Trans-hiss-tion

Last month's Spin magazine called local psychedelic garage rockers the Hiss one of the "25 to Watch" for 2004. But most Atlantans are more likely to have watched members of the band toil at Savage Pizza or the Flying Biscuit Cafe, landscape yards or deliver Creative Loafing. The term "huge in Europe," once reserved for Baywatch-era David Hasselhoff, now pertains to a band that lives in near anonymity in its own hometown.

Britain's music tabloid New Musical Express called the Hiss "better than, well, everything." The band's track "Triumph" was an NME single of the week in February 2003, and it charted No. 6 upon entry onto the U.K. rock chart. In March, the band opened a string of dates in Germany for Oasis.

But in America, aside from the Spin accolade, the band has had limited press. It released a limited edition, three-song 7-inch available only in Atlanta. It opened a set of dates for faceless garage band White Light Motorcade and shoe-gaze rockers Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, as well as performed a one-off with the White Stripes at Stone Mountain last summer. Here, the Hiss is known as a British band or the sound a tire makes when it's leaking air.

The band, which formed the same week as the Sept. 11 tragedy, has experienced extreme highs and dark lows. The Hiss has played everywhere from arenas like the Zenith in Munich, Germany, to anyone-can-play-here dives like the Somber Reptile just a few feet away from Georgia Tech. The band has gone through three bassists in a span of time that rivals Spinal Tap's appetite for drummers. The group has taken off as the "next big thing" and landed as backroom semi-regulars in the length of one cross-Atlantic plane flight.

With the U.S. release of its debut album, Panic Movement, Tuesday, March 23, the quartet will finally try to transfer some of its European success into domestic fame. (The full-length album was released in the U.K. last August.) But the band that took on the right side of the Atlantic in 2003 is different from the one about to embark on its American crusade.

The Hiss' whirlwind rise in the U.K. occurred a little over a year after the band's inception — combining the talents of Floridians singer/guitarist Adrian Barrera and drummer Todd Galpin with New England ex-pat guitarist Ian Franco and Liberian-born Atlantan Mahjula Bah-Kamara on bass. At the time, a flood of acts had been returning to the United States from success overseas, including the White Stripes and the Strokes. It was a trend the British press called "the new rock revolution." Bands of that ilk traded in stripped down, visceral fare that stemmed from short but effective hooks. Comparisons traced them back to the Stones, Stooges and MC5, and the acts all sported the same jeans-and-T-shirt look.

In mid-2002, the Hiss' 7-inch Triumph leaked across the pond and caught the attention of an NME editor named James Oldham. Moved by the band's marriage of garage fury and eerie psychedelia, he offered his services in releasing the disc in the U.K.

"We were dead set against going to England," says Barrera. "All these bands were going to England and breaking out there, trying to do this Jimi Hendrix shit, and we're like, 'Why aren't they trying to do it here first?'"

Oldham, who was starting a new label (a division of U.K.-major Polydor named Loog), was the only offer on the table. At a Hiss show at Khyber Pass in Philadelphia, he charmed the band with his naivete, says Barrera.

"We knew right away he had no clue what the hell he was doing, 'cause all he talked about was hats. He was like, 'You guys want to wear crazy hats?'"

During the course of two months on the other side of the Atlantic, the Hiss never got a moment's rest. Between a quick tour of the U.K. with Detroit garage-punks the Sights and a one-week German stint with Oasis, the band moved into a mansion in Milton Keynes to record Panic Movement with famed Britpop producer Owen Morris (Oasis, the Verve). The album, a reverb-drenched, mishmash of influences from the Stones to Zeppelin to Oasis, includes songs that rocket from start to finish, flow on radio-ready pop-balladry or meander in a hazy smoke of British blues and wanderlust.

The Hiss was blowing up, but the grueling pace was too much for Bah-Kamara. She became increasingly distant as the time-squeezed recording sessions soldiered on. When the band prepared to return home, Barrera recalls a series of bizarre incidents that occurred between the studio and the departing gate at London's Gatwick airport in late March: Bah-Kamara reportedly plucked rare flowers from the mansion's garden and presented them to the mansion's none-too-pleased owner; she rode backward on airport people movers; she lost both her passport and ticket, which caused problems with post-9-11-paranoid airport officials. When it was time for the Hiss' plane to leave, Bah-Kamara was AWOL and eventually detained after an alleged act of vandalism in the airport's HMV.

