For a project that was intended to get a pair of musicians out of their comfort zone, Megan Nash and Brodie Mohninger have grown rather comfortable as PandaCorn.
The Moose Jaw band, which also features drummer Ryan Schnell, will be opening the 2015 season of the Southern Plains Co-op After Dark concert series at the Estevan Art Gallery and Museum on Friday night.
Mohninger is a guitarist with an ear for the age of 1970s rock, while Nash is well known as a singer-songwriter, more country than swinging rock to the beat of a kick drum.
“Every project takes on a life of its own after awhile. The initial concept was to take ourselves out of our comfort zone and now it’s become comfortable, which is kind of funny,” Mohninger said about initially teaming up with Nash.
Formed in 2012, the band released their first EP, Synthesis of Opposites, this past November.
PandaCorn’s sound is straight dance rock, but to create a more distinct sound, the band added a prominent synthesizer. Mohninger noted much of their fast, guitar-laden sound has been done to death, but the addition of the synth gives them something different to help them stand out, as do the costumes they often wear, that of a panda and unicorn.
It’s the combination of those animals that gave them their name.
Mohninger and Nash were playing a Halloween show together as part of Nash’s solo act and the two costumes they had were a panda and a unicorn. During last week’s interview with the Mercury, Mohninger said the costumes may not make the trip to Estevan.
“It’s part of the symbology of it, because the band started and the costumes were an easy way for us to differentiate ourselves from our previous projects. The idea (is that) the songs are being co-written by the two of us, hence the two animal names morphing together as well.”
That the songs are written by both a man and woman plays into the subject matter of the tracks. While their music has a rhythm, a rock beat that would encourage a crowd to get up and dance, Nash and Mohninger also address gender issues and the perspectives of men and women in the modern world.
In the song Velveteen Daddy, it’s Mohninger lamenting the role of being a stay-at-home father and Nash proclaiming her desire to bring home the bread and the bacon. The song further explores what it means to be a family addressing issues of disconnectedness in a wailing chorus, all to a relentless drumbeat.
It’s that drumbeat that really guided the band’s sound in the beginning.
When they first demoed some songs, the music was played to a drum machine. They didn’t have a drummer. That initial lack of drummer meant the dance beats kicked out by the drum machine found their way into the music.
“Being accommodating for dance beats is something that definitely came out of those original arrangements and what we were doing with the synthesizers influencing the sound and tonality,” said Mohninger.
Nash had a synthesizer lying around and started playing it, while Mohninger played the guitar sitting down á la Jeff Healey, which meant a different style than he typically played.
“We were putting more emphasis on what we were writing and honing in a lot on lyrics and coming down on basic ideas to build off of for the songs because we were actually limited to basic things on our instruments,” Mohninger said.
That installation of limitation, he noted, was a way for them to focus on certain elements they weren’t focusing on for their other projects.
“There was some sort of consensus that the way the tunes would be arranged was with a three piece in mind. I’ve been in a lot of guitar-based, drum trios, and to me it’s a bit of a tired sound. It’s been done. It’s really hard to make that an original thing,” said Mohninger. “The synth played really well into that, and synth-based music tends to lend itself to more of that kind of a genre.”
PandaCorn will be the first band to perform at the EAGM in 2015. Doors for the concert open at 8 p.m. on Jan. 30. PandaCorn’s EP Synthesis of Opposite is available to stream at pandacorn.bandcamp.com
