Pretty Mighty Mighty and for the years he spent running the now-defunct Workbook Studios. “Ron’s contributions were amazing, but in hindsight maybe I did fall into those trappings of relying on another element instead of figuring out how to write a better song.”

On HOT-LINE, there’s also a subtle musical shift, with Cantu embracing the newfound openings in the songs to stretch out on bass, lacing tracks such as “Spy Balloon” with thick, pliant, rubbery grooves. Not to say that Manager has gone soft. “I just can’t shake this static,” Chinn offers amid the fuzzy pop-rock swirl of “Lady Pizza,” the line serving as an apt descriptor of the buzzing, reverb-laden guitar that slices through these four songs.

Lyrically, the musicians focus on mood more than narrative, with lines serving to capture slice-of-life vignettes and more slippery, ethereal moments in time. “For me, it’s always a snapshot of an emotional state of mind,” Chinn said. “I’m never really going to have a platform to state something where I’m going to change the world with it. But I do like an emotional reaction to hearing songs and music, so for me it’s always about creating a mood. … It’s about creating a tone I want to sit in for those few minutes.”

Increasingly, this more unguarded, emotional state is reflected in Chinn’s lyrical delivery – something he described as a departure from the more detached approach he took during his years in Pretty Mighty Mighty.

“I think in the ’90s that sort of deadpan approach you saw in [bands such as] Pavement influenced me, and I thought there was something artistic about being vague, and not just in the lyrics but in the delivery,” Chinn said. “Now, I find that I’m less self-conscious about everything. … I want to be more emotional with my delivery. And I’m enjoying playing guitar more than I used to. I used to hate playing guitar solos and now there’s more of that. I don’t know. I’m getting closer to turning out good work. Maybe I’ll figure it out eventually.”