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Representing Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco, FYM showcases original artwork, thoughtful well-written feature stories about our favorites in art, music, and culture on the West Coast.
Last night at the Glass House in Pomona, California, FYF, who are mere weeks away from hosting their big bash in downtown Los Angeles, hosted their FYF Summer Night. It was a bit of a preview of the large FYF Fest on September 4, as a few of the bands who played at The Glass House are playing both shows (Wavves, Abe Vigoda, The Growlers).
(Wavves)
Headliners Wavves, featuring singer-guitarist Nathan Williams and Jay Reatard’s former backing band, played a set that equally favored both new album King of the Beach and 2009’s Wavvves. The Pomona youth was no match for the Glass House’s security team, as many kids (as well as Wavves’ own backstage guests) hit the stage and dove into the crowd from early in the set during the pop punk “King of the Beach” all the way through noise punk closer “No Hope Kids”.
(The Growlers)
The Bill Murray-approved group The Growlers can be described as a Western-influenced surfpunkabilly band featuring a genuine frontman in Brooks Nielsen, who looks and sounds like the kind of guy Nelson Muntz from The Simpsons would be if he grew up to be a gloriously sleazy 70’s lounge singer. The crowed seemed most interested in The Growlers than any other band the entire evening and for reason as The Growlers are now rapidly increasing in national prominence as they have been in local LA prominence over the last few years.
(Abe Vigoda)
Abe Vigoda is a true Los Angeles local band as they basically play about 8 shows in the southland per week. Their forthcoming album Crush should solidify them as an elite indie band as the addition of electronic percussion and icy synths to the sound of many of the new material they performed at The Glass House could open them up to a wider audience.
FYM had kind of a non-run-in with Abe Vigoda guitarist and Microkorg maestro Juan Velasquez at The Oinkster in Eagle Rock and on Twitter the other day, and then briefly met him face-to-face at The Glass House show. Nice guy!
One-time FYM Jam of the Day and Crush track “Throwing Shade” was a highlight of their set and we captured it on video:
(The Lovely Bad Things)
La Mirada’s The Lovely Bad Things seemed about as young as most of the crowd there and they definitely fed off of each other’s energy. Besides the energetic quality of their music, their constant swapping of instruments kept things interesting throughout their set and the crowd felt it too, as they seemed to want to hear more after they finished.
As previously mentioned, Wavves, The Growlers, and Abe Vigoda all will be playing FYF Fest on September near downtown LA along with a ton of other excellent bands. Don’t miss out:
Last night at the Glass House in Pomona, California, FYF, who are mere weeks away from hosting their big bash in downtown Los Angeles, hosted their FYF Summer Night. It was a bit of a preview of the large FYF Fest on September 4, as a few of the bands who played at The Glass House are playing both shows (Wavves, Abe Vigoda, The Growlers).
(Wavves)
Headliners Wavves, featuring singer-guitarist Nathan Williams and Jay Reatard’s former backing band, played a set that equally favored both new album King of the Beach and 2009’s Wavvves. The Pomona youth was no match for the Glass House’s security team, as many kids (as well as Wavves’ own backstage guests) hit the stage and dove into the crowd from early in the set during the pop punk “King of the Beach” all the way through noise punk closer “No Hope Kids”.
(The Growlers)
The Bill Murray-approved group The Growlers can be described as a Western-influenced surfpunkabilly band featuring a genuine frontman in Brooks Nielsen, who looks and sounds like the kind of guy Nelson Muntz from The Simpsons would be if he grew up to be a gloriously sleazy 70’s lounge singer. The crowed seemed most interested in The Growlers than any other band the entire evening and for reason as The Growlers are now rapidly increasing in national prominence as they have been in local LA prominence over the last few years.
(Abe Vigoda)
Abe Vigoda is a true Los Angeles local band as they basically play about 8 shows in the southland per week. Their forthcoming album Crush should solidify them as an elite indie band as the addition of electronic percussion and icy synths to the sound of many of the new material they performed at The Glass House could open them up to a wider audience.
