Memory is short in the Las Vegas music scene, and veteran bands need to play shows constantly to avoid being forgotten. So it'd be hard to blame the average fan of local music for assuming that rock trio Vandelay Industries had gone the way of the dodo. Late last year, the band dropped off the local radar (save for a single March show at Pink E's) not, as some might think, because they broke up, but because they've completely reinvented themselves.
Gone are the emo/hard-core screams of singer-bassist Matt Ivie. Gone are all the songs on the band's three independently released EPs. Gone, even, is the name. What's not gone are the three band members—Ivie, Crowley and drummer Matt Norcross—who remain together under the cheeky new name Now That We're Famous. They've been working hard at a Los Angeles studio for the last few months on their debut full-length album, produced by their mentor Loren Israel, a former A&R executive for Capitol Records who discovered the band on the music website Purevolume.com.
What was once a sometimes abrasive hard-rock band is now a self-described "power pop" act with hooks, harmonies and decidedly no screaming. It's all thanks to Israel, who's taken the band under his wing and drastically reshaped them into something marketable.
Israel had the band write a song a week, to end up with "stacks and stacks" of material to choose from for the new album. "If something's not good, he just flat out tells us, 'That song sucks. Throw it away,'" Crowley says. "He picks out the really good ones and the rest of them he basically tells us to scrap."
Talking to Crowley is at times like talking to a new convert to a particularly benevolent cult. Despite how authoritarian Israel's methods sound, and how he's clearly molded the band into something very different from what it used to be, Crowley is nothing but calm and optimistic. It's not as if you can't hear the old Vandelay Industries listening to the new Now That We're Famous. And it's not as if Israel wrote the band's songs for them—he just picked the best from the heap of songs they wrote themselves, using techniques he taught them.
If they've sold out, it's hard to tell exactly who's bought them, since they're financing the album themselves and will thus own every piece of it. "There's absolutely no attachments," Crowley says proudly.
Now That We're Famous plan to release the finished product, one they've poured every ounce of their own money and time into, this summer, and to look from there for label deals and touring opportunities. Crowley knows that the support the band had in the past was based on a sound that no longer exists, but he's confident that the reinvigorated band will win fans over even more. "They were pretty good for their time," he says of the band's old songs, "but they're not even near the stuff we're writing now."