Synthetic name, real rock

I first saw acrylic five years ago in a smoky coffeehouse on Virginia Street called The Vault. It was filled with underage kids wearing black and slipping in and out of blasé stares. I was there the night that news of Princess Diana’s death filtered into our part of the world, and half the crowd cheered.

Something about acrylic has perhaps always appealed to kids in the throes of self-doubt and angst. Their full-length album out at the time, You, was a dark but beautiful rock ‘n’ roll love letter to a jilting ex-lover. The album cover was simply a reflective piece of paper, so that when you held the CD, your own distorted reflection stared back. I played this album over and over and over.

Now, when acrylic holds a mirror to its audience, different faces stare back. Older faces. Faces of people—not just kids anymore—who are ready for acrylic’s melodic, catchy, emotion-filled sound.

I saw acrylic again for the first time in years on a recent Friday night, and they still have it—the grunge-band wail, the Brit-pop flair and just a hint of goth-band darkness.

“We just felt it was time,” front man William Conran says. “It was time to start playing again.”

They’d been lying low for a couple years, but they started playing gigs again this spring. Now, with show dates booked through the summer and a new, ambitious manager, acrylic is serious not just about selling itself to Reno, but to national radio.

The band has three of its original members—Conran, bassist Robb Russo and guitarist Stephen Larkins—and a new drummer, Joshua Estes, who is a longtime friend of the band.

“Josh gives us funk,” Conran says.

Sitting around a table at Esoteric Coffeehouse before their show begins, I ask the members of acrylic how they have changed over the years, aside from the switch in drummer.

“It’s funny, because I don’t see it,” Conran says. “It’s just rock ‘n’ roll, I guess … [but now] it’s got more soul.”

Larkins agrees.

“I don’t see much of [a change],” he says. “But maybe now the world is ready for what we do.”

It sounds like a brash statement, but Larkins is characteristically quiet and unassuming as he talks of the band’s reemergence in the local music scene. For him, acrylic is simply doing what it always did—producing music with deep emotion, but without whininess or cynicism. He says that now, with artists like Remy Zero and Pete Yorn rising in popularity, audiences’ ears are tuned into their breed of song.

“Music is just essentially a medium of bringing emotion out of people,” he says. “[Our music] always seems like it’s about struggle.”

Conran laughs.

“Really, it’s all about sex and drugs and teenage partying,” he interjects. “It’s not too serious.”

Conran proved his point later in the evening when, about an hour into its set, the band launched into a cover of Britney Spears’ “… Baby One More Time.” Conran—who has electrifying grace onstage—lunged his reed-thin body at the microphone stand and crooned the lyrics between swigs of beer. The crowd went wild.

“We’ve been playing for six years, and we feel so old,” Conran says. “I guess we’re an old, old Reno band, so we’re trying to spike it up a bit.”

“Old to Reno," Russo adds. "But new to the world."