Last year, The Stranger highlighted a handful of
up-and-coming bands, acts to watch in the coming year, and dubbed them
the Young Ones. Since then, all these groups have achieved
international fame and unbridled financial success—Bow + Arrow
even bought a yacht. Seriously, though, most of them had pretty stellar
2007s, and all of them were well worth the extra notice. So naturally,
we’re doing it again this year, and we’re adding a showcase, featuring
this year’s Young Ones as well as headlining performances from two of
last year’s selections, Dyme Def and Arthur & Yu. The show takes
place Thursday, March 6, at Neumo’s and Sole Repair and is a benefit
for Real Change. Not all of this year’s bands are, strictly speaking,
young—some have been playing around for years—but they’re
all poised for breakout runs in 2008.
“Keep Her on the Line”
Geographically, Green Lake is nowhere near Laurel Canyon or Big
Pink. But the Moondoggies reside much closer to the Byrds, Crosby,
Stills and Nash, and the Band than their current address suggests. Not
just in their sound—a vibrant strain of cosmic country rock with
abundant vocal harmonies, embellished by touches of blues, gospel, and
folk—but how they generate it, too.
“We don’t really have a complicated setup, and tend to keep things
very simple and group oriented,” says frontman Kevin Murphy. And thus
it has always been. “We used to sit around in a house in Everett and
listen to records. A lot of jamming out to ‘Tonight’s the Night.’ Then
we’d start harmonizing, and just playing a few acoustic instruments.”
Eventually, originals—many composed by Murphy during a stint in
Alaska—replaced Neil Young covers.
“Deep down, we have a very traditional, less-is-more outlook… but
that can go in a lot of directions,” Murphy observes. Rightly so. On
their forthcoming Hardly Art debut, Long Time Comin’, lively
hip shakers (“Ol’ Black Bird”) coexist peacefully with sepia-toned,
Southern rock–flavored grooves, and joyous, communal vocalizing
(“Ain’t No Lord”). But they all gush forth from a similar spring. “It
comes from a time of less-preconceived notions about music, the
bare-bones, front-porch stuff.” KURT B. REIGHLEY
THE PHARMACY
“Little Toys on a Shelf”
As a band, the Pharmacy are hardly young—the Vashon
Island–to-Seattle transplants have been making music together for
nearly a decade. They released their full-length debut,
B.F.F.
, in 2005 and they’ve played hundreds of shows
since, touring with the likes of Kimya Dawson, Best Friends Forever,
and Matt & Kim.
During their adventures, they’ve been arrested, stranded, and sliced
open by sharp river rocks. More debilitating to their career, though,
has been the band’s regularly rotating cast of characters. After the
release of B.F.F., original keyboardist Joey Seward left the
band. Then the duo turned into a quartet that turned back into a
trio—drummer Brendhan Bowers, guitarist and singer Scott Yoder,
and keyboardist Stefan Rubicz.
“This is the really comfortable situation,” says Yoder about the
new, permanent lineup. “We’ve always been pretty close friends for so
long, so the energy really works.”
Rubicz also fits in with the band’s running joke of inevitable bad
luck—shortly after joining the band last year, he broke both
wrists and still had to play keyboards. More recently, he broke his
pinky when the band toured to L.A. a couple weeks ago.
Over the years, the Pharmacy have morphed from a discordant, lo-fi
DIY punk into power-pop gold. Last week the band finally released their
second full-length, Choose Your Own Adventure, on local
label Don’t Stop Believin’. It’s their best effort yet—blissful
and bright, yet still harnessing the angst that made B.F.F. so
fun to scream along to.
The Pharmacy won’t be performing at the showcase this week,
sadly—they’ll be just starting months’ worth of touring
(including a few weeks with Japanther)—but they’ll be back in
Seattle in April. Hopefully, no one will be wearing a cast. MEGAN
SELING
THE PHYSICS
“Ready for We”
Local duo the Physics (pictured here with collaborator Monk
Wordsmith) are at their best when making smart and futuristic hiphop.
To find the origins of smart hiphop one has to go back to De La Soul.
That old-skool trio fathered a hiphop defined by self-referentiality,
self-mockery, and playfulness. When we enter the tunes produced by the
combined intelligence of MC Thig Natural and DJ/producer Jus
D’Amato—the Physics—we think of De La Soul, Tha Alkaholiks,
and the Pharcyde. But this is not entirely accurate. Thig and Jus are
not that related to the Pharcyde or De La. All are smart, but
something else happens in the music of the Physics.
The Physics’ debut album, Future Talk, which came out in
the middle of 2007, breaks into two parts. The first half of the album
is music that in rock is called “trad”—these tracks are not
terrible in the least; they simply show us that the Physics know the
tradition of hiphop. The first half of the album is full of the
past—the second, the future. And it is in the future tracks that
the Physics are both at their smartest and most distinct from other
smart hiphop.
