Flash back to 2016 on the Vegas music scene. That’s the year The Musket Vine released not one but two full-length albums, played Brooklyn Bowl and the Sayers Club and rocked 11th Street Records for Neon Reverb. And then?
“We went on several pauses, because I served in the army for six years, and I deployed to Iraq,” explains vocalist and songwriter Mahonry Tovar. “It was like every time we would pick up momentum, something would happen. I went on deployment, came back, we started again and then I went on another deployment to Kuwait.”
In need of a job and a way to leave home, Tovar recalls, he signed up for the U.S. Army Reserve at 18 and deployed to Iraq at just 20 years old. “It seemed like a really good option, since they were gonna pay for my college. My parents were really religious, and they didn’t support my music. They always thought it was a waste of time.”
Tovar went on to graduate from the Los Angeles Film School with a degree in music production. But throughout his service and his studies, he never stopped making music. And he never stopped thinking about The Musket Vine.
Last Halloween, Tovar reunited with bassist Ernesto Ricardez and drummer Jorge Aguiar, and the musicians began playing shows as a three-piece version of The Musket Vine. They’ve since added lead guitarist Julio Pacheco and rhythm guitarist Jessie Montez, signaling the official return of a band once heralded by Las Vegas Weekly and others as a potential breakout act.
Tovar originally formed The Musket Vine in 2014 as a blues duo with Aguiar. Before long, they’d added Ricardez and guitarist Lu Lee, who went simply by “Elmer.” “I had more of a power-chord and straight-forward punk style, and [Elmer] incorporated the reverb, the delays and the effects on the guitar,” Tovar says. “So from then on I started writing more into that kind of genre.”
Before Tovar went overseas, The band released Sleepless Nights and Unwanted Memories, two synth-driven LPs channeling the dreamy, atmospheric pop of Beach Fossils and The Smiths. Tovar’s vocal prowess, meanwhile, recalled Brandon Flowers or the Arctic Monkeys’ Alex Turner. Those albums contained some of the most engaging, exciting tunes crafted by a Vegas band at the time, and they were surprisingly polished, considering they were recorded in Tovar’s bedroom.
“If you listen to it, people assume it’s been recorded in a big studio,” Tovar says, adding that he usually composes the music on his own before his bandmates add flair. “That’s one of my main focuses, writing good songs that are catchy. That doesn’t mean making complex music. It means making something that sounds good and can be sung by everybody.”
As the band dove into influences like Mac DeMarco and Melody’s Echo Chamber, its sound developed a strong heartbeat, and Tovar began broaching themes of attraction and love. On Sleepless Nights opener “Queen,” for example, he begs a lover to come home with him before spiraling into the mantra, “I want to worship you/I want to worship you.”
Tovar later experimented with more hip-hop- and trap-driven sounds on a solo project he called Jidiani, which he says proved to be therapeutic. “[The hip-hop was] more like my aggressive side,” he says. “At that time, I had just come back from war. I had PTSD and was very aggressive. So I was like, ‘Let me get this out somehow.’”
Though The Musket Vine might be reunited, Tovar isn’t in a rush to make new music—yet. For now he’s focused on reintroducing folks to the band through live shows and the catalog of music it already has.
“The music is timeless,” the now-26-year-old says. “The music is gonna be good forever.”
The Musket Vine instagram.com/themusketvine, facebook.com/themusketvine
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