FYM had kind of a non-run-in with Abe Vigoda guitarist and Microkorg maestro Juan Velasquez at The Oinkster in Eagle Rock and on Twitter the other day, and then briefly met him face-to-face at The Glass House show. Nice guy!
One-time FYM Jam of the Day and Crush track “Throwing Shade” was a highlight of their set and we captured it on video:
(The Lovely Bad Things)
La Mirada’s The Lovely Bad Things seemed about as young as most of the crowd there and they definitely fed off of each other’s energy. Besides the energetic quality of their music, their constant swapping of instruments kept things interesting throughout their set and the crowd felt it too, as they seemed to want to hear more after they finished.
As previously mentioned, Wavves, The Growlers, and Abe Vigoda all will be playing FYF Fest on September near downtown LA along with a ton of other excellent bands. Don’t miss out:
Space-age shoegaze superheroes Autolux took the stage at Pomona’s The Glass House in a homecoming (if you count Pomona being in Los Angeles because it’s in L.A. county) performance that highlighted many of the band’s best tracks from new album Transit Transit and 2004’s Future Perfect. Six years passed between the release of the band’s first two albums, and even though they did tour and perform one-off concerts fairly regularly between albums, the concert did have a refreshing return-to-form/comeback feel to it since it was the first time an L.A. crowd was able to see the band after having enough time to take in the newly released album.
Aside from some heckler annoyances here and there, the evening was pretty majestic. Highlights of the show included Greg Edwards’ Transit Transit haunted piano ballad “Spots”, the glitchy and mesmerizing “High Chair”, which sounds like a great Hail to the Thief-era Radiohead track (and contains the inexplicably intriguing lyric of “No more passing out in banks” which is some great imagery), and Future Perfect’s under two minute bulldozer “Robots in the Garden”, which has the power to snap out anybody caught in a trance by the band’s beautiful ballads.
The band certainly knows how magical all of their songs sound, especially a couple of their new ones off of Transit Transit that incorporate piano, electronics, and slow, expansive musical landscapes that all come together to create something beautiful. The band had adorned many of their amps, and stands, and other gear with glowing lights but kept them off until they played Transit Transit highlight “The Bouncing Wall”. The lights suddenly flashed on for the first time in their set right when drummer-vocalist Carla Azar started singing at the beginning of the song. It was a small but significant chills-inducing moment that many people probably would not appreciate, but it’s always good when bands playing on a small-scale stage can artfully incorporate that kind of lighting into a performance. Check out the performance of “The Bouncing Wall” here:
FYM gave Autolux’s new album Transit Transit a well-deserved glowing review back in early August (which you can read by clicking HERE). In a nutshell, Transit Transit is one of the finest releases of 2010, expertly taking the best aspects of Future Perfect while building on them and expanding their sound with the welcome addition of piano and processed electronic percussion to give an a band that already sounds futuristic an even more cutting-edge feel.
FYM wasn’t around when Autolux released their debut full-length, Future Perfect, in 2004. The album sounded (and no doubt still does to this day) simultaneously modern and ahead of its time, despite finding some old-school 90’s shoegaze (Slowdive, My Bloody Valentine) in its DNA. Its ahead-of-the-curve qualities were even more emphasized by the resurgence of the shoegaze sound (The Big Pink, M83’s Saturdays = Youth) that seemed to be led by My Bloody Valentine’s monumental reunion tour that didn’t happen for another three years after its release. The longer that Autolux took to release Transit Transit, the more it became clear that Future Perfect was a modern classic and one of the finest albums of the last decade (and beyond).
Gold Panda started the night by playing some of his signature ambient electronica, a fine companion to Autolux’s sound.
