Local band Yours Truly embraces ‘math-pop’

Pittsburgh-based band Yours Truly had one important thing going for it right away:… Pittsburgh-based band Yours Truly had one important thing going for it right away: experience.

The trio, consisting of lead vocalist/guitarist Justin Portis, bassist/back-up vocalist DJ Huggy and drummer/back-up vocalist Eric Downs, united through a mutual acquaintance, jazz musician Gene Stovall.

All of the members had played with him before, but one concert in particular brought them together.

“It was the middle or end of my senior year, and Gene had booked my band a gig with his band in Erie,” Downs said.

DJ Huggy was already playing with Downs, and Portis came into the picture after Stovall asked if he would play the gig as well. Downs and Portis ended up carpooling together and spent the two-hour drive discussing music and the way they felt it should work.

“By the time we got to Erie, we had a band,” Downs said, laughing.

The group deems its genre “math-pop” — a new take on the concept of “math” music, an intricate, guitar-based take on rock, most popular in the mid-90s. Because its sound didn’t fit any genre in particular, Downs said the band asked itself, “Why not smash [all of our elements] together into math pop?”

“We talk about it a lot, because we don’t want to fall into the ‘we don’t know’ category … we really want to categorize it,” Portis said.

“The way we looked at it is … if you look at the composition of the song, and especially Justin’s voice, he has an extremely pop-friendly voice, but we do have a lot of time-signature-heavy elements, so we try to find the perfect marriage of these two,” Downs said.

In Yours Truly, each member brings a different element to the mix: DJ Huggy, for example, is a skilled producer; Portis is an experienced singer-songwriter; and Downs has a keen sense for arrangement and perspective. This might be due in part to their divergent musical backgrounds: DJ Huggy is a studio producer/engineer, Portis is a professional jazz and classical trumpeter and Downs is a jazz drummer.

Portis said that their experience in professional music has helped keep them afloat.

“Bottom line … a lot of bands are just in it to be in a band, but we were musicians first. We recognize this is a job. It sucks, it’s painful to know, but it’s a business,“ he said.

While most bands feel that bad music has no purpose in the world, Yours Truly disagrees.

“We draw a lot of influence from bad music … We’ll take elements and say, ‘Okay, what makes this not pop?’” Downs said. “You can listen to the most boring artist in the world and say, ‘You know what, I don’t like this music at all, but now what can I get from this artist to either utilize or avoid?’”

The band’s debut EP, The Colorage, is, according to Portis, “five songs that are well-arranged about girls.”

“That’s not to say [we] don’t have songs that are totally out of left field and not about that at all, but for whatever reason those are the five songs [we] chose,” he added.

Future plans for the band include another CD and some out-of-state traveling.

“We’ve since returned to Erie, played in Greensburg and we’re starting to book outside of Pittsburgh in the surrounding states, places like Ohio, Washington, D.C.,” Downs said, mentioning that they’d love to eventually play in Philadelphia and “make [their] coverage area bigger and bigger.”