Feral Children

by Jason Lymangrover Named after the term for kids raised by wolves in the wilderness, the spark for Seattle indie rockers Feral Children was originally ignited in Maple Valley, WA, a five-and-a-half square-mile woodland town. Bassist/vocalist Jim Cotton and guitarist/vocalist/percussionist Jeff Keenan met while in junior high school there, and played together for the first time during an afternoon of plucking grunge songs on acoustics to a crowd of one: a horse on a neighbor's farm. Using music as an escape from the boredom of their surroundings, the two picked up guitarist Josh Gamble and keyboardist Sergey Posrednikov to form their first band, Blood Alley Accident. Sounding quite a bit like fellow Northwesterners Built to Spill and Modest Mouse, the foursome stuck it out as a band through high school, rehearsing in a backwoods trailer, only to go their separate ways and scatter across the country after graduation. Posrednikov stayed wayside to take classical piano lessons, while Keenan moved to Washington and Gamble moved to Ohio. Cotton went the farthest away, moving to Alaska temporarily, and later relocating to Seattle, drawn there partly because it was the nesting place of his heroes the Fastbacks, 764-HERO, and Murder City Devils. The others were drawn there two years later, and with the addition of drummer Bill Cole, the band started trying to beat the odds to gain recognition as a successful band in a mecca of thriving musicians. The name Feral Children was adopted and the group started to make itself known through volatile shows, in which dual drumming jams and instrument destruction were part of a typical night's work. In 2008, impressed by the live energy of a show at S.S. Marie Antoinette, producer Scott Colburn (Animal Collective, Arcade Fire, Mudhoney, Modest Mouse) jumped on board and recorded the band's first full-length in six days at his Gravel Voice studio. Just after the record was mastered, surprisingly, "Jaundice Giraffe," the album's most unusual cut, started getting regular rotation on KCRW, and Second to the Last Frontier was scheduled for release that summer, in July of 2008.