Coming home

Fuckin’ Pacific Northwest. Always stealing our brightest flowers. These days, it seems everybody knows somebody who’s moving to Portland or Seattle or wherever the hell people go when they get tired of the sun.

But it’s always been this way, especially when it comes to music.

Ray Raposa left and later formed The Castanets. Bands like Trumans Water and singer-songwriters Carra Barratt and Adam Gnade are now rocking Portland bars. Joe Plummer, who played in The Black Heart Procession, ran off to join Modest Mouse. And we can’t forget big guns like Eddie Vedder, Matt Cameron and Andrew McKeag (Presidents of the U.S.A.). Who’s to say what Pearl Jam would have sounded like had the other members moved down here instead of the other way around. Alas, I guess San Diego just isn’t weird or rainy enough.

“It just happened. It wasn’t pre-meditated at all,” says Minmae frontman Thomas Sean Brooks, who gradually made his way to Portland in 2001 after starting the band in San Diego in 1998. “I grew up in El Centro, and I lived in San Diego for over 10 years, but once I left, it was never my intention to come back.

Even with Brooks’ local connections, which include stints in bands like The And/Ors and collaborations with Arabella Makalani (Jejune, Bartender’s Bible) and Jewel (Brooks says her back-story of living in a van down by the beach is “entirely untrue”), many local music fans still haven’t heard of Minmae. Even Brooks concedes that much of their fan base consists of record-store geeks and “people who are pretty opinionated about music.”

But even so, you’d think that after 11 years, nine albums and countless shows, they’d have made a name for themselves and be making a living at it by this point. But, as Brooks watches his peers in The Decemberists and Modest Mouse playing vast world tours, he’s having to talk to me while boarding a Portland city bus, after getting off from his day job translating medical documents.

“I sold my car to have money for a trip to Europe,” says Brooks, adding that he plans to spend six months in Europe playing solo gigs. “That’s OK, there’s some really nice bus drivers in Portland.”

But the truth is that if Minmae aren’t exactly well-known, it’s because they make music that’s not immediately accessible. They’ll almost surely never have a song on alternative radio or in the iTunes top 10, yet their body of work is amazingly strong. Consisting of Brooks and a revolving cast, their style of indie rock is the kind that takes time and effort before immediately coming to love it. Comparatively, bands like Low and The Standard come to mind—the types that take a little patience.

“It’s kind of like bristling guitar with a lot of open-chord voicings,” says Brooks when asked about the band’s sound.

“We’re bridging the gap between bands like The Replacements and Big Star and any kind of Sonic Youth-influenced band. I think that sometimes other bands go one way or another with their sound, so the fact that we don’t makes us kind of unique. It’s not as easy to pigeonhole as other bands, which has been both a blessing and a curse.”

The band’s most current album, 835, is about as all-over-the-map as it gets, but it’s been the band’s most acclaimed release to date. Yet, Brooks says he’s reached a point where he sees himself focusing more on his solo work. He recently released a solo album under the name T.S. Brooks, and it seems he may be headed in a more folksy, roots-rock direction.

“This is Minmae’s last tour for awhile,” he reports. “I’m reaching a point where I want to challenge myself, do something slightly different than just playing in a band. I enjoy it, but it’s time to try something new.”

With grand musical experimentalism and a career that’s going on two decades, when it’s pointed out to Brooks that it seems like he’s always been trying something new, he chuckles but agrees that he’s a bit restless.

“Yeah, it’s always been like that.”

Minmae play at Bar Pink with Roxy Jones on Monday, June 22. www.myspace.com/minmae.