Take “They Call Me” as an example. Before the opening of this track
there is “Movie Phone (Interlude).” Here, Thig calls up a service that
delivers movies through the cell-phone network (this technology is in
the near future). After listening to the blaxploitation movies the
service has to offer (Gone with the Benz, Barbeque 4,
Broke Black Mountain), Thig selects Get Your Serve
On, the film is downloaded, and “They Call Me” is activated: We
enter the world of the slickest, sweetest, bad-assest ghetto prince in
Seattle. Where we are and what we see has nothing to do with
reality—this is pure cinema, pure play, pure fantasy. The image
(the ride, the dip, the digital bling-bling) is something that Snoop
Dogg would take very seriously—this is his ideal. What makes
“They Call Me” so smart is that the Physics are not simply mocking the
life and mode of the ghetto prince, they are doing better than Dogg and
others who, track after track, attempt to capture the spirit of hood
cool and smoothness. This is another kind of mockery, another kind of
laughter. CHARLES MUDEDE
“It’s Okay”
Don’t let the cutesy lyrics and fey appearance fool you, PWRFL
Power’s Kazutaka Nomura can fucking shred. Before starting his
singer/
songwriter solo project, Nomura performed as part of NA, an
avant/noise ensemble that was as experimental and outré as his
new incarnation is poppy and precious. The through line of both bands
is Nomura’s tremendous but never showy guitar prowess, which gives even
his most cartoonish pop songs deceptive depth.
Or, you know, fuck it. Because PWRFL Power’s songs are cute—Nomura sings, in distinctly accented English, about crushing
on girls, about teaching you how to use chopsticks, about being
yourself and releasing your, you know, powerful power. But though PWRFL
Power’s songs are silly and self-conscious, they’re also serious:
Nomura’s songwriting is honest and revealing, when he frets about being
labeled a cokehead if he does too much coke or about liking a girl even
though she’s plain-looking, he’s revealing faults and taking chances,
and these moments balance out the occasional goof about fruits and
vegetables.
On March 3, PWRFL Power released his self-titled full-length debut
on Portland’s Slender Means Society (full disclosure: former
Stranger writer Zac Pennington runs Slender Means), and Nomura
is heavily touring the U.S. in support of the release, winning new fans
one awkward acoustic song at a time and journaling about the whole
experience on Line Out. Oh, and he was a cartoon in an Esurance
commercial, which means he can introduce you to that pink-haired girl
who you have an unrealistic crush on. ERIC GRANDY
“Eyes Spliced Open”
Sleepy Eyes of Death’s impeccably crafted cinematic electro-rock
sculptures are notable on their own, but what really sets the band
apart from their peers is their remarkable live shows. The band deliver
their dramatic instrumentals through a thick cloud of fog, eerily lit
with flashing blue, red, and yellow spotlights. With a slew of amps,
Moogs, keyboards, and synths, their performances are so draining on
club’s electrical systems that they’ve been known to blow a fuse or
two. Or, as they did at a Vera Project show last year, set off the fire
alarm.
“Thirty seconds into our set, the alarms go off and everyone has to
evacuate,” remembers Sleepy Eyes’ guitarist J. Andrew. “They were
really nice about it, though. They let us play a couple more
songs.”
Their best sets, though, are seamless, with songs flowing into one
another through layers of ambient noise.
For 2008, the band are working on a sophomore album.
“It’s gonna be really rad,” says Andrew. “We’re honing in on our
sound, making it more original and less about drawing from influences.
The new stuff is a little darker and more cohesive—it’s feeling
more like an album.”
There’s no date set yet, or label (hint, hint), but they’re shooting
for a fall release. As for their performance at the Young Ones
showcase, Andrew says that the band have added some new tricks to their
arsenal to ensure a stellar performance. Prompted for more info, he
coyly replies, “It’s going to be a surprise.” What can be said is that
you might want to bring a pair of sunglasses, as one possible addition
to their lighting rig is something usually reserved for arenas. MEGAN
SELING
“Guitar Strap”
“None of us really think that grunge is an insulting word, nor do we
consider ourselves players of grunge music,” write Talbot Tagora in a
MySpace message, after being asked about the “grunge” tag on their
profile. “MySpace didn’t have our preferred genre description listed,
which is ‘NOIVE.'”
Noive?
“We had originally thought of choosing the genre description ‘other’
instead, but we realized that we don’t play ‘other,’ we play
‘NOIVE.'”
If Talbot Tagora can make up their own sound, free from heavy nods
to obvious influences, I suppose it’s only fair they can make up a word
to go with it.
The band are the youngest in this year’s showcase—Chris Ando
is 21, Mark Greshowak is 20, and Ani Valley is 18—and before they
became TT, they were a duo called Summer Camp. But Ando and Greshowak
wanted to fill out their sound, so they asked Valley to sit in on a
practice and renamed the threesome Talbot Tagora.
Talbot Tagora’s songs are organically derived exercises in
discordant noise. Sometimes they rely on repetitive, jarring guitars
(“Guitar Strap”), sometimes they wow with bombastic layers and
distorted vocals (their killer cover of Elastica’s “Connection”). The
best songs are just really spooky and weird—”Lady Meeting” makes
you feel like you’re floating in a cartoon sky.
