Band survives crazed fans

Circa Survive With Ours, Fear Before the March of Flames Sunday, Nov. 25 Agora… Circa Survive With Ours, Fear Before the March of Flames Sunday, Nov. 25 Agora Ballroom Cleveland, Ohio Doors open at 6:30

Circa Survive, more than your average band, are certainly circa today.

Sure, the music sounds modern – an evolved fusion of stream-of-consciousness poetry, experimental rock ‘n’ and pure energy – but what really makes the band a product of modern times is its mastery of the blogosphere. These five Philadelphia boys keep Internet journal entries like it’s their job. And in a way, it is.

After all, just as much as fans of the band like to tear through Circa Survive’s two albums and one EP, they love to get more personally involved in the band member’s lives. But as lead singer Anthony Green told The Pitt News in a recent interview, getting personal with the fans can be a tricky, sometimes uncomfortable lifestyle to lead.

“I think that we view our fans as an extension of the band. I know that sounds ridiculous, but we couldn’t operate or function without them,” Green said. “But it becomes difficult when there are people who don’t want to see you as anyone other than this band dude who is somehow better or superior. It becomes self defeating.”

But without good music for fans to play on repeat, there’d be no such lifestyle for Green and company – and the band certainly isn’t short on good music.

The story of Circa Survive is just about three years long, but already near-mythical, musically speaking. From 2003 to 2004, Green was the singer of perpetually about-to-blow-up underground emo-sensations Saosin, which was composed of the Philly singer and a band of California boys. That band released only an EP, but the hype surrounding their eventual album pushed them to become band on the tip of countless music tastemakers’ tongues – for about a year, that is.

Because when Green returned to Philly sometime in late 2004, he decided, quite simply, that Saosin wasn’t the band for him – while waiting for a layover flight back to California. Saosin trucked on without him, and Green quickly pieced together Circa Survive from Philadelphia locals. By the spring of 2005, they’d already released an EP and a debut album, Juturna, for which they toured incessantly for most of 2005 and 2006, before recording and releasing On Letting Go just last summer.

If it seems like Anthony Green is borderline obsessed with writing and creating music, well, he is. To Green, writing is a constant process crucial to nothing short of his sanity.

“I write things down everywhere – little sentences and poems. It’s tremendously helpful therapy. I’ll go ahead and say that 95 percent of it never makes it into a song. Seriously, I’ve got tons and tons of notebooks,” Green said.

A quick flip through the band’s liner notes will show that traditional lyrics just aren’t Green’s style. Each of the band’s songs contains melodies, consistently catchy ones indeed, but the verse-chorus structure familiar to most is suspiciously absent, replaced by a more fluid, free-form approach to music. Each song’s lyrics are simply a paragraph of the thoughts washing through Green’s head: “Infinite silence flowing right in with the dawn / This is wrong, this is wrong / And I cannot sleep without the radio on,” he sings on “In the Morning and Amazing