The family plan Lock and Key become leaders of a new local scene, and the Call Up join in BY WILL SPITZ

Back on October 20, the members of Lock and Key were sitting at the bar of the Paradise Lounge in Boston and wondering whether anyone was going to show up for a show to celebrate the release of their debut full-length, Pull Up the Floorboards, on the North Carolina indie label Deep Elm. It was a Wednesday night — Blackout Bar night at the Lounge — and yet Lock and Key had reason to worry: it was also the night of the seventh game of the ALCS, the game that would send either the Yankees or the Red Sox to the World Series. Since the band, who would be heading off on a seven-week tour the next day, had to be there early for sound check, singer/guitarist Ryan Shanahan had invited friends to come to the Lounge to watch the game with them. "I was like, ‘They’re not really gonna come,’ " he recalls. "But people showed up in the first couple of innings, and we all just hung out and drank beer and watched the Sox. And they weren’t playing music, either. It was Blackout Bar without music. They won, and 20 minutes later, after everyone had their cigarette break, we plugged in, and everybody was in the best mood. I think we played better because of that."

Many of the people who were there for that show are what the members of Lock and Key view as a burgeoning scene made up of local musicians, recording engineers, photographers, and artists. Lock and Key may be one of the city’s most promising and hardest-working young groups, but as they see it, they’re just one group in a community of punk- and hardcore-influenced bands emerging from the old houses and run-down apartments in Allston/Brighton.

When I catch up with them, Shanahan is feeling nostalgic. He remembers a party he went to back when he and Lock and Key drummer Keith "Trash" Casella, both then living in Watertown, Mass., were starting to break into the local scene with their high-school band Fastlane. The soirée was at the large Allston (Mass.) house that was the headquarters of local punk label Fork in Hand Records and home to members of Big D & the Kids Table and Drexel. "It hit me like a ton of bricks that here were all these bands who were all friends, and their friends recorded them, and their friends put their records out, and their friends did their art work. And I was just like, ‘Oh my God. This is how it is?’ And I wanted to be part of that so badly. And we totally have that going on right now. It’s the coolest thing. And instead of everybody competing, everybody’s working together."

No one seems to be working harder than Shanahan and Lock and Key. Their diligence and dedication when it comes to taking the show on the road — at T.T. the Bear’s Place in Cambridge, Mass. a week ago Thursday, the band kicked off a five-week tour, their third full-scale jaunt since they were freed from their college commitments last May — have people starting to take notice. And in the wake of the promising No Fate EP the band released on Deep Elm almost a year ago, Pull Up the Floorboards has made Lock and Key one of the bands to watch in Boston’s always teeming local underground. They’ve been invited to take part in this year’s Rumble, and after being highly touted in the Phoenix back when No Fate was released, they’ve been named a "Hot Band" of 2004 by Stuff @ Night and one of the 10 bands to watch in 2005 by the Boston Globe. And the Boston Herald recently praised them for their "clean and keen rock ’n’ roll."

Although the band’s music is indeed "keen" — Floorboards is rife with evocative metaphors, and the songs are arranged thoughtfully by Shanahan, Casella, guitarist Mike Vera, and bassist Josh Hoey — it’s not exactly "clean." Shanahan barks gruffly over waves of distorted guitar chords, in a way that could suggest Nirvana or Jawbreaker. But the band they’re most often compared to are Gainesville’s Hot Water Music, with whom share a predilection for thick guitars and throaty vocals. Shanahan does cite Hot Water Music as a major influence, though it’s clear he’s growing tired of the analogy: at a recent practice, Casella likened a work-in-progress to a Deftones song, whereupon Shanahan retorted, "People are just gonna call it Hot Water Music." Maybe so, but with its doubled ascending guitar octaves and double-time rhythm, the new tune sounds more like Siamese Dream–era Smashing Pumpkins, and it signals a departure from the straight-ahead post-hardcore of Floorboards and No Fate. On another new song, Vera provided some atmosphere with a spacy, delay-drenched guitar melody — a new and welcome texture.

