How two dudes built the fascinating and fortuitous 10-strong rock band Northern Arms

The result of their journeys is Northern Arms (BITBY), their eponymous debut album, due out June 17. It is a dark, eerie record whose thematic and sonic roots are in traditional country, folk, gospel and blues, with touches of orchestral music filtered through a horn-heavy, melodic, big band sound.

NORTHERN ALLIANCE: The story starts with the two guys seated in the center — L-R: Keith Richard Peirce and Eric Bandel — finding out they were dating the same woman.
Max Gaines

The story of Keith Richard Peirce and Eric Bandel’s first encounter some 14 years ago is a meet-cute that’d make the most vapid Hollywood rom-com writer blush. 

“Well, we were dating the same woman,” says Peirce, his matter-of-fact tone playing against the posture of a storyteller who knows he’s got a real gem on his hands. 

One morning, Peirce was supposed to play some music he had been working on for his friend Jamie Mahon of the Philadelphia band The Three 4 Tens, who happened to live near Peirce’s then-girlfriend. He got up and threw on some clothes, and when he arrived at Mahon’s there were people crashing on the floor from a party the previous night. Bandel, himself a keyboardist, was on that floor. He recognized Peirce without knowing why. When he heard the music Peirce was playing for Mahon upstairs, Bandel walked into the room to listen.

“A beautiful guttural dog in an opera house” — that’s how Bandel remembers Peirce’s voice from that morning. “It was unhinged, all emotion.” 

It was a powerful moment for Peirce, too: “I felt like I found my brother in a second.” 

It wasn’t until later that Bandel realized Peirce had been wearing his shirt — one he left at his girlfriend’s apartment.

The next few years are filled with stories of their false starts as a band (first as a duo, then a quartet), alcoholism, heartbreak, departures from each other and the city, aimlessness, sobering up, reunions and an eventual second chance. “We were really self-destructive people,” confesses Peirce. “We were drinking and drugging to run.” 

The substance abuse drove them apart. Bandel moved to Brooklyn, got married and got sober. Peirce moved to Florida, fell in love and quit drinking by 2011. They both quit music, and although they stayed in touch intermittently, they didn’t reunite until the summer of 2012, when Bandel, fleeing a divorce, went to visit Peirce in Florida. There, the two recorded a song they had written for a friend’s wake, the lovely country ballad “Last Horse,” to positive responses online. And all of a sudden they got a glimpse of who they might have been, who they had wanted to be all along, and who they could still manage to be. By 2013 they were both back in Philadelphia, committed to making a record, and assembling a band that would eventually swell to their current ensemble of 10 members.

The result of their journeys is Northern Arms (BITBY), their eponymous debut album, due out June 17. It is a dark, eerie record whose thematic and sonic roots are in traditional country, folk, gospel and blues, with touches of orchestral music filtered through a horn-heavy, melodic, big band sound. 

Ask about influences and, among other things, Peirce will tell you about attending a now largely defunct public school program called Religious Release as a boy, which would get him out of school for a devotional period where he developed a love for old hymns. Bandel mentions legendary gospel and bluesman Rev. Gary Davis. “We go to the original sources, the dirt and the blood and the bones,” says Peirce.

On the role of Biblical and Gothic imagery in their songs, Peirce is reluctant to go into details. “I’ve seen too many of my heroes really fucking shit the bed with letting me know exactly what they thought. … These songs are a representation of a feeling.” Then he laughs. “What did Bowie say about the terror of knowing what the world is really about?”

For all this, the band still achieves moments of intense release. Listen to the performance of soul singer PJ Brown on the closer “Flesh of Arms,” which she transforms from another dirge into blistering existential blues, or the hymnal refrain that forms a coda to “Let the Water Come Down.” There, you get a sound like a group of strangers who have stumbled into each other singing the same song. They find and hold a brief harmony before their voices fray apart as the notes rise, taking up the passage again and again. Each time the harmony is a pleasure, a genuine surprise, a recognition of each other, a feeling of community. 

Northern Arms plays Fri., May 30, 9:15 p.m., $10, with Weird Hot and A Brood of Vipers, Johnny Brenda’s, 1201 Frankford Ave., 215-739-9684, johnnybrendas.com.