band

the calmer is...

brian vees guitar / vocals

fee garro bass / addl. vocals

the calmer started as a band called figurehead: fee and brian had known each other for a year and played music together and wanted to start a band for a while during that time. sometime in april of 2006, andrew came to a party at fee and brian's apartment where he played for a bit on brian's electric drum set. that was all it took for fee and brian to recruit andrew and start the long awaited band. jamming and practices commenced immediately. for lack of a place to practice, fee and andrew made the hour long drive to Gardnerville at least three times a week to practice in a guesthouse. it went like that until august, when fee, brian and andrew all moved into a house together and really started concentrating on the band, which they had decided to call figurehead. between august of '06 and may of '07, they wrote the music for the album 'creative differences', released 5/19/07, which was also the date of the band's first show at club underground.

they played shows pretty steadily for the next year, and began writing the music for the next album, later to be named natural disaster. at this point the band decided to incorporate elements of progressive rock music such as longer, less standardly structured songs as well as odd time signatures, partially to contrast with the first album which was fairly mainstream. also, it was decided to have the album tell a story, which was written over the course of many, many long nights at the bar down the street, bully's.

a long, long time passed with this sophomore effort unfortunately falling into obscurity, but after several years, the music was resurrected and work began once again. brian and fee resumed writing the story in a familiar bar setting, this time in sacramento, and slowly but surely wrote and recorded what they had started a decade prior. in may of 2020, 11 years after the release of natural disaster, this album was finally released to the public: a 77-minute concept album entitled "presence": an album depicting the journey of a space-faring colony in search of a new home after earth suffered an apocalyptic event dooming its inhabitants and rendering its environment inhospitable.

the band continues to support their new album, and talks have already began on possible future works.

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