(Gold Panda on stage at the Glass House)
Gold Panda seems to play the Los Angeles area so often that for Young Moderns just assumed he was originally from the area and was part of Los Angeles’ electronica scene (Flying Lotus and Gold Panda sound like musical cousins). We were surprised to find out that he’s actually from Glasgow, Scotland (an excellent city, by the way). So, way to go Scotland. GP has a great new album out, Lucky Shiner, and his remixes seem to pop up everywhere these days, including this soothing remix of Los Angeles’ HEALTH track “Before Tigers”:
Space-age shoegaze superheroes Autolux took the stage at Pomona’s The Glass House in a homecoming (if you count Pomona being in Los Angeles because it’s in L.A. county) performance that highlighted many of the band’s best tracks from new album Transit Transit and 2004’s Future Perfect. Six years passed between the release of the band’s first two albums, and even though they did tour and perform one-off concerts fairly regularly between albums, the concert did have a refreshing return-to-form/comeback feel to it since it was the first time an L.A. crowd was able to see the band after having enough time to take in the newly released album.
Aside from some heckler annoyances here and there, the evening was pretty majestic. Highlights of the show included Greg Edwards’ Transit Transit haunted piano ballad “Spots”, the glitchy and mesmerizing “High Chair”, which sounds like a great Hail to the Thief-era Radiohead track (and contains the inexplicably intriguing lyric of “No more passing out in banks” which is some great imagery), and Future Perfect’s under two minute bulldozer “Robots in the Garden”, which has the power to snap out anybody caught in a trance by the band’s beautiful ballads.
The band certainly knows how magical all of their songs sound, especially a couple of their new ones off of Transit Transit that incorporate piano, electronics, and slow, expansive musical landscapes that all come together to create something beautiful. The band had adorned many of their amps, and stands, and other gear with glowing lights but kept them off until they played Transit Transit highlight “The Bouncing Wall”. The lights suddenly flashed on for the first time in their set right when drummer-vocalist Carla Azar started singing at the beginning of the song. It was a small but significant chills-inducing moment that many people probably would not appreciate, but it’s always good when bands playing on a small-scale stage can artfully incorporate that kind of lighting into a performance. Check out the performance of “The Bouncing Wall” here:
FYM gave Autolux’s new album Transit Transit a well-deserved glowing review back in early August (which you can read by clicking HERE). In a nutshell, Transit Transit is one of the finest releases of 2010, expertly taking the best aspects of Future Perfect while building on them and expanding their sound with the welcome addition of piano and processed electronic percussion to give an a band that already sounds futuristic an even more cutting-edge feel.
FYM wasn’t around when Autolux released their debut full-length, Future Perfect, in 2004. The album sounded (and no doubt still does to this day) simultaneously modern and ahead of its time, despite finding some old-school 90’s shoegaze (Slowdive, My Bloody Valentine) in its DNA. Its ahead-of-the-curve qualities were even more emphasized by the resurgence of the shoegaze sound (The Big Pink, M83’s Saturdays = Youth) that seemed to be led by My Bloody Valentine’s monumental reunion tour that didn’t happen for another three years after its release. The longer that Autolux took to release Transit Transit, the more it became clear that Future Perfect was a modern classic and one of the finest albums of the last decade (and beyond).
Gold Panda started the night by playing some of his signature ambient electronica, a fine companion to Autolux’s sound.
(Gold Panda on stage at the Glass House)
Gold Panda seems to play the Los Angeles area so often that for Young Moderns just assumed he was originally from the area and was part of Los Angeles’ electronica scene (Flying Lotus and Gold Panda sound like musical cousins). We were surprised to find out that he’s actually from Glasgow, Scotland (an excellent city, by the way). So, way to go Scotland. GP has a great new album out, Lucky Shiner, and his remixes seem to pop up everywhere these days, including this soothing remix of Los Angeles’ HEALTH track “Before Tigers”:
Words. Photos. Will Sellers. Graphic. J Thomas Codling.
