Most people don’t have the money or time to venture off to other states to stumble upon up-and-coming talent, but Phoenician music fans got that chance this week. Portland, OR’s Archeology is a calm, tap your toes and sway from side to side, indie band, and they rocked the Rhythm Room last night.
Daniel Walker, Jason Davis, Zachary Dilday and Ben Hayson make up Archeology, but only two of them have an actual love for archeology.
“Sometimes, we just go onto the desert and hike around,” Walker says. “We drag the other guys along and they say they like it, but I can tell that they don’t.”
During an archaeology dig, Walker and Davis met and began talking. Shortly after, the two were playing in a band together. In 2009, they began writing and playing a lot, but by the end of the year, the band felt like they needed some change.
“The music we were playing then… felt really forced,” Walker remembers.
Walker and Davis, both brought up in Evangelical backgrounds, soon spun off and started Archeology.
“I was raised in church,” Walker says. “My dad was the pastor from when I could remember. In my early 20s, I just kinda sat back and reconsidered about what I was taught.”
For all the questions they never got answers to, they wrote it out in lyrics. That’s where Memorial, their first full-length album, was born and was released earlier this year. And that’s how Archeology was quickly mistaken for a Christian band.
“We got a lot of e-mails from this album saying, ‘I don’t know if I could write on this Christian band.’ and I was like, ‘Whoa, we’re not a Christian band,’” Walker recalls.
In April, they did a quick West Coast tour, and now they’re embarking on their first national tour supporting Memorial.
The tour has been quite a journey for the band. They left Portland thinking a van with no air conditioning would be OK until they hit that blistering summertime heat.
“As soon as we hit Vegas and got over to the Midwest, it was like hell,” Walker says. “We’ve gotten use to the heat really quickly. I think we’ll be tougher for it.”
The band has mostly been accepted with open arms on their tour, except for a stop in Charlotte, NC. The band pulled into a campground at around 4 a.m., exhausted and a little tipsy, just wanting a couple hours of sleep. (Mind you, the park closed at 10 p.m., but they thought it’d be OK and smart to rest for a while.)
An hour later, Hayson was woken by an officer. The band was detained and surrounded by a park ranger and two more police officers.
“They told us to go to the church parking lot to sleep,” Walker says.
The officers were puzzled on why the band would sleep at a campground when there was a perfectly good parking lot down the road. Because nothing screams comfortable like asphalt. Other than that, the tour has gone well for Archeology.
“We’ve been stranded a few times,” Walker says. “The van has been picky on when it wants to go. We are a good 5,000 miles over for an oil change.”
The band likes playing in and visiting Arizona. Walker loves going out and exploring what our desert landscape has to offer.
“It’s the Indiana Jones in me from my childhood,” he says.
