Pop Empire's Henrie Wilson and Cameron Cochran (Photo credit: Provided)

Just prior to their EP release show at the Southgate House, Cameron Cochran and Henrie Wilson of Pop Empire sat down with Each Note Secure to talk about their new album and the upcoming CD release party.  The Rainy Child EP release party takes place this Saturday at the Southgate House.

Pop Empire, Cincinnati’s latest edition to the music scene, is seemingly made up of contrasts and opposites.  Physically, the band is made up of two opposing forces.  There’s Cameron Cochran, who is by all appearances, a mountainous man with a deep voice and the confidence of someone who has been playing music for a good length of time.   Henrie Wilson, on the other hand, is wiry and soft spoken, with the scattered speech of someone with a lot running through his head.  Musically, the two are equally conflicting.  While Cochran is somewhat of a veteran, playing for 15 years or so in bands like The Sheds and The Lions Rampant, Wilson is comparably fresh, having only previously recorded by himself.

Yet the first time Cameron Cochran heard Wilson’s demo, he was floored by what he heard. Cochran recounts, “That next day, I think I sent Henrie like, three emails in a row, like [typing] ‘It’s really good’ and then the next one was like, ‘No, it’s really, really good’ and then the third one was like, ‘Okay, we should definitely do something together.’”

It’s almost a year later and the two are milling around in Brutopia, the coffee shop in Clifton where Henrie works part-time when he’s not in school.  Their first show is less than two weeks away, where they will debut their new EP, Rainy Child.

Rainy Child effortlessly skips between garage rock, pop and indie, bridging the gap with loud, crunchy guitars, electronic drumbeats and punchy synthesizers.  When asked what influences they drew from to create their sound, they look at each other.

“How much time do we have?” Henrie laughs, looking at the clock.  The list hops between genres and eras: Echo and the Bunnymen, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, The Ramones, Gucci Mane.

Because their sound is across the board, the two have rehearsed tirelessly in order to learn how to make their live performance work.  Cameron, all smiles and laughs throughout the interview, now speaks sternly when he says that they’ve put just as much care into the live performance as they have with the album.

“Our live performance is a very full sound, it’s very special,” says Cameron. “[Henrie] says that he’s playing laptop but he’s really playing keyboard and essentially a keyboard and sampler.  And then I’m playing guitar.  The drums are really loud, it sounds like there’s a live drummer in the room…We didn’t really want to just have a thing where we were playing a backing track and playing to that.” Cameron adds that the band will be bringing its own speakers to supplement the venue’s sound system because “it’s not big enough to support all that we’re doing on the laptop.”

The band’s live show is not the only thing that strays from convention.   In addition to performances by Pop Empire and local acts The Seedy Seeds and The Lions Rampant, the CD release party will feature a gallery showing of art inspired by the Rainy Child EP.  According to Henrie, local artists were given a copy of the EP and instructed “to do whatever they do with either [the album] as a some kind of theme or concept or completely disregarding it.”  Henrie explains that the collaboration with the artists is part of a broader concept the band had always envisioned.
“One of the things I think, since the beginning, we’ve been hoping for in this project and in whatever we’re doing is not to be simply doing our thing in a vacuum but in collaboration with other musicians, [and] also importantly with other types of artists…we thought this might be a way to kind of branch out a little bit and involve more than just what we do from the get go.”

Pop Empire may appear as a band intentionally trying to do things differently, but in the end, they’re a couple guys that love synth, drum machines and rock ‘n’ roll.  Cameron’s fingers are still torn up from their first performance in front of the artists who did pieces for the show.  He makes a There Will Be Blood crack, then says in all seriousness, “we play really hard. It’s definitely rock and roll.”

Pop Empire performs Saturday at The Southgate House in Newport, KY.  Get show and venue details here.