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Live in the Clubs: 28N keeps name but feels like new band as twosome

If you’ve been familiar with the Capital Region’s music scene over the past 10 or so years, you may have heard 28N before.

But go out and watch that band perform today, and you might not recognize what you’re seeing. Before the release of the group’s 2007 CD, “Where Tenses Meet,” 28N was first a four-piece and then a three-piece band, utilizing rock’s tried-and-true guitar-bass-drums combo. After that album, the group’s principal members, guitarist Hank Banks and drummer Rusty Jones, chose to continue as a duo.

At first, the band performed with a prerecorded bass track to faithfully re-create the earlier material. But on the group’s coming 10-song album, “The Attack of the Purple Pachyderm,” the band truly embraced its duo lineup.

“We really don’t have any interest in being the same band we were before,” Banks said during a recent interview at a coffee shop in Albany, where the band is based. “I think we feel more than anything like the last year was really the start of a new band, even though we have the same name.”

Time for reinvention

Part of that transition is the pseudonyms — up until recently, Banks and Jones went by their real names, Nate Stengrevics and Lowell Stringer. “We like the fake names; it’s just better for us. We’re really trying to reinvent ourselves,” Banks said.

The duo, normally a fully electrified hard rock band, will play a stripped-down acoustic show at Gaffney’s on Thursday night. They’re regulars on the local club scene, having performed at Tulip Fest and LarkFest last year. But in many ways, the group really took off after becoming a two-piece, gaining more local attention from its unusual lineup.

“We’ve recorded so much music together, it’s just that we’ve been together for a long time and we were never a signed band,” Banks said. “We were never anything that was on a national stage or a regional stage. We were just playing shows at small bars all the time.”

Banks and Jones, now in their mid-20s, started the band as sophomores in high school in Newcomb, taking their name from the only road that runs through that small Adirondack town.

“It’s a bit enigmatic, but it’s also lame because every band in the ’90s had number names,” Banks said of the band name. “So we’re equal parts enigmatic and lame, but we only show our true age and where we came from.”

Indeed, the group’s early influences, such as Pearl Jam, Nirvana and Live, reflect the early-’90s grunge rock approach found on the group’s early CDs, which also include 2003’s “Stand” and 2005’s “This Planet Mercy.” Now, the group takes inspiration from an equal mix of classic and modern rock, Banks said.

Making Discoveries

“We were children of the ’90s, that’s what we were,” Banks said. “As we’ve gotten older, I feel like we’ve —I mean I — particularly in the last few years, I’ve fallen in love with Neil Young and Led Zeppelin. Just some of the greatest rock ’n’ roll music that was ever written: The Beatles, The Rolling Stones. And those are such cliché things to say, but it’s funny because those weren’t natural things for us to say; they weren’t the things we first discovered, they were things I feel like came about later.”

These influences have helped to shape the group’s new direction. The first song Banks and Jones wrote as a duo, “Purple Pachyderm,” available on the group’s MySpace page, www.myspace.com/28n, is a good example, marrying bouncing hard rock riffs to an upbeat vocal melody unlike anything found in the band’s back catalogue. It was the first song the group wrote as a two-piece, and according to Banks, sums up the duo’s new approach.

“That phrase just came from sort of fun conversation between us, but it [has] metaphorically turned into what the whole album is about. It’s really about thinking outside the box is all, really. . . . It’s just about, are you just gonna do everything that everyone told you because that’s what they told you to do, or do you want to do what really feels right to you? ‘The Purple Pachyderm’ is really about that kind of thing.”