Photo by Michael Donahue // Buy this photo
Impeccable Miscreants: (From left) Logan Todd, Aaron Floyd, Freddy Hodges and Will McGee.
“Impeccable” means “flawless” and a “miscreant” is “someone who does bad deeds,” said Freddy Hodges, 21, lead singer of Impeccable Miscreants.
“In a way, it can mean you’re a perfect sinner,” said Logan Todd, 17, who plays drums in the band that also includes guitarist Aaron Floyd, 19, and bass player Will McGee, 17.
Memphian Jason Tune was pleasantly surprised when he heard them perform at a show with other bands. “Absolutely stole the show and stole the hearts of a few girls in the audience, too,” he said.
Hodges wanted to put a band together after moving to Memphis from Des Moines, where he was pursuing hip-hop music. “The thing about hip-hop is that it gets to a spot where you’re always doing the same thing,” he said, adding, “It’s much more rehearsed and much more practiced. You write it down and then you read it and you re-read it and re-read it and you commit it to memory.”
Impeccable Miscreants plays roots rock, but the influences of the band members are diverse.
In eighth grade, McGee got in the jazz band at Stax Music Academy. “I made it through this audition and they thought I could play music,” he said. “At that point I couldn’t read anything. So, they put me in this jazz band. I literally walked in there my first day and I sat down and they’re like, ‘OK, here’s what we’re about to play.’ They gave me this piece of music and it was Dave Brubeck’s ‘Take Five.’ And here’s the kicker: Dave Brubeck Jr. was in town and he had come into the classroom and he’s listening to us play. He started giving us critiques. Then he was like, ‘The rhythm section, mainly the bass, had a lot of problems.’”
McGee got to stay in the band. “They knew and they worked around it.”
Floyd is into blues and Todd particularly likes indie rock and jazz.
“Cathodes” is one of their songs written by Hodges. “It sounds so sexual, but it’s all about TV,” he said.
One of the lines is “Let me turn you on,” but the reference is to turning on the television set.
“It’s about how TV has a hold over you,” McGee said. “It can be a babysitter. It can be your best friend.”
“Mortality,” which Hodges also wrote, is their crowd pleaser. “I wrote three or four songs after my grandfather passed,” he said. “He passed in the house. I was living with my grandmother at the time. We knew he was going. He had cancer... It’s just letting him know that he wouldn’t be forgotten.”
“It’s Called Love,” which Floyd wrote, is “not about loving women or whatever,” he said. “It’s about needing to get out. To get out of your own head and get out of your comfort zone, really, and finding out what makes you feel like your life is complete.”
Describing his song, “Recoil,” Todd said, “It was me getting over this girl. It was my way of getting my emotion out. I couldn’t move until I wrote the song.”
The song opens with the line, “Strangling is the way you taught me to breathe.”
Matt Ross-Spang engineered “Cathodes” and “Mortality” at Sun Studio for an Impeccable Miscreants EP. “They’re a little more classic rock and roll in terms of like the good rock and roll days, the ’60s and ’70s,” Ross-Spang said. “They didn’t have that modern crap they call ‘rock.’”
Listen Up spotlights area performers. Michael Donahue can be reached at 529-2797.
Impeccable Miscreants
The group performs at an all-ages show at 7 p.m. Friday at the New Daisy at 330 Beale. Cover: $10. Call: (901) 525-8981.
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