By Chris Brook
Sean Yeaton sounded exhausted.
His band, Daniel Striped Tiger (DST), was about to embark on an ambitious tour that will see the Boston-based post-hardcore four piece band weave through the country as they criss-cross highways, playing more than 30 shows during the course of five weeks.
Before Yeaton can rest, he’ll need to help his bandmates silkscreen posters, press one-inch buttons and ready the vinyl copies of the band’s third record.
Yeaton, a junior English major, plays guitar alongside friends Jason St. Claire (vocals), John Bogan (bass), and Daniel Madden (percussion). They also attend college in metro Boston – St. Claire and Bogan at Suffolk University and Madden at the Art Institute of Boston.
“It can get hectic,” Yeaton said. “In the last year, I gave every sort of free moment and promised it to furthering the operations of the band. It can be kind of frustrating because we all have a lot of things we want to be doing, but the band is always something we enjoy putting every last drop of our time into.”
The band, originally from New Hampshire, makes incisive music with complicated and gritty guitar arrangements. DST’s work is simultaneously loud and abrasive, yet melodic. St. Claire’s vocals are shouted, yet impassioned.
The band is fiercely committed to the do-it-yourself scene. During the last four years, the quartet has been playing shows in basements and living rooms across the country to handfuls of people, befriending musical contemporaries along the way.
During the last month, DST experienced an event that turn heads. To celebrate the release of their new record, “Capital Cities,” the band threw a concert at the Danvers Art Association in Danvers with the band Ampere.
Midway through their first song, Danvers police officers shut the venue down and arrested St. Claire and two crowd members, citing disorderly conduct. Despite public outcry and contradictory police reports, the three could face six months in prison if convicted.
In January, the band plans to tour Europe, a move Yeaton hopes won’t interfere too much with his spring co-op plans, when he will be working for Spin Magazine.
Yeaton, whose focus is in anthropology, said most of his schoolwork influences his band work, whether his creative writing inspires lyrics or novels he reads serve as a muse for the songwriting process.
“In anthropology, I do a lot of digging, looking for correlations between times in history, novels and written work,” Yeaton said. “This contrasts to me as a songwriter. I dig through my record collection and my ear wraps itself around structures and riffs.”
“Capital Cities” marks the band’s third full length record and the follow-up to 2005’s Condition.
“When we wrote ‘Condition’ we were freshmen in college,” Yeaton said. “We were anchored to home, we had the same girlfriends from high school and our lives were stagnant.”
“Capital Cities” is the sound of cohesion: songs meld together, segue in and out of deceptively serene guitar before Madden’s frenetic drumming kicks in, while St. Claire bellows along.
“This record is like the difference between bungee jumping and sky diving,” Yeaton said. “We’re divorced from the suburbs we grew up in, out of our parent’s basements, this is just a watermark record.”
