Joe Wawrzyn was wearing the name of his band, The Westward Trail, long before the electronic indie-pop duo was an official act. When he and his partner in crime, Jake Dempsey, started crafting songs together in their apartment almost three years ago, they found themselves ready to play shows but still lacking a name for their project. The solution came in the form of the belt buckle Wawrzyn had acquired at a flea market—a massive piece of metal with images of three pioneers on horses and the phrase “The Westward Trail.”

“I just came home from work one day and realized I’ve been wearing it on the crotch, man. It’s been staring us in the face!” he says. “Then we questioned why my crotch (was) staring us in the face.”
The two have been playing together in various bands since 2000, including a five-piece version of Cassette with current Cassette singer Nate Bluhm when they all lived in Pennsylvania. Now in Boston, Dempsey and Wawrzyn are enjoying modest success as The Westward Trail and are branching out to other parts of New England. On Tuesday, Jan. 24, the duo returns to The Spark at the Muddy River in Portsmouth, where this past November they played a show they describe as “one of the best ever, if not the best .”

“We’ve played some big shows in Boston, but I haven’t felt like we’ve gotten (as) positive of a response (as the Portsmouth show),” Dempsey says.  “People were really digging it.”

Essentially two frontmen with no backing band, most of the traditional sound roles—drum rhythms, bass and synth parts—are sequenced by Wawrzyn on a Mac G4 laptop. Dempsey writes lyrics and melodies that Wawrzyn often harmonizes to, and both play Epiphone hollow-body guitars.

Says Wawrzyn, “Sometimes I like to play with bands that are a little more strictly rock, because it feels like a bit of a challenge for the audience. And then when we get up there with two guitars and we have, like, an iPod running through an amp, they’re like ‘What the f— is this?’ But I think there are definitely times that we’ve won those people over. The fact that it’s only two of us up on stage means we have to work that much harder making it somewhat of a live spectacle.”

“The great thing about the sequencing, no matter how drunk and off we are, (or) should we be struck down ... or take ill,” adds Dempsey humorously, “(is that) the sequencing is still interesting.”

Wawrzyn and Dempsey both started as guitar players, then found their way to electronic music. The guitar background consistently adds a thicker, edgier rock tone to their sound than one might normally expect from electro-pop.

“And since (the hollowbody guitars are) really the only two organic things played live,” Wawrzyn says, “It opens up the sound a lot more than two solid-bodies. A little warmer.”

Dempsey acknowledges the influence of the 1980s in their interest in synthesizers and sequencing.
“We were just starting to grow up when New Wave was fading out, and synthesizers were becoming nasty monstrous things that made awful, mediocre sounds that are on ’80s metal recordings.”

But Wawrzyn and Dempsey aren’t afraid to use the liabilities of synths to their advantage.

“At the time they were invented,” Dempsey says, “they were trying to actually emulate real sounds…. (Synthesizer pioneer) Bob Moog thought that synthesizers would replace natural instruments, and as technology improved, they would sound like real instruments. But as they start(ed) to sound like real instruments, the less interesting they became, and musicians then discovered that aesthetic in their own way with their own incredible, strange sounds, unusual, unnatural sounds, that can be made even on very rudimentary sound cards and old game machines. And there’s something good and interesting about what you can do with them when you take it and use it for something other than what it was meant for.”

Wawrzyn continues the thought.

“You can always make great sounds from (bass, guitar, and drums),” he says, “But I love electronics because it gives you a new opportunity to create sounds that, theoretically, have not even existed up until that point. ... I think it’s just an incredible thing, to always be creating new sounds just by tweaking various electronic components.”

 “I feel like a lot of people have gotten kind of hung up on using ’80s sounds in an ’80s way, just rehashing New Wave,” Dempsey says. “But I’m finding, through just playing with computer programs, that you can still get vintage synth, and you can go and sample it and you can run them through all sorts of strange effects.  The potential is just limitless now, even with just a computer, downloading freeware, you can take synth-pop into new areas, create new sounds, mess with them, destroy them in ways which were, before, never possible.”

Their choice in naming their act, though seemingly arbitrary, is a fitting one. While others are content to stay where things are comfortable and well established, these two young men feel the itch of exploration on their posteriors along with their saddle sores. They have taken only the essentials, packed them onto their horses, and headed for unknown territories to establish something new, discover something unique, and rock a few saloons in the process.

The duo is working on a tentative spring release on Post Meridian records. In the meantime, they continue to sell a four-song EP at shows; it can also be heard on their Web site, www.westwardtrail.com. Mark your calendars for The Spark at The Muddy River in Portsmouth on Jan. 24, with The Westward Trail, Tiny Whales and Birth Rites.