The songs sound like the result of fluid improv sessions, but the
band say they’re actually thoughtfully constructed. “We aren’t really
into jamming, but if we do jam, it isn’t for long because somebody in
the band will get really bored and pretend to be thirsty. We usually
layer from an idea that someone comes to practice with.”
As for what’s in store for 2008, the band will hit the road for a
short West Coast tour later this month, and they’ll also keep busy
recording songs that will appear on a variety of releases, including a
split 7-inch with friends Shearing Pinx, a split cassette tape with a
band from New York called Handjobs, and “probably a CD-R or two.”
They’re also working on a new fashion trend. “We had to stop wearing
flannel because most of the bands that are related with ‘Futura Noive’
(or ‘Noive’) can’t really relate to the fashion of a lumberjack or
grandparent. So instead we wear brightly colored blouses and raincoats
(you know how the Seattle weather is).” MEGAN SELING
“Lolita”
Throw Me the Statue began as the one-man, bedroom pop recordings of
one Scott Reitherman, a California native and Vassar grad who moved to
Seattle to start a record label and make music. His label, the homey
Baskerville Hill, has released recordings by Black Bear; Husbands, Love
Your Wives; and others, including Throw Me the Statue’s impressive
debut, Moonbeams.
On Moonbeams, Reitherman’s home-recorded songs loom
deceptively large, with layers of synths and drum loops complementing
live guitars, drums, melodicas, piano, ukulele, and other incidental
instruments, all circling around Reitherman’s casually cool singing and
book-smart songwriting. The baroque lo-fi arrangements reveal a kinship
with other DIY hermit geniuses such as the
Microphones/Mount
Eerie’s Phil
Elverum and Of Montreal’s Kevin Barnes.
“Young Sensualists” affectionately details a friendship worn thin
over a clipped, off-kilter rhythm loop, organ chords, and ukulele or
possibly banjo picking. “Lolita,” though it seems at first about as
substantial as a lollipop, is deceptively clever. The upbeat boardwalk
strut and flattened singing of “A Mutinous Dream” favorably recalls
Very Emergency–era Promise Ring. “Your Girlfriend’s Car”
is charmingly shambolic, with Reitherman promising, affably though not
entirely convincingly, that he’s not interested in stealing anything
from out of the titular vehicle. “About to Walk” is a persistent dream
of a pop song. “This Is How We Kiss,” “Groundswell,” and “Take It or
Leave It” are sunny indie-rock jams.
Reitherman’s one-man show has expanded into a full band so as to
better realize his songs live—the usual electric guitars, bass,
and live drums accented by keyboards and glockenspiel (don’t let anyone
tell you that you can’t rock out on a glockenspiel). The group recently
signed to Secretly Canadian, who rereleased Moonbeams internationally, and they’re touring extensively in 2008, appearing at
SXSW and the Sasquatch! Music Festival. ERIC GRANDY
TRUCKASAURAS
“Angels Sound Like Bottle Rockets”
In the land of techno, Truckasauras are a thrashing, mechanical rock
‘n’ roll monster. The group, consisting of brothers Adam and Tyler Swan
and longtime friends Ryan Trudell and Dan Bordon, bring a
beer-swilling,
headbanging, low-tech energy to their live shows
that makes them as well-suited to rocking Decibel Festival as they are
to instigating a dance party at the Comet.
The band attracted some critical glow in 2007, including an effusive
write-up on Pitchfork and an appearance in Vice magazine’s “Dos and
Don’ts” (as a “Do,” naturally), but they’ve yet to transform the
attention into a proper release. Instead, they’ve circulated a
hand-printed, four-track demo, which includes remixes from DJ Collage
and Jerry Abstract, while looking for label interest. But the group has
easily an album’s worth of eight-bit blipping, 808-booming tracks ready
to go. Their songs combine body-moving beats with nostalgic,
melancholic video-game melodies, highlighting their skills as both
musicians and producers. But to really grasp the power of Truckasauras,
you have to see them live. The group bring an impressive array of drum
machines, sequencers, pedals, as well as a Game Boy sequencer, and play
in front of a projection of old VHS footage of WWE wrestling,
Airwolf, and monster-truck rallies, which Bordon mixes and
edits live. They also bring an impressive ruckus, draping themselves in
American flags, John Deere caps, and sleeveless shirts, while downing
whiskey and beer like machines.
What’s in store for the Truck in 2008? According to Adam Swan,
they’ll release their full-length in April or May via local collective
Fourthcity; the release will be available as vinyl with artwork and
sleeve design by Journal of Popular Noise’s Byron Kalet and as a
digital download.
“Our goal with the Truck album, is to sell a piece of art worthy of
hanging onto, and to get the music to the people in the most effective
way,” says Adam Swan.
“After the album is released, we are trying to put together a tour
of the states to help promote it. Tyler and Ryan both just turned 27
recently. So they need to get on the famous-and-dead-at-27 thing this
year.”
“Other than that, we will be depleting the whiskey and beer supplies
of as many clubs as we can.” ERIC GRANDY