E-Mail This Article to a Friend The young ones Eisley’s wholesome, home-schooled pop BY MIKAEL WOOD
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Sherri DuPree is tired of being at the receiving end of jokes about Eisley, the band she shares with her two sisters Stacy and Chauntelle, her brother Weston, and a nice neighbor named Jonathan Wilson. "We’re a home-school family that grew up in this little house out in the middle of nowhere," she acknowledges over the phone from Eisley’s tour bus as it rolls across Florida toward Fort Lauderdale on a tour that comes to the Palladium this Friday. "We didn’t have any other friends but each other, and we’re in a band together. We get made fun of for that stuff a lot — people like to play that up whenever they interview us because we’re dorky or whatever. I don’t know why it bothers some people, because it’s not like it has anything to do with how the music sounds."

That’s debatable. What’s special about the music DuPree and her young band mates make on Eisley’s debut album, Room Noises (Reprise), would seem to have everything to do with their situation. The group, who hail from Tyler, Texas, play melodic mid-tempo guitar pop in the vein of countless other groups of clean-cut white people; its particular charm lies in the comfortable, intuitive way Sherri’s voice blends with her sisters’, and the sense that Eisley have created their own little world filled with adolescent whimsy and insulated fantasy. On the first track, "Memories," they sing preciously of a husband and wife separated by death but connected by memories that "grow into beautiful things . . . with their beautiful names and beautiful sounds." In "I Wasn’t Prepared," Sherri describes how "the bees flew down and wrapped themselves around me, and that’s when I spoke a word to have them trace your face for me in pollen." The music swells with little dreamy swirls of vocals, keyboards, or, in "Golly Sandra," melancholy steel guitar, never quite cresting but just politely threatening to spill over into . . . something. The Eisley girls sing about "rows of mermaid-entwined shrubbery," and very sweetly.

"If it hadn’t been for the situations we grew up in, we probably wouldn’t be a band right now," Sherri says, allowing that there is an upside to their back story. "We’d all be in school, we’d have our own friends, and we wouldn’t be making music for a living."

And Eisley have begun to make a career of it. At the Palladium, they’ll be opening for New Found Glory and Reggie and the Full Effect, two acts who loom large in the realm of punk and emo. Back in 2003, before they even had a proper album out, they were chosen to tour with Coldplay, whose singer Chris Martin, as Internet legend has it, used to sing the band’s songs during soundcheck. "It was awesome, but it was definitely like, ‘What are we doing here? This is insane,’ " Sherri recalls. "We just couldn’t really get our heads around it the whole time."

The band’s quick rise from playing the strip-mall coffeehouse their parents had opened in Texas to touring with Coldplay and then the like-minded Scottish band Snow Patrol last fall may seem a little mysterious. But the story involves elements no more exciting than well-placed demo tapes and humdrum record-company showcases. If Boyd and Kim DuPree, the siblings’ "totally supportive" parents, pulled any strings to advance their kids’ cause, they’ve kept it a secret. For their part, Eisley are navigating their unusual situation — which includes a debut album produced in LA by industry heavyweights Rob Cavallo, John Shanks, and Rob Schnapf — with cool heads. "After you get signed, there’s good and bad aspects to it," Sherri admits. "There’s definitely the good, which is people hear your music and you get to go on all these cool tours. But then you have an A&R guy who, while you’re recording, he’s trying to get you to rewrite your songs so that they’re more radio-friendly. You’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, screw this.’ No artist wants to deal with putting that into their music. It seems so stupid." She sighs. "So there’s that."

Eisley open for New Found Glory and Reggie and the Full Effect this Friday, March 25, in a WFNX show at the Palladium, 261 Main Street in Worcester; call (800) 477-6849.