British Internet publication Manchester Online attributed the episode to "a cocktail of drugs, hard work and schizophrenia," but Barrera refutes that.

"I vehemently deny any connection between drugs and [the incident] completely," says Barrera. "[Mahjula] was medically examined and the 'nervous breakdown' or 'psychotic episode' — what happened in Gatwick — was caused by exhaustion."

Regardless, Bah-Kamara needed a break and the Hiss train was just getting rolling. So the band took stock and decided it would be best to part ways, believing that its ailing bassist would be taken care of.

"We were like, 'You still have this money coming, so just relax, you don't have to work. You probably should be around family or something,'" says Galpin. "People thought we left her high and dry, like, 'See ya.'"

Bah-Kamara, now a Chicago resident who plays in the indie-rock outfit the Dirty Blue, downplays the incidents at Gatwick but agrees that the time was appropriate for a split.

"It was a hectic time. We had a lot of work to do, I needed some time off and that's basically how it is," says Bah-Kamara. "It's just like any relationship. Things don't always work the way you want them to work, and you have to take a step back."

When they returned home, the Hiss were short a bassist and virtual nobodies. Along with the band's sonic dabbling, the presence of Bah-Kamara had been key in keeping the band distinct from the rest of the garage-rock revivalists being sent over from the U.K.

"In a way [Mahjula] just stood there, but that was what made it cool ... she carried on this sort of air of confidence," says Iain Bluett, one of the band's former managers. "She had that big massive 'fro and she was a black chick playing bass in a white Southern band."

The band quickly replaced Bah-Kamara with Johnny Kral, a friend who Galpin and Barrera had made during their college days in Gainesville, Fla. Those who remembered the Hiss from before the England trip were faced with a different looking band. Kral, a slender-bodied former model who head-bangs his way through sets and spins about on his side of the stage, is easily the most animated member of the band.

Shows thus far have been reasonably well attended, but the new Hiss isn't filling clubs like before, or like they did overseas. Nevertheless, most people who've kept up with the band, like former manager and 99X DJ Jay Harren, say that "sonically and socially," Kral is an improvement for the band long term.

"I think the live show is way better with Johnny," says Barrera. "He's definitely a more solid player. He's got a voice for backup singing. He makes us more of a gang."

But Kral's emergence isn't the only difference in the Hiss' live performances. At a New Year's Eve show at MJQ and in the opening slot for Detroit rockers the Von Bondies earlier this month, the band that once showcased songs both powerful and nuanced performed a more high-powered, streamlined set. It relied more heavily on the band's ferocious rock 'n' roll songs, abandoning cuts that Barrera once claimed gave the band "a big palette to work from" over other "one-dimensional" members of the neo-garage set.

"We've tried playing slower songs before and it doesn't go over right," Barrera now says. "It perverts the whole tone of what you want to do with a live set."

Luckily for the Hiss, that big palette is still available should it choose to use it. After introducing U.K. audiences to its new lineup last fall while touring with one-trick ponies Jet, the band will hit America with two of the more idiosyncratic members of "the new rock revolution": disco-influenced rockers the Electric Six and hypnotic noisemakers the Raveonettes.

But Galpin knows what the ultimate barrier between the Hiss and American recognition has been thus far: "We came home and we're still a band that didn't have a record out. And you can only get so into a band if you can't listen to them at home."

That predicament ended in January when major-connected indie Sanctuary Records signed the Hiss and secured rights to the U.S. distribution of Panic Movement. With an album to back, the band should feel renewed energy at its live shows — they may even incite a sing-along or two. But America is still a very different beast from England.

"You could tour England in three weeks and play every small little town," says Barrera. "It would take you three months to do the same here. [The U.S.] is like a bunch of different countries. The Midwest is totally different from the South. And the South is totally different from the Northeast. And then California's got its totally different thing."

For those of us back home in Atlanta who go to shows and watch musicians play the Earl or Echo Lounge one night and then serve us beer or pizza the next, we can't help but root for the Hiss. Like the Strokes with New York and the White Stripes with Detroit, the guys have the potential to open the doors of Atlanta's rock clubs to the world. To pull for the Hiss is to pull for our city's struggling rock scene.

They are Atlanta's great now-all-white hope.

nikhil.swaminathan@creativeloafing.com