Outsideinside rocks like it’s 1972 on its second album.
There was no band called Outsideinside rocking our world in the early ’70s, but you could almost be fooled into thinking there was.
Taking its name from the second album by Bay Area power trio Blue Cheer, Outsideinside is led by Pittsburgh rocker Dave Wheeler, who emerged on the scene in 2007 in the grungy metal band Magic Wolf.
Before that, the towering singer had been killing it at karaoke night at Ryan’s Pub in Regent Square, and before that he was in a Led Zeppelin tribute band in high school.
“I really grew up on classic rock and soul,” Wheeler says. “I think I was already digging deeper into that stuff than people my age. I graduated high school in ’96. Eventually, I discovered stuff like The Jesus Lizard and The Melvins, after high school, and became disenchanted with classic rock. I guess I was sick of it and wanted to see what else was out there.”
Doing shifts at WPTS, the University of Pittsburgh radio station, helped open those musical worlds a bit.
His fondness for the new wave of British metal — he mentions Diamond Head and Witchfinder General, not Judas Priest and Iron Maiden — informed his next band, Carousel, which he launched in 2012. The heavy-hitting Carousel toured internationally behind its two acclaimed albums, “Jeweler’s Daughter” and “2113,” before splitting in 2016.
That left Wheeler with Outsideinside, the side project he’d created with Carousel bassist Jim Wilson and drummer Panfilo DiCenzo. The band’s 2017 debut, “Sniff a Hot Rock,” toned down the crunch of Carousel and had the singer wheeling back to boogie-rock influences such as Free, Humble Pie and Spooky Tooth, which all happened to be British.
“It wasn’t like I had this harder edge and switched over to a more conventional classic rock sound,” Wheeler says. “It’s always been there.”
Soon after the album was released, the power trio became a quartet with the addition of former Harlan Twins frontman James Hart, who’s expanded the sound with organ, guitar and vocal harmonies.
“II,” the eight-song sophomore album from Outsideinside, which will be released on Friday with a show at Brillbox, gets off to a bold start with “My Mother’s Son,” a soul-rock song loaded with classic-rock goodies, from Wheeler’s scratchy vocal to the cowbell to the furious call-and-response guitar jam in the middle.
“II” continues in that vein, getting deeper and more soulful than the modernday hard-rock bands that maybe heard The Black Keys and The White Stripes and just set out to be heavy and fuzzy.
Recording digitally with Nate Campisi at Mr. Smalls’ studio, they created what sounds like an undiscovered gem from the ’70s with songs like the moody, organ-drenched
“Ancient Faces,” the punchy “Top 10” and “Eventide,” a 10-minute hammer-of-the-gods psych jam that closes the album.
“There’s a term that I’ve heard called ‘tone-chaser,’ ” Wheeler says, “like the kind of band that really tries to replicate a sound authentically. I mean, we play gear from that era because we like it, and, yeah, he got that nice analog sound. I think a lot of getting that sound is the discipline you use when you’re recording. Obviously, having an engineer that knows how to get the sound is the important thing, and Nate was really good with that.
“But the thing is, when you record to tape, like we did with Carousel on ‘2113,’ you can’t just fly things in and do overdubs as easily. So, if you take that same approach when you’re recording digitally, and you have an engineer that knows how to get the sound, then you can replicate that — just kind of embrace some of the looseness of the recording process.” If people dig it, that’s cool.
If not, “I don’t pay too much mind to that,” he says. “We’re fans of the music. We’re fans of and do our best to write songs that we like. I don’t think we’re toiling under the delusion that we’re Deep Purple and we’re going to skyrocket to the top of the rock ’n’ roll pantheon. Those things don’t factor into the creative process. We just try to do what we want to do and not think about that kind of stuff.”