By Corbie Hill

Photo by Sarah Gilliam

When Wilmington’s Ponchos (From Peru) recorded their new LP, A Southern Gentleman Starts a War, they treated it like a job. For a solid week, drummer Will Brone and guitarist Adam Smith worked their 9-to-5s and then headed to the studio.

“You work and then you get there at like 7:00 and then you record until like 10:30, and then you work the next day and you come back and do it again,” Brone says, describing the second-shift approach to studio time.

Both members of Ponchos effectively worked a 60-hour week to save on otherwise prohibitive studio costs, but that’s not why Smith is excited. This is the first Ponchos release that wasn’t home-recorded, but he feels the time crunch — plus the quick turnaround between Southern Gentleman and its predecessor, Archetypecast — ensured that the songs were still fresh when they hit tape. “It’s been a year since we put our last one out,” says Smith. “So [Southern Gentleman] is very alive to me.”

Ponchos play technical math-folk with jazz elements, with Battles-level tempo chicanery and drum-work backing electrified anti-folk. As a drummer, Brone is given to virtuosic somersaults, yet he doesn’t come across as showy. Smith plays his guitar clean, the absence of effects or even distortion transforming his quick runs and hammer-and-pull riffs into something more complicated and jazzy than simple shredding.

Smith, who minored in poetry, writes purposefully abstract lyrics. Even the meaning of the album’s title is up to interpretation, he points out. ‘“When the Record Spins’ is actually about a friend who passed away, and it’s a metaphor,” he says. “He’s really not there but I still think about him. But I think you wouldn’t get that just from the song.” Smith’s activist streak also asserts itself on songs like “The System.” “I got no armor/ over my chest/ it’s right here,” he chants over serpentine guitar and sparse, militaristic drumming. It has the menacing feel of an At the Drive-In song stripped to its constituent elements.

Even if the lyrics are open-ended, there’s still intense emotional heft. Smith says, “I think music can be more powerful than any other political tool because it connects you on a deep subconscious level but also on a top level.”

But these aggressive thoughts and tonalities, not to mention the difficulty of pigeonholing Ponchos’ sound, don’t always gel with retirees or tourists. And Wilmington has its share of both. “If you want to be in a cover band, you can make a lot of money,” Smith says, describing the scene rather than griping. “If you want to play metal, there’s actually a pretty strong metal scene. There’s a pretty strong jam scene, too.” But there’s not much crossover. “People, once they start doing covers, they realize how much money they make,” he says. “They never want to go back.”

But Smith is proud of scene-mates D&D Sluggers and Fractal Farm, and he loves the intimacy of the small music community. Ponchos’ records come in hand-painted cases, a personal touch from a band preferring that kind of DIY contact. “When you have positive feedback it’s more connected, it’s more real,” he says. “When you live in a bigger community and you have positive feedback, it isn’t personalized.”

For Ponchos, this city of fewer than 100,000 people is perfect. The band plans to press a humble 50 to 100 copies of Southern Gentleman. And if those all sell — which happened with the similarly short-run and home-packaged Archetypecast — they will be happy. “Even if there aren’t a lot of people that come out most of the time,” says Brone, “the people that come out, they’re really into it.”