That’s not to say that the guitars on Floorboards are uninteresting. Among stretches of roaring chords and rhythmic palm muting, Vera and Shanahan lay big, shimmering open chords over one another and bounce melodic phrases back and forth, laying a shifting foundation for Shanahan’s bellowed melodies, which he sings with blood vessel-busting intensity. His earnest delivery is buoyed by the optimistic tenor of his lyrics. "I don’t like just complaining," he explains. "I have to say, ‘This sucks,’ but then move on from there. How are you going to make it better if there’s any way to do it? Sometimes it’s just hope that it will be better. Sometimes it’s an actual solution."

If you find yourself in the lobby of Kenmore Square’s Hotel Buckminster and you think you hear the low din of rumbling power chords coming from general direction of the elevator, you’re not crazy. Down in the bowels of the Buck, there’s a room that still houses the hotel’s old, unused elevator ropes and gears, in between the elevator shafts, and it’s now Lock and Key’s second home. Shanahan works at the hotel part-time between tours, and when his boss found out that the band were paying $250 a month to share a rehearsal space with another group, she offered them this basement space. "I was like, ‘No, we can’t play in the basement. It’s gonna be too loud. You’ll hear it upstairs.’ But when we came back from tour, she was like, ‘You should go see that room in the basement.’ " The hotel’s maintenance staff had built a wooden platform that they covered with stained carpet from hotel rooms to solve the problem of the room’s uneven floor, and they’d cleared the room of all the miscellaneous junk. The band have practiced there ever since, and complaints have been few.

It’s here that Lock and Key have been road-readying their current set for a tour that will take them down the East Coast to Florida and then back up through West Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. At the T.T.’s kickoff show, the band were in top form, and Shanahan wouldn’t have it any other way. "Most of my day is bullshit, and if we play for a half an hour somewhere, why not put everything you have into it? You get more out of it. Sometimes you end up so drained, but it’s a good feeling. It’s kind of like people that love to go to the gym. It feels really good to be full on and all out when we play. It really does."

CHRIS AMARAL, who also hails from Watertown and who now lives with Shanahan and Vera in their Lower Allston (Mass.) apartment, is the singer of the Call Up, the band who played second to last at the T.T.’s show. He, drummer Mark Sarno, guitarist Mike Shepherd, and bassist Johnny Lattuca are all very much part of the community the members of Lock and Key talk about like family. And he echoes Shanahan’s philosophy when we meet up at T.T.’s: "I think if you’re not putting everything into it when you play, then go fuck yourself. You feel disappointed if you can’t get to that point."

Amaral didn’t seem to have much trouble getting to that point at T.T.’s, beating the strings of his guitar as mercilessly as he later beat Sarno’s cymbals with that same guitar and screaming as though it were the last night he’d have a voice. Yet the songs — many of which will be on their forthcoming debut full-length, tentatively titled Cheap Novelty and due out in a couple months on Lonesome Recordings — remained melodic. The Call Up combine the fast, loud-and-pissed-off intensity of hardcore punks like Black Flag and Minor Threat with the more melodic, anthemic post-punk associated with the Replacements, and the desperation and angst of post-punk with the epic sensibility of Bruce Springsteen. Throughout the forthcoming album, Amaral renders his own apathy contemptible by disgustedly sneering at it. On "Gaslight," he laments what he’s doing with his life as a "passing phase, a child’s game . . . another cheap novelty, another way to murder all the time," only to chalk it to up to "a case of the spoiled-white-boy blues."

"I was really kind of bummed out, and life was pointless, and all I was doing was hanging out in Allston and drinking myself to oblivion," is how he accounts for those emotions. "But I’ve had all the opportunities in the world." As he puts it in the song, borrowing part of a line from the Replacements’ "Bastards of Young," he could have been "picking cotton and feeling the crack of the whip upon my back."