Silver Triplets of the Rio Hondo Can’t Stand Genres or Fences

William Slater tells the tale of his undefinable Portland combo.

Silver Triplets of the Rio Hondo

“Triplets is not this thing that you think it is,” William Slater intones with a graven twinkle.

A leading light of indie tastemaker circles since adolescence—his high school rockabilly trio included the future Lucero frontman and the boy who’d direct the films Mud and Take Shelter—Slater should be more than familiar with the desperate games critics play when describing new bands, but his current Portland combo, Silver Triplets of the Rio Hondo, has spawned some especially tortured Mad Libs in their short time together.

“A writer in Seattle thought we were ‘Ennio Morricone meets ZZ Top at Lee Hazelwood’s house on mescaline,’ closely followed by a friend saying we are ‘the acid trip of Frank Sinatra and Leonard Cohen’s love child,’” Slater says. “Uncanny, right? Shadowy encounter, drug reference, location—is this the new format people use?”

This is not, once again, his first rodeo. Slater spent 18 years as an integral component of acclaimed post-rock experimentalists Grails and has been affiliated (“never a member,” he insists) with Modest Mouse for ages. (“Isaac Brock asked me to join the band in 2002 as cellist,” he recalls, “which I thought was curious since I don’t play cello.” Incidentally, it was Brock that gave Silver Triplets its name.) This is his first solo turn at the helm, and he’s hurtling his band through uncharted waters.

Where the conceptual design of Silver Triplets of the Rio Hondo debut Luminous Dial lent itself to armchair semiotics, their live revue dons the sepulchral twang ‘n’ smoke machine trappings of high desert noir only to gleefully subvert every last expectation.

Drums splash, guitars chime, and Slater’s slow-rolling Ricky Nelson star turn employs the western-fringe sonics moodily burbling beneath as a trampoline for crowd-foaming somersaults through gypsy flavors and chillwave remove toward pure pop effervescence. Slater spoke with WW about the difficulties of branding a vision as big as all outdoors.

WW: How’d this all come together?

William Slater: The origin story’s a bit unlikely. I’d been helping produce my dear friend Kyle Craft’s third record and was slotted to join him [and our drummer Haven Multz Matthews] on a particularly long U.S. tour and, you know, there was just this portentous feeling. Kyle’s a pro, but his booking agent quit suddenly and left us wondering if there’d be holes to navigate down the road.

So, the band began as Craft’s opening act?

At first, Triplets was just added insurance to our ability to produce a show in case the wheels came off somewhere far from home. I hastily recorded the songs in the days leading up to our departure, and Kyle was kindly open to the last-minute addition—even allowing us to bring on our guitarist [Christo Cook] to double as front of house. We’d only rehearsed twice before the first show. It was…chaotic.

The band found itself through the tour?

You know, our saving grace was the concept. In my mind, I pictured the English Channel ferry where a dude in the corner’s playing a Casio with [the keyboard’s] pre-programmed beats. Maybe we were using sequenced tracks out of necessity, but, armed with a concept, we could afford to lean in, make the synths more outlandish, make the key bass sound alien and strange...doesn’t work if you aren’t a little cheeky.

Our dilapidated cruise ship now [sailed on] the dissonance of improvised-versus-prerecorded music. That contradiction is at the core of Triplets.

Yacht rock, then?

Sometimes! We’re still evolving. Psych, musique concrete, country-western are often mentioned. Haven started calling us “sci-fi roadhouse” years ago, which feels right. Lately he’s moved on to “ranch house exotica,” which I have to say…also feels right. He has these beats at his disposal but can step outside of them whenever he wants. [Guitarist Chris] exists somewhere between Jeff Beck and Bakersfield country—he’ll just play and let his eyes roll back.

I’m lucky enough to play with two other guys that, even when our shows aren’t necessarily tight, see that they contain places we can travel. There’s a playfulness behind Triplets, and I hope that translates. None of it is real, after all.

And you? Any particular sources of inspiration?

I’ve been so fascinated by Fernando Pessoa. He fully believed himself a medium, wrote as 72 different people, and could somehow make his ego utterly disappear. Other than Pessoa, there’s been no shortage of absurdities to pull from. Remember when pro golfer Payne Stewart’s Lear jet depressurized and the entirely dead, frozen [occupants] traversed the country? I wrote numerous songs about that. More recently, Hans Niemann’s chess scandal I find particularly spicy. No song yet but just as an aside that is a very spicy situation.

Anything musical?

Oh right, all over the map. You like the playfulness of Beefheart to counteract the inflexibility of sequenced tracks. Paul Lytton for his drum flights. Link Wray for his brazenness. Any number of crooners (Roy Orbison, Jim Reeves, Marty Robbins) for their abilities to imbue even the most mundane of words with emotion. Most importantly, though I’d say the music is tethered to a sense of fantasy. I find tremendous freedom in not having to be myself every time I write a song or arrange music, and after all it’d be pompous to presume people want to hang with me in my most emotional spaces.

[Luminous Dial is] the very opposite of a tribute album, hopefully. I’m not sure why people think it’s natural to pluck a piece of music from its original context and expect it to hit the same. We’re impressionist, maybe? If you hear an obscure country/western 45 and think it needs a sprinkling of Vangelis? If the chocolate collides with peanut butter does it become more delicious?

Is the record meant to tell a story?

More set down a vibe, probably. Certainly nothing linear. The modern composition aspect is important to me, perhaps due to my musical education in school and with Grails. The goalposts shift when you alter the sense of space and explore how things feel in a given moment. Ornette Coleman used to say that he played ideas not melodies, yeah? We’re no Ornette Coleman, but the sentiment holds. I suppose, on its face, the record came to invoke an intergalactic AM radio station.

An occult station coming through on an alien frequency? Aliens catching stray AM radio broadcasts mid-voyage?

I’ll take that.

And it holds no real hints toward your follow-up?

No, I don’t think so! Too many ideas. People that would endure 69 minutes of supernatural AM radio music deserve a new chapter. I think record two feels more atmospheric, more fantastic, perhaps, at times, more sinister. Thematically. the instrumentation brings a few more delicate classical voices, such as harp and pizzicato violin. We’ll see how that progresses.

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