Covered in kudzu and swathed in a blanket of humidity, Spanish moss, feedback and reverb exists Futurebirds. Here, at this intersection, we find a synthesis of the two extremes of Neil Young's yin and yang. It's at this crossroads, on this plane that Futurebirds meld the sweet, lilting, pedal steel and harmonies of the Stray Gators with the raucous, buzzing, distortion of Crazyhorse.
In the past year, Sarah Negahdari, the singer, guitarist, and chief songwriter of Los Angeles art-rock trio The Happy Hollows, has caused quite a commotion in the music world. Wired Magazine called her “one of the coolest women in rock,” Pitchfork wrote that her voice “commands attention on both the stompers and serenades,” and The Huffington Post branded her a “rock goddess.” Now The Happy Hollows are set to release their debut album Spells via Autumn Tone Records. The L.A. indie label will release the album in the U.S. on January 26, 2010. Sarah Negahdari’s journey to this point has been unconventional to say the least. It all began in a trailer park…well actually it began during the Iranian Revolution….
Sarah Negahdari’s unconventional background may explain her eccentricity. Her father fled Iran shortly after the Islamic Revolution and moved to the U.S. to escape persecution by the fundamentalist government. Shortly after he met Sarah’s mother, an ex-hippie from Northern California, Sarah was born. The family spent their first several years in a government subsidized trailer park outside of San Jose. They didn’t have much, but Sarah’s mother kept an old drum kit from her hippie days in the mobile home. In the summer, she would set the kit up outside and teach Sarah to play. These early lessons convinced Sarah that she wanted to be a musician, but instead of being a drummer, Sarah wanted to play the guitar like her childhood idols Jimmy Hendrix, Pete Townshend, and especially Bonnie Raitt.
Sarah moved to New York City in 2003 and ended up working at a bar, which also employed the future members of Akron Family. While not working, she played open-mic nights around the city, honing her guitar chops and unique finger picking technique. In 2006, Sarah moved to Los Angeles and, after meeting Ph.D. student and bass player Charlie Mahoney and drummer Chris Hernandez, both Washington, DC transplants, she formed The Happy Hollows.
Since 2006, The Happy Hollows have been a vital and critically acclaimed band in the Los Angeles music scene. If you were to place them on a contemporary musical spectrum, they might lie somewhere between Captain Beefheart and Cindy Lauper. They have moved seamlessly between the Silver Lake, downtown, and Long Beach music communities, their music defying easy categorization. The band’s music combines innovative structures, surreal lyrics, and fiercely adept instrumentation to recreate reality into a jagged panorama of vibrant, kaleidoscopic collage. Their songs straddle the sub-genres of post-punk, 90s college rock, and 80s pop yet they create a sound all their own by deconstructing these genres. Taking pop melody as a starting point, they do away with the traditional verse/chorus approach, and write music that is both catchy and challenging.
Blair now lives in Brooklyn, but until recently, gigged in and around the Silver Lake and Echo Park neighborhoods of Los Angeles. But this story doesn’t begin on the west coast, far from it actually.
Blair grew up in the Deep South, New Orleans specifically, and in a town as soaked in gin as it is jazz, brass and funk, an adolescent Blair alternately drifted towards the sounds of Neil Young and Bob Dylan drifting out of her mother’s turntable. But she is no folkie. Born in the ‘80s it was inevitable that the pop sounds of ‘90s FM radio would seep into her musical DNA; remember, these were the days when Nirvana and Beck dominated the airwaves. A quick study, Blair taught herself guitar by listening to and learning the tunes on John Frusciante's first solo records and by her late teens was opening for the likes of Cat Power and Bright Eyes. Fast forward to 2007. At 22, Blair self-releases her debut EP, Pluto. At four songs the EP is a quick dash through the past four decades of pop music as filtered by someone who grew up with a healthy collection of Kate Bush, PJ Harvey, Replacements, Velvets and Pavement.
By eschewing an endless series of club gigs and relentless Twitter updates, Orendy is better able to keep rooted in the sweet alchemical science of music: the way voices, pianos and guitars can become sunshine and science, vines and satellites, hearts and minds, summer flame and radio static; you and me and we.
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Photo Credit: Alex Manning
The players are the Roadside Graves- John, Colin, Rich, Mike, Jeremy, and Dave, along with special guests like Fun Machine’s virtuoso keyboardist Johnny Piatkowski on the farfisa and mellotron. The sound is that of the teetering ramshackle wall of sound, the sparse and tenderly haunted finger-picked ballad, Irish table chantey, the harmonium soaked funeral march, dark rumbling surf-folk, the ocean floor.
Our goal is to create music for people who love music, in all its many facets and faces. The music traverses a wide landscape of topics and sounds, and it is the hope of the group that it will prove as good of company to our listeners in their lives as it has to us in ours as we wrote and performed it, for it’s yours now.
The Henry Clay People are a rock and roll band from Los Angeles. With common comparisons to Pavement and The Replacements they play a type of no-frills, pretention-free rock that has sorely been missing from LA. The band is made up of brothers Joey (vocals, guitar) and Andy (guitar, vocals) Siara, Noah Green (bass, vocals) and Eric Scott (drums). November 4th will see the release of their second album For Cheap or For Free on popular blog Aquarium Drunkard's Autumn Tone Records.
Last year, the group released Blacklist the Kid with the Red Moustache to much critical acclaim. The album was produced by Howard Bilerman (Arcade Fire, British Sea Power) and Colin Stewart (Frog Eyes, Pretty Girls Make Graves). Over the past year they have taken that momentum and have further firmed their hold on Los Angeles with plays on Indie103.1, KROQ and Sirius Satellite radio, a residency at The Echo, high profile shows alongside the likes of The Whigs, Bodies of Water, Quasi, Frog Eyes, Broken West and a spot at this summer's Sunset Junction Fest with !!!, Beachwood Sparks, Black Keys, Cold War Kids and more. A standout set at SXSW in March highlighted their chaotic-but-still-all-in-good-fun live show that led Esquire to declare them "the most intoxicated band in Austin" and that "the usually amazing band was made even more amazing by the fact that they could barely stand." This is The Henry Clay People. A band that plays every show with the same amount of energy and love whether it's to a crowd of hundreds or to a crowd of a few.
For Cheap or For Free is a family affair. Recorded at different studios in LA with the help of Joe Napolitano (Le Switch), Dave Newton (The Little Ones, The Movies), Raymond Richards (Broken West, The Weather Underground) and Wendy Wang (The Sweet Hurt, Correatown) it also feature's guests from local bands Le Switch, The Sweet Hurt, I Make This Sound and Idaho Falls. The songs on the album feature bright telecasters, honky tonk piano, Heartbreakers worthy drumming and the occasional pedal steel. As a twenty something himself, Joey Siara's lyrics deal with the issues one would expect; growing up, being broke, being in love, caring about the future but also trying to resist it. "Working Part Time" is an ode to merely getting by, the beauty in the little things, as he sings "I was broke but still alive, yeah, I was fine." In "This Ain't A Scene" he talks about not settling down until he's seen everything and on "Fine Print" touches on faith and feeling lost, "we got caught believing, we were tired of leaving our futures up to fate." Green chimes in too on his tune "Bull Through" as he sings "We were doing nothing but paying our rent." Straight for the throat rockers and anthems mesh well with country ballads and ramshackle living room numbers. The Henry Clay People have delivered a vital album full of celebratory rock and roll for an audience that is desperate for just that.
Photo Credit: Benjamin Hoste
