Camping in Alaska
Camping in Alaska from Huntsville, Alabama made their return to Milwaukee, on tour, for the release of their latest album, “Eggbeater Jesus,” selling out the Cactus Club.
Drummer Jacob Stuart and vocalist/rhythm guitarist Austin Davis originally met in a Taekwondo class as kids. Stuart said they met again later on in high school gym class, and they began making music together, releasing their first album “please be nice” in 2013. The band is currently comprised of Davis, Stuart, guitarist Jacob Hill, lead guitarist Eli Long and bassist Dani Fandre.
“We took a long, kind of like hiatus thing between 2015 and 2018-2019, but we had written songs from 2017 and just kept writing stuff,” Davis said. “Some of that stuff came out on our 2023 EP, ‘Hollow Eyes,’ but a lot of those other songs we hadn’t done anything with.”
With their album title and certain lyrics pointing towards religious themes, Davis said that growing up in the South, religion was baked into everyday life regardless of beliefs.
“It’s kind of inescapable, not even just Alabama but in America in general, with the Christian symbolism and the overarching themes,” Davis said.
Fandre said that religious themes are also intertwined within the recovery community as well. Many programs are known to incorporate some sort of faith or higher power.
“All of us have had a lot of run-ins with that, and I’m still super conflicted on it and I wouldn’t call myself religious but I think about that stuff all of the time,” Davis said. “A lot of people call themselves Christians in the modern day, especially Trump voters, and they’re not really espousing anything that’s close to what Jesus would want them to do.”
The band said that compared to “Eggbeater Jesus,” “please be nice” speaks more towards their younger selves, delving into issues that were more prevalent in their teenage years while “Eggbeater Jesus” represents the band now, more than a decade since “please be nice.”
“We were 17, you know, we were just singing about stuff that was relevant to high school, I mean, skateboarding, weed–smoking teens,” Davis said.
Stuart talked about how many of the themes on “please be nice” addressed “pretend problems” while “Eggbeater Jesus” feels like it leans into “life-threatening” problems.
“You couldn’t put that any more succinct, lived problems.” Davis said in response to Stuart.
The band said that putting out an album exactly like “please be nice” would feel disingenuous considering the growth they’ve seen together and the differences in their lives now compared to when they were kids.
“I feel like it’s a cautionary tale of the kids that wrote ‘please be nice’ and ‘Bathe’ that would later turn into the kids that wrote ‘Eggbeater,'” Davis said.
“please be nice” exists as a representation of the band’s life as young kids in high school, while “Eggbeater Jesus” moves into a more nuanced and different emotional territory, looking inward to their lives now. Both projects stand alone thematically and sonically, but continue to prove their relatability for distinct reasons, two very different life periods for the band.
human ant farm
Milwaukee based-band human ant farm opened for Camping in Alaska along with Lagrimas and Silver Fern. The band is composed of lead vocalist Jacob “RV” Renard-VerVoort, guitarist and vocalist Chase VerVoort, guitarist Kendall Karpinski, bassist Sam Knutsen and drummer Tillman Fryer.
Karpinski said the band formed after the group of friends jammed together one night and came up with part of their song “Creature of Habit.”
Renard-VerVoort said that the band didn’t have an official vocalist for about a month toward the beginning of the band’s inception.
“We realized RV [Renard-VerVoort] has a similar vocal register to Doug Marsh or Isaac Brock. Modest Mouse and Built to Spill were our biggest influences at that time, and that’s how that happened,” Karpinski said.
In 2024, the band released their first official project, their EP “pictures of cities.”
“We had one day in the studio to record five songs live. We didn’t have lyrics to two of our songs; I wrote the lyrics to ‘Creature of Habit’ on our way there,” Renard-VerVoort said.
The main themes of “Pictures of Cities” allude to change, friendship and growing up in the Midwest.
“Our EP is coming-of-age and nostalgic. Our song ‘I wonder how they did in ’04” has a lot of notes of growing up, time passing,” Karpinski said.
The band said that playing with Camping in Alaska was one of their biggest shows to date.
“It’s the most excited I’ve ever been to play with a band because I’ve listened to them since high school,” Karpinski said.
The music scene in Milwaukee has introduced various DIY venues within the past few years, members of Human Ant Farm most recently starting one of their own, “The Litterbox.”
“It’s just awesome, being able to book a band that I want to see. It’s cool to have connections and be able to reach out to bands we’ve been playing with for years now so they can have a space to play,” Renard-VerVoort said.
Renard-VerVoort said when the band came into the scene, there was already an established scene and other genres that were getting more attention at the time, but that their sect of the scene is becoming really tailored towards what people want to hear within their subsection.
“As of recently, we’ve kind of had our own little scene that we’ve been coming up with, Frantic Repair (Fryer’s other band), In Shining Armour, our sister band basically, Oogwe — we’ve all been playing together a lot and we get along really well,” Karpinski said.
Human Ant Farm is currently working on a three song–EP which will be released sometime in April and an upcoming album, with no current release date yet.
“The new EP is a mix of new stuff and stuff we’ve written with Keenan (former drummer); it has a lot of the same vibe as our first project, but it’s also a transition into a new sound a little bit,” Renard-VerVoort said.
VerVoort describes their new sound as leaning towards emo, less in the realm of shoegaze and more complex.
The band plans on releasing a music video for “Prize Winning Cow,” which will be featured on their upcoming EP, directed by Griffin Sauter and Frank Holmes.
“The video we made is really about what it’s like to grow up in the Midwest with nothing to do. In short, the story follows a group of friends throwing rocks at trains, crashing cars, shooting guns in the woods, waiting for time to pass,” Sauter said. “We can’t say too much yet, but it will be released at an event this spring, promoting their new album.”
Sonically, their upcoming EP will have different changes compared to “Pictures of Cities,” but conceptually similar with coming-of-age themes about friendship and change.
“That’s what it’s about, it’s for fun. We’re serious about it, we care a lot and want to make the best music possible,” Renard-VerVoort said. “We all have a passion for making music, but the driving force has always been that we have fun doing it.”
This story was written by Sofía Cortés. She can be reached at sofia.cortes@marquette.edu.
