Live in the Clubs: New York City duo Gay Blades are a bit different from your average 2-man band

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The Gay Blades are a tribute band of sorts.

According to guitarist and vocalist Clark Westfield, the original Gay Blades was a two-piece band in Brooklyn whose members died on tour in a car accident. Westfield and drummer Puppy Mills appropriated that band’s name and, apparently, its songs as well.

“We took up the banner of The Gay Blades and started playing their songs, writing some of our own,” Westfield said during a phone interview while heading to Atlanta for a tour stop. “Actually, we just ripped them off, like the Talented Mr. Ripley. That’s what our name should be actually; can we still change that? We’ll change it, but it will probably stay The Gay Blades.”

The New York City duo, fresh from a stint on South By Southwest in Austin, is currently touring with post-hardcore groups The Sleeping, Envy on the Coast and The Secret Lives of the Freemasons. This tour, which hits Valentine’s in Albany on Thursday at 7:30 p.m., has been a change for the Gay Blades. In addition to now being backed by a record label (indie 4Never/Triple Crown), The Gay Blades are touring with bands that they normally wouldn’t play with.

“We’re playing with bands a little different from us; they come out of the post-hardcore scene,” Westfield said. “But we’re happy to be smashing their faces with this trashy rock ’n’ roll stuff.”

However, Gay Blades songs such as “Oh Shot” or “Hey She Say” seem to straddle the line between punk and ’70s riff rock, making a case for the band’s inclusion on this tour. Vocally, Westfield has the punk sneer down, but his guitar playing suggests a bit more swagger than that of hardcore punk.

The band’s lack of a bassist creates the “trashy” sound Westfield referred to. The two-person rock band is by no means a new phenomenon, but Westfield and Mills’ approach differs slightly from other rock duos such as The White Stripes or Local H. Rather than attempt to re-create a full sound with two people, Westfield and Mills just bash their songs out live.

“I believe the chemistry within a band is more important than the sonics coming from the stage,” Westfield said. “Not that we haven’t tried it with a bass player, or a saxophone player, or a violin player, or a harpsichord player, or a harp player, but the chemistry is always what’s sacrificed.”

Westfield and Mills’ influences, called out tag-team style over the phone, include some choices that make sense for a budding rock group (Elvis Costello, T. Rex, David Bowie) and a few left field additions (Bill Murray, “an actual T. Rex, like the dinosaur”). Those influences combine to create a sound similar to “stories about living on the sea,” as Westfield explained.

“Because if you live on the sea, there’s always either a whale or a real big animal, like an albatross, a seagull or a dog, a whale or a shark, ‘Old Man and the Sea,’ a marlin; and there’s always a storm,” Westfield said. “[Mills is] the animal and I’m the storm, and the sea is our music.”

The band’s rough-and-tumble approach has certainly garnered attention. This year marked the second year in a row The Gay Blades performed at South By Southwest, a gig the band landed by sending in a few songs from their new album, “Ghosts,” which comes out on Sept. 23.

“The biggest thing that happened is it got the ball rolling for us; we ended up playing five showcases,” Westfield said.

The “Ghosts” album will feature remixed songs from the band’s indie release of the same name, plus new songs recorded in the past year.

“We’re very excited; we did a couple remixes from the indie release and trimmed them down, made them super-sexy,” Westfield said. “We’re very, very excited, and rich. Rich and excited.”

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