New Music, Emerging from your Local Scene
Portland based musical people,
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The Deli
www.thedelimagazine.com
California music doesn’t always have to be about the beach and surfing and pretty girls. The partnership of Aidin Sadeghi and Bret Leinen that form Irvine-based Strange Birds is inspired by California as well, but they present us with a much more intimate portrait of the landscape.
It has a quality of an old memory. The varying amounts of reverb on the vocals stir up a nostalgia that feels as if it’s still close enough to touch. The calm guitar strumming and softly harmonizing vocals on "Save Me" and "Winterbirds" serve up the perfect amount of melancholy equivalent to a rainy fall day. The melodies are simple and repetitive to lull you into total comfort and keep you there. The excitement lies in the details and flourishes in order to take the listener by surprise within their music. These can be exemplified in the dramatic shift from the tranquil pace in the beginning of "Bandages" to a throbbing electric guitar jam for the last minute of the song and the descent from jazzy guitar beats in "Chasing Ghosts" to shivering psychedelia at the end. Each second of the songs are meticulously crafted, but it flows as if done completely effortlessly. It sounds as if the Fleet Foxes and Bon Iver ran away into the forests and the mountains, and came out with this EP.
– Taylor Lampela
The idea of very melodic rock songs buried in noise is anything but new (many shoegazer bands made abundant use of this idea), but Sweet Bulbs find a way to make it sound different. Their almost bubblegum pop female vocals are buried in a deli-rious (and deli-cious) mess of distorted guitars. But these guitars don’t drone – this is not shoegazer. It’s rather an interesting brand of noise pop that brings together extreme melody in the vocals and extreme noisyness in everything else. Fun!
The band will release their debut CD at Silent Barn on 11.13.
Darlings play a brand of mischievous lo-fi garage pop that has the potential to fill you with a sense of nostalgia for your wilder days (assuming your youth has passed at this point), or, if you’re still young, to remind you of recent parties you’ve attended and done something spontaneous (or stupid) at.The band will perform live at Bruars Falls on 11.19 with Sweet Bulbs. – Read Bill Dvorak’s interview with the band here.
We like ArpLine a lot – that’s why we invited them to play our CMJ party at Spike Lee a few weeks ago. There are traces of early MGMT, but mixed with Kraut Rock and Post Punk influences, creating a feeling of club basement badass mixed with synthesizers, distorted guitars and dance jam goodies. ArpLine’s set to release their debut full-length “Travel Book” in early 2011. For a taste, listen to the upcoming record’s first single, "Fold Up Like a Piece of Paper", one of the most tense and cathartic tunesyou may find yourself dancing to. Please do that at Glasslands on 11.17, as the band will be playing with other Deli favorites like The Big Sleep, Chappo and Red Wire Black Wire. – read Vann Alex’s interview with the band here.
This new Chromeo video really got my attention for some reason, but then at the end I didn’t really understand it. Why are all the police women mad at the guys? Because they went in the female section of the police-sauna? I mean they weren’t that outraged when they saw them there… Does the police have private spas? Dudes, i have no time to watch it again, this video is just a "Hot Mess". Anyway, the band hit it pretty big this year, with their dancey tunes inspired to the ex-uncool decade that’s cool again (the Eighties). The band is currently touring Europe and Australia – they’ll be back in North America with an extensive set of dates in early 2011.
NICKCASEY is a solid folk-rock musical partnership between Brooklyn singer/songwriters Casey Spindler and Nicholas Webber. Backed by bassist Tim Luntzel (Rosanne Cash, Bright Eyes) and drummer Dan Rieser (Norah Jones, Marcy Playground) the band is set to release the debut album "Can’t Reason Through Love" with a show at The Living Room, where videos for the songs “Medicine” and “Bandages” will be also premiered. The date is 11.21
Sick of frontmen lacking stage presence, making you question if they even enjoy their own music? Francis Farewell Starlite may be the cure. Fellow scenemaker and Cantora Records labelmate, William Johnson of Gordon Voidwell, once said in a Deli interview that Starlite “is easily the most impressive dancer I’ve played a show with.” A quick search on YouTube renders numerous live videos of him showing off some sweet dance moves, opening for no-big-deal acts Drake and MGMT. Starlite heads Francis and the Lights, a band that successfully fuses funk, soul, country and electropop. His malleable voice that often soars into falsetto ties these often opposing forces together. To get an idea of this conflicting yet satisfying sound, think of the best possible result of a Prince and Phil Collins collaboration. The band has a good amount of cred as they can count Kanye West and Drake as fans. They covered West’s “Can’t Tell Me Nothing,” which was posted on the artist’s notoriously ridiculous blog last year, and the band not only opened for Drake earlier this year, but Starlite also helped produced “Karaoke” off of his latest album, “Thank Me Later.” Bring your dancing shoes and head over to Terminal 5 on November 17 to catch Francis and the Lights open for Brit synthpoppers La Roux. – Nancy Chow
