Hello Ocho

In the beginning, Hello Ocho's primary motivation as a band was to make people dance. It was a three-piece back then, made up of singer/guitarist and self-proclaimed "computer babysitter" Chris Yonker, bass player Clinton Callahan, and drummer John Gregg. The songs they wrote were fun, buoyant, and somewhat exotic in their approach to traditional indie pop, but things never went much deeper than that, at least not on the surface. But anyone who was in the audience for any of those early shows, watching the band's chemistry percolate amid layers of driving rhythms and electronic textures, knew that there was more to the group's vision than arty indie-rock party anthems. Soon, Hello Ocho had figured it out as well. "We started digging a little deeper with our songs, and reached a point where we wanted more from them," Yonker says. "We wanted to write songs that we wanted to listen to so we started holding ourselves to a higher standard."

After scrapping the entire cache of songs it had written during its first few years, Yonker and Co. began piecing together a headier body of work. Although much of the group's songwriting style remained the same, the mysterious energy it had been channeling all along began to gel with subtle but experimental hippie/pop aesthetic, propelled by the broader depth of kraut rock repetition.

—Creative Loafing

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