Melody makers

Many musicians in Reno are jaded or bitter. Frustrated by the lack of opportunities, many musicians here are resigned to a life of swimming the short distance back and forth from shore to shore, or searching desperately for a river to a larger body of water. So it’s refreshing to encounter someone like Ben Miller, a 20-year-old University of Nevada, Reno journalism student and the vocalist of the band She’s So Provocative.

“Here, it’s like every day there’s going to be fires,” says Miller. “There’s going to be planes crashing, and there’s going to be people being shot left and right.”

Those events are obviously tragic, but Miller conveys a sense of nervous, wide-eyed excitement when talking about it. He grew up in Elko, and for him, Reno is the big, dangerous city. She’s So Provocative’s song “Green Glowing Sky” depicts Reno as a place where “there’s laughter and joy … and everyone’s dying.” The title of the song references the way the downtown casino lights, particularly the green lights of the Silver Legacy, reflect off clouds at night.

Musically, the group falls in with the more artful end of mainstream radio rock—The Killers are an easy reference point. Guitarist Austin Smith and bassist Chris Monzon have fundamentally melodic styles, and their parts relate to one another in a tangential, polyphonic way. The bassist doesn’t just play root notes and the guitarist doesn’t always play chords—they both play clean melodies.

Most contemporary guitarists use their instruments in a rhythmic or textural way, or as a purely harmonic backdrop for a vocal melody. Even guitarists who play guitar solos primarily focus on sonic effects like feedback and distortion. Smith’s guitar lines often use delay and other effects but never at the expense of melody.

“And Ben, with his vocals, ties everything together,” says Monzon.

Miller’s voice has that high, wounded-but-defiant quality that often gets called “emo.” There’s also an element of third-generation Morrissey-style crooning in his flowing, watery approach to vocal melodies.

In fact, melody—rather than rhythm or energy or atmosphere or anything else—dominates this band, including the drums. Drummer R.J. Koons tends to follow the vocal melodies with tom rolls, rather than just playing locked grooves—though he does throw in a lot of dance-punk beats. Because the rhythms follow the melodies, there are a lot of time changes, but not stop-and-start, more like ebb-and-flow.

Lyrically, Miller doesn’t just write about Reno. “Korova Milk Bar” is about the seedy joint in A Clockwork Orange that serves milk laced with various drugs. He says his lyrics often begin with personal feelings, which are then obscured by metaphors.

“I’m kind of metaphorical to a fault,” he says, though he acknowledges that leaving room for interpretation is part of the artform of writing and listening to songs. “I kind of want people to hear what they make of it.”

“There are three meanings for every song,” says Koons. “What the songwriter intended, how it actually sounds, and how the listener interprets it.”

Three of the band members are 20 years old; Monzon’s 19. They’re all students at UNR. The group’s youth might provide a worthy excuse for a few misguided creative decisions—the band name, for example—but the band’s youthful exuberance is also its appeal.

And hopefully, as these musicians grow older, they’ll mature, without losing that exuberance. This pond needs more colorful fish.