Derek Thomas will be able to tell right away who among the KFMA Day crowd on Saturday, April 14, has heard of his Vista Kicks band.
They will be the ones dancing along with the Sacramento, California, groovin’ pop-rock band.
Not that what the quartet of lifelong friends does on stage constitutes dancing, really. It’s more like a wiggle, a twitch and some movement that’s timed with the poppy rhythms that borrow from the music Thomas and his friends grew up listening to from their parents’ record collections: The Beatles, Bee Gees, Frank Sinatra, a little Led Zeppelin.
“We just kind of ... do our thing,” Thomas, the band’s lead singer, said last week from a concert stop in San Luis Obispo, where they had opened the night before for the Tempe emo band The Maine. “I have some footwork, but it’s not always good. Every stage is different.”
There were some people in that San Luis Obispo audience who were dancing along to Thomas and the band — Sam Plecker, Trevor Sutton and Nolan Le Vine. But as they have in more gigs than they can count, the band played to an audience whose musical tastes were worlds apart from theirs.
“For years we would play at these restaurants and people would look at us like, ‘Oh gosh, there’s a band, honey,’” he said. “Sometimes we would have the whole restaurant paying attention, and that was nice. We got really good at that and we got really good at getting an audience in a space where they weren’t supposed to be an audience (interested in the music). And I think that helps now when we have crowds that are not our crowds and we’ve got to win them over.”
The win-them-over campaign starts in the dressing room. Everyone wears the same clothes, almost like a uniform.
“The idea is that people will focus less on our outfits and more on our faces,” Thomas explained. “In a lot of bands you tend to see the singer or the guitar player, and we want everyone to be seen. So wearing the same thing gives that illusion.”
The indie band out of Northern California is the newbie on the KFMA Day lineup. Translation: They have to work harder to win over non-fans.
Thomas said he thinks their music is as good a place as any to start. Their sound is not complicated or complex. It’s light and poppy, but not sugary, with flashes of 1970s pop. And when they take the stage at KFMA Day with the much heavier, darker lineup anchored by Maynard James Keenan’s cryptic prog-rock band A Perfect Circle, you will notice the difference.
Thomas likes to explain the differences on an emotional level: Hard rock is where you pump your fists in the air and release all the day’s anger and angst. Vista Kicks is the cool exhale.
They’re the band that coaxes the shy kids out of the corner and onto the dance floor.
“To dance is to get rid of an insecure, nervous energy. And I feel like our job is to let people relax and enjoy themselves,” Thomas said. “Our job is to just do our thing, and if people like that, which I feel they would — not everybody ... and that’s totally fine.”
Thomas and his buddies have been playing music together since grade school. They grew their hair long and started playing once Le Vine’s dad bought him a drum set. When Thomas’ voice changed and he could no longer hit those rock ‘n’ roll high notes, they migrated to jazz, playing corporate parties and those restaurants.
They formed Vista Kicks as a rock band in 2015 and released their first indie EP the following year. Last September, their indie-produced debut album “Booty-Shakers Ball” dropped and their devoted and energetic fan base that happily joined the band’s Kickback Club was growing.
“Our whole thing is to relax and dance and have fun, and I feel like people have a hard time doing that nowadays because of social media,” Thomas said. “You never know who has a camera and no one wants to make a fool of themselves, so they refrain from dancing. But we try to break down those barriers. We’ll get the entire audience dancing by the end of the show.”
