Comeback Kids Take Action!

Brass master Hall and Mike Gibson,
lead vocalist and guitarist, recall the weeks before Hall graduated
from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2006, when he had
discovered that the fatigue he was then experiencing wasn’t caused by
stress over final exams. “When we heard about Brandon falling ill, we
all felt sort of helpless,” Gibson says. In 1998 Gibson and Hall were
founding members of the West Genesee High School outfit Skatos, specializing in an upbeat mix of ska, reggae and punk. Gibson and trumpet player Chris Nolan
then got the idea to summon their former band mates, in the hopes that
by surrounding Hall with friends and music, something positive could
happen. 

“I had no idea that the guys were
getting together,” Hall remembers. “I wanted to play with the band up
on stage, but in my condition I couldn’t dance, let alone play and jump
around.”

Without goals or expectations, the band commenced with weekly meetings in August

2006. Gibson brought in a song that he and Nolan had messed around with back in 2003.

“Nolan wrote a great horn section for a song before we all went our own
ways,” Gibson says. The song was revisited and turned into a new, more
complex number. “It was then that we realized that we were all happy
making music together.”  

The re-formed septet acknowledged that
they were not the same band, so they changed their name. “We weren’t
the Hawaiian-shirt-wearing, hair-dyeing teens that we were in Skatos,”
Gibson says with a laugh.

During the Skatos hiatus, each member
had stayed musically active with other projects. Gibson and Hall were
part of the surf-rock trio The Amazing Shakes. Bassist Adam Carkey played with the Ukrainian band Vorony. Drummer Craig Chamberlain experimented with jazz, as did trombone players Dave Piwinski and Dan King. And Nolan continued carrying the ska torch with The Benefits.

“The Amazing Shakes project allowed me
to write from a different perspective,” Gibson says. “Writing songs in
the ska and reggae genres felt limiting.”

The Action! has been recording with their longtime sound engineer Sam Paterelli as well as Ron Keck, operations manager at SubCat Music Studio
in Skaneateles. The final track list will hold 15 new songs penned
primarily by Gibson, such as “Please Don’t Leave.” Gibson says, “The
writing has matured, and for the first time a song of ours has vastly
different sections. It is musically more complex, with tempo changes
and with the chorus being in a different key than the bridge. We took
the horn section Nolan wrote three years ago and found a way to
incorporate it into a more meaningful piece of music.” 

The Action! will also pay homage to
their adolescent music heroes Reel Big Fish at the Big Kids Dodgeball
Tournament. “We learned the a-ha song “Take On Me” that Reel Big Fish
covered in {the 1998 movie} BASEketball. It was fun playing on
the upper deck over the {Sports Centre} field as the teams battled it
out for dodgeball glory,” Gibson says.

Admission to the tournament is free. For
more information, call 256-3922. The Action! will also perform June 6
at the Taste of Syracuse’s SubCat Emerging Artists stage in downtown
Syracuse. Admission is free. For more information, call 685-9064.

-John Martin Goot