When Chalk Outline Party appeared on the local scene two years ago, soon to release the Shiny Penny Things EP, the band was a fresh-faced jaunt around darkly buoyant rock conventions: Bowie, Nick Cave, Ian Curtis. But there’s a reason why 18 percent of Allegheny County is over retirement age: Twenty-four months in Pittsburgh is like 48 elsewhere. And now singer (and occasional CP contributor) Aaron Jentzen and guitarist Brian Sproul write songs like “Extra Extra” from the slow burners’ new EP, A Plan Lost in Dreams. “Close your eyes and dream yourself a hole in the river / In the city where the electric light hums all night long / And the voltage to your mascara always seems about to run out.”

That’s us all right: lights always humming -- never buzzing -- and darkened eyes on the brink of running out.
“It’s about seeing things that you’re turning into from a detached perspective, and ultimately having some real doubts as to whether you’re going to survive yourself,” says Jentzen. “The thing that freaks me out on a daily basis is the passage of time. You think you’re stopping [time] in a song, but it’s still rolling over you. You can go kicking and screaming, but it’s still rolling -- I guess I just choose to go kicking and screaming.
“Those are the kinds of themes that have taken over most of what I’ve written since moving to Pittsburgh. What does living right now sound like to me? Being here’s been really strange.”
Maybe it’s been strange since Jentzen moved from California (on Amtrak, no less), but it hasn’t exactly been bad. After all, since Sproul and Jentzen started Chalk Outline Party -- now solidified with bassist Jason Dangle and drummer Doug Kochmanski -- the band has transformed itself from the deep, beat poet-inspired, yet still hipster-cool sound of Shiny Penny Things to the immense, plectrum-snapping guitar-rock of A Plan. And what’s more, Chalk Outline has not only kept its audience, but grown it. For a group that started out informed by “the garden-variety cool bands,” as Jentzen puts it, songs like “Transit Between Urbane Centers” and “Citrus” are a distinct departure. Led Zeppelin riffs, hard-rock kick-drum thumps and steady bass lines plod behind Jentzen’s fist-in-air baritone. Especially when joined with Jentzen’s melancholy-of-northern-life lyrics, COP resembles mid-period New Model Army on a song like “The Gun in Everyone” and -- stay with me here -- Fish-era Marillion on “Citrus.” Big guitars, stop-start time changes and dynamic switcheroos -- please step out of the car, son. Looky here, is that prog-rock I smell on your breath? 
“The first EP was us struggling to find a way to speak to one another about music,” explains Jentzen. “We decided what the format was going to be and went with it, and that was a really small box for us to be in. At some point we decided to stop trying to fit ourselves into a format that we thought would be cool, and said, ‘What do we have here? What are our ingredients?’ Well, Sproul plays the shit outta the guitar. We should go for that instead of reining him in. The lyrics I come up with are a bit different from what you might find elsewhere, so let’s bring that out. And let’s be more open to different song structures -- so this new record is us playing to those strengths.”
The band didn’t know that anyone would get it -- or maybe they’d get it, and hate it. “I originally thought there was no way we’d be able to do some guitar-solo thing and have anyone not just go, ‘Oh god …’” But the proof is in the picking: Check the last two tracks on A Plan, which offer live documentation of Chalk Outline Party’s new-sound debut, complete with worshipful fan screams during those dreaded proggy parts. Proof, perhaps, that despite the wear and tear of time and the dread of modern living, some things remain intact.
“We started doing these breakdowns and guitar solos, and people started flipping out,” says Jentzen. “People seem to like rock ’n’ roll. It’s the funniest thing.”

Writer: JUSTIN HOPPER
Photographer: HEATHER MULL
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Chalk Outline Party debuted last year with "Shiny Pretty Things," a seven-song EP that revealed it as band with a dark and literary streak.
Now, Chalk Outline Party has dropped "A Plan Lost in Dreams," its second EP of this year -- a five-song CD with two hidden live tracks.
One might get the impression that singer-songwriter Aaron Jentzen and his band are having trouble with the commitment thing.
"I like the open-ended, work-in-progress vibe an EP has," Jentzen says. "So much freedom to work out who you are and where you're going. Each EP we've made has been a snapshot in our development as a band. That debut full-length is your opening statement -- a definition to build from. I'm a little reluctant to take on that kind of statement in a self-release or local label situation. A full-length isn't far off, but we want to have not only the musical ingredients we need to make a memorable record, but also the resources to have it done well and actually, you know, heard."
The roots of Chalk Outline Party go back to Grove City College, where Jentzen hooked up with Brian Sproul, a drummer who would later come forth as the band's second lead guitarist. They didn't solidify the lineup until they worked on the second EP earlier this year, so the process of becoming a rock band has been a gradual and revealing one.
"Our previous recordings are somewhat charming in their own ways, but this is the first time we've had any of the muscle we usually bring to the live show," Jentzen says. "It's really been a process of self-discovery. One day we realized to our surprise that we played in a hard rock band and that the guitars had to really rip. And that we had a kick-ass guitar player and some strange lyrics, and maybe we should push those elements to the front and find out what we're all about, instead of deciding on something and trying to make it fit. We've improved on our best ideas and thrown out a lot of lesser ones."
Anyone who has heard Chalk Outline Party won't be surprised to learn that Jentzen was a graduate student in English. Over moody bass lines and fractured guitar parts, in a voice like Nick Cave or Lou Reed, he tosses off lines such as: "Close your eyes and dream yourself a hole in the river/In this city where the electric light hums all night long/And the voltage to your mascara always seems/Just about to run out."
His dark and cryptic imagery was inspired by all the best influences.
"Virginia Woolf, William S. Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, Dylan, Patti Smith, Bowie, Steely Dan -- many of the artists who have influenced me seem to be searching for coherence in a mass of chaotic stimuli, and our best songs are ones where something I wasn't looking for swam up from the static ... I used to physically cut apart and rearrange text to generate lyrics, but nowadays I just do it in my head. You start pulling together images that elicit a certain response -- happiness, change, anger, confusion, arrogance, dread, horniness, whatever -- and arrange them for maximum impact. It's a sort of verbal pointillism."
Jentzen says he has no intention to be cryptic just for the sake of it. "It's usually decorative camouflage for not having much to say," he says. "Some things I find difficult to swallow: self-consciously retro or, worse, ironi-retro groups. It just smells like suicide. Which is funny, because a friend of mine was talking about Blue Oyster Cult the other day as part of a wave of 'existential '70s rock bands with awesome guitars and songs about death.' He looked at me and started laughing and said 'Aw, sorry, I forgot: you PLAY in one of those bands.' Yeah, maybe."
He's more content with that BOC description than with the loose "indie rock" tag, which he calls "just a blanket term to cover any non-assertive music coming out these days. Stack Modest Mouse up against a groundbreaking DIY independent band like Black Flag, and you realize pretty quickly that indie rock is to '80s independent rock as New Wave is to punk rock: not bad, but a castrated shadow of something that really rocked [bleeping] hard."
Besides rocking hard, Chalk Outline Party shows on the EP's two hidden live tracks that the players can break a song down and explore it in a long Velvet Underground or Doors-like jam.
"Getting over live isn't about telling jokes, jumping around, all that cheesy showman-type stuff," Jentzen says. "For us it's a conscious decision to intensify whatever-it-is-that-we-do. We don't really improvise or 'jam,' but we do leave some room to breathe in certain songs. The challenge is: It has to sound loose, even delicate, but be bolted to an invisible I-beam somewhere."
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