Face melting music

Each time the door of the Gunnison Pizza Company swung open late Saturday evening on Jan. 16, the sound of crashing cymbals, relentless bass and the exploratory electric guitar from local band Left on Red tumbled out into the dark.

The three-piece band — composed of drummer Jeff Walker, bassist Mike Sharan and guitarist Alden Burt — was born from the members’ appreciation for heavy, complex music in a valley of jam bands and bluegrass. Playing an amalgamation of genres, the group cites acts like the Melvins, Primus, Mr. Bungle and Faith No More as its primary influences.

“You could call it math rock, you could call it prog rock,” Walker said. “Some folks call us punk rock. We are a heavy, loud and in-your-face band. Sprinkle that with lots of odd time signatures, starts and stops and you are getting close. We write complex song structures with the intent of sounding nothing like any other band in the valley.”

The band was slow to form because it took a while for the three to find each other. Walker moved to the valley in 2019 to snowboard and got a job at the Secret Stash. He was looking for like-minded musicians when the bar manager at the restaurant introduced him to Sharan.

“Once Mike and I jammed, we pretty much clicked,” Walker said. “We had progressive ideas that have been able to develop into our songs.”

The two spent almost a year as a drum and bass duo before meeting Burt at the Blue Mesa Music Store open mic, where he worked the soundboards.

Burt, who is 19, was born and raised in Gunnison. As a kid, he learned piano from a local teacher in Gunnison. From piano he jumped to trumpet, before discovering Elliott Smith and jumping headlong into guitar.

At 36, Sharan is over a decade older than Burt. He’s a roofer who first moved to the valley in 2007. He’s also in a bluegrass band called The Secondhand String Band and has been playing music since he was 18. Eight years ago, his future wife bought him a bass. He said he clicked with it immediately and began experimenting.

Walker clocks in at 49 years old, and has lived many lives, he said. His history with music and touring bands runs deep. He first took up drumming as a freshman in high school, trying to mimic the sounds of Metallica and Slayer.

After high school, he attended Chico State in Northern California and, in his senior year, helped to form a band called Headspace which toured extensively, opening for bigger acts like Sublime and Goldfinger. When tragedy struck and the lead singer died of a drug overdose, Walker quit music for a time, moving to Tahoe to snowboard.

Eventually he ended up in Portland, Oregon where he played in a slew of genre-diverse bands: the noisy, complex Facepilot, grungy GALL and a two-piece band called Huger, which he said was named after the fact that “we were so loud just the two of us … we were ‘huger’ than your five-piece band.”

Walker said Left on Red is a combination of all of those bands, with an emphasis on complex time signatures and a heavy, thundering wall of sound. For Sharan, the creativity in the Left on Red songs is what keeps him so engaged.

Left on Red has another gig set at Gunnison Pizza Company on Feb. 10. In the meantime, the band is continuing to write songs and practice twice a week in a garage which doubles as a concert venue and a practice space on Virginia Street.

“We’ve got a brand new song we're going to play for the first time, and it's probably one of our most complex songs we've written so far,”  Walker said.

Looking ahead, the band hopes to record an EP in the near future while continuing to gig in Gunnison and beyond. As far as the Feb. 10 show, they said anyone who plans to attend should come prepared.

“Bring a couple extra faces,” Burt said before Walker chimed in, “because we’re going to melt your f--- face off.”

(Jacob Spetzler can be contacted at 970.641.1414.)