Experimental Rentals

Back when Matt Sharp was playing bass in Weezer, he got bit by the creative bug and decided to do an album of his own songs. Soon enough, the new venture needed a name. After rejecting his producer’s suggestion that he christen the band That’s Incredible (after the 1970s TV show) he settled on the Rentals.

“I wanted to find a name that sounded like it could be a band from any era,” Sharp told the Reader over the phone during a tour stop in Washington DC. “I wanted to come up with a name that sounded like a band that had already existed before. Then it just turned out to be good luck that we had this sort of musical collective mentality — an ever-evolving cast of band members and contributors.”

Since the group’s debut album, Return of the Rentals, Sharp has been the only consistent player. From the start he acquired a producer’s inclination to choose his musicians for any given project, and, on the band’s latest release, Lost in Alphaville, he seems to have taken this motif one step further.

“It’s real super-pretentious to say, but often with this album I was feeling more like a film director than anything else. Just trying to figure out the personalities. The thing I’m probably most fascinated by is chemistry. What happens when you put this one person with this other person, and how does the dynamic change by just adding one person or subtracting one person in the room? Just having all these chemistry experiments until you get to the place you finally wanna go,” Sharp explained.

“The first Rentals show ever was at the Casbah.... Weezer had a very traditional way that you go about being in a band. We started in clubs. There was nobody there. We played for five people a certain amount of times, and eventually it got to ten people, and then 15 people. Rivers [Cuomo] and I went out and flyered every show, every night. We didn’t have a car, so we got on a bus and passed out flyers every night...and nobody would show up. The Rentals, on the other hand...‘Friends of P’ was already on MTV before we ever played together. Our first show with Maya [Rudolph] and everybody else was at the Casbah, and we were already in a bus...and we paid no dues. We didn’t have very many songs. We were headlining. We didn’t know how to play a real show. We were trying to stretch stuff out; it was just weird. I think our shows were, like, 11 songs long, so our set, with encores, was probably, like, 40 minutes,” Sharp said.

Expect a bit more when the Rentals play the Irenic on Thursday night, June 4.