Family Worship Center wasn’t born in a church, but these Portland-based rockers hope to bring masses to the Chameleon this weekend

The story of Portland-based rock band Family Worship Center goes back to Nashville, but truly begins and continues with a love for authenticism and musicianship.

In the late 2010s, Andy Krissberg was living in Tennessee’s music hub and spent much of his time recording musician after musician straight to vinyl – a practice much lost to time.

While wandering record and thrift stores looking for remnants of the past in 2018, he stumbled upon a “Bible-esque” info-pamphlet titled “Family Worship Center.” The old pamphlet discussing group beliefs resonated with Krissberg, who around this time began gathering top-tier studio musicians in Nashville in order to start a project of his own as a musician himself. Thus, Family Worship Center – the band – was born.

After recording an initial record, Krissberg moved to Seattle. He continued recording artists straight to vinyl and made a living doing so, that is, until COVID-19 struck in 2020.

With his business slowed, he took the time to focus on his own music and gathered another group of talented musicians to reform Family Worship Center in the Northwest. Many of those same musicians followed Krissberg on his final move to Portland, where the band is now not only based but continues to bloom within the scene and on a broader scale.

During the downtime that the pandemic caused many musicians, the group began working on a record and cultivating their sound.

One might not assume the band’s current Oregon foundations based on the old school southern rock sound of 2023’s “Kicked Out Of The Garden.” The record features grainy lead vocals, choir-esque harmonies, jazzy brass runs, and gritty guitar breaks. With every listen it seems like there’s a new element within the layers to discover. About 30 musicians play on the album.

“I wanted it to be a really big sounding record,” Krissberg said. “Horns, strings, standards like guitar … It was kind of hard to wrangle because it was so large-scale.”

Whether it’s rock or soul, Krissberg isn’t too concerned with the box that genre titles can place on a group. He also wants the music to sound fresh and new alongside the “throwback” sound.

“We’re trying to make something that we’d want to listen to, and that’s what it boils down to,” Krissberg said. “Respecting our influences was a big deal for us, but we also wanted make it a little bit more dangerous, a little bit more updated.”

As the group’s frontman and lead vocalist (along with piano player), Krissberg writes much of the group’s material and is heavily involved with the direction of the music. His inspirations range from material relatively similar to their sound to areas more outside the box, such as Japanese music. Lyrically, “a lot of the song writing comes from the idea that ‘Hey, this life is tough but we’re in this together and let’s support each other,’ ” Krissberg said.

Now, the band is embarking on a West Coast tour that bounces everywhere from Los Angeles to Phoenix, Vegas to Salt Lake City, and concludes in Spokane on Saturday at the Chameleon. Live shows like the stops on this tour truly encompass what Family Worship Center is all about.

The group’s “aesthetic inspiration” goes back to the initial pamphlet Krissberg found years ago now – a cultish, colorful, psychedelia-filled vibe that easily catches the eye and one can’t help but be curious about.

“Whenever you go to shows, there’s that fine line between bands that take themselves way too seriously and those that don’t take themselves seriously at all, and I feel like we’re kind of in the middle with the outfits and stuff,” Krissberg said. “Whenever people go to our shows, I want them to be like ‘okay what the hell is going on; I don’t understand this, but I’m glad to be a part of it.’”

Family Worship Center is also already working on their next full-length LP, and after this tour they’ll be hitting the studio with a relatively concrete image of what’s desired already in mind.

“I’m very excited about the new record and it’ll be a little different,” Krissberg said. “It’ll be somewhat, stylistically, the same but the sound is also going in a bit of a different direction … hopefully it’ll be as chaotic as the last one but also a bit more contained.”