Seemingly neverending touring rock & roll Texan foursome …and You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead rolled into southern California; promoting their latest release, Tao of the Dead, and shattered the Glass House in Pomona along the way.
Despite multi-instrumentalists Conrad Keely and Jason Reece being the only two remaining members of the original lineup, the veteran band, who have been active for about a decade and a half now, returned to the basics by performing as a four-piece group as opposed to recent tours where they had as many as five or six members on stage at once. It doesn’t hurt that new drummer Jamie Miller has the skill of five percussionists (seeing how Trail of Dead used to perform with two drummers simultaneously), while new bassist Autry Fulbright II held his own alongside mainstays Reece and Keely, who both look as young and energetic in 2011 as they did the first time I saw them live way back in 2002.
Impressively, Trail of Dead kicked off their set last week with the 16-minute closing movement from Tao of the Dead, titled “Tao of the Dead Part II: Strange News from Another Planet”. Other songs they played from Tao, such as “Weight of the Sun” or “The Spiral Jetty”, manage to pack in some massive, anthemic choruses at much shorter song lengths.
After getting the solid new material out of the way, the band played some classics from their back catalogue, such as the sprawling “Will You Smile Again?” from 2005’s Worlds Apart, which is truly an experience to hear live. Reece’s fellow World Apart cut “Caterwaul” also still sounded great, as did “How Near How Far” and “It Was There That I Saw You” from 2002 masterpiece Source Tags and Codes.
It’s always a welcome sight to see that Trail of Dead are coming to town and are still going strong. Their catalog of albums is essentially flawless and packed with unforgettable songs that should have made them hugely popular in a different world with better taste in the arts. Below is a brief career retrospective of Trail of Dead’s work (along with grades for each album), each album being very well worth anybody’s time:
…and You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead (1998)
Grade: B+
…and You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead’s 1998 self-titled debut album proves that these young Texans were not one of those bands that started off with a smaller sound that eventually got bigger and bigger. Forty minutes of music is spread out over eight songs and range from the spiraling and evolving seven-minute piece “Gargoyle” to one of Trail of Dead’s wildest punk songs in “Prince With a Thousand Enemies”. Trail of Dead’s first album definitely signaled the start of something fresh and unique while never sounding like a typical debut.
Listen to …and You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead track “Ounce of Prevention”:
Madonna (1999)
Grade: A-
The year after their debut, Trail of Dead followed up with Madonna Madonna was the first Trail of Dead album that caught my attention, and any album with songs that sound as revolutionary and electric as “Mistakes and Regrets” and “Totally Natural” will be very influential on a high school freshman like I was at the time. The band’s young and angry sound got them plenty of buzz at the time and they soon left indie label Merge for Interscope, but not before gifting the music world with Madonna and its songs such as “Aged Dolls”, both majestic (with its classicist piano and strings) and monstrous (with its standard Jason Reece snarl). Listen to it below:
Source Tags and Codes (2002)
Grade: A+
…and then in 2002 came Source Tags and Codes.
Source Tags and Codes’ level of prestige and quality is so high that it’s basically controversial. It was infamously branded with a 10.0 review from Pitchfork, yet infuriatingly got not much help from Interscope’s promotion department. I very clearly remember hearing “Another Morning Stoner” played on Los Angeles rock radio behemoth KROQ sometime in February or March 2002 as deejay Jed the Fish’s “Catch of the Day” (meaning it would likely be played that one time on that one day and never again) and calling the radio station later that day to request it and the operator then telling me he had never heard of it and the album was not at the radio station.
Source Tags and Codes is one of the greatest albums ever made, yet should definitely be given an equal chance to be heard today as all of their other albums. In fear of understatement, it IS indeed a shining cosmic masterpiece of an album that, if truly heard, has the power to make any listener curl up into a fetal position on the floor and bawl their eyes out at its pristine beauty. That probably won’t happen the on first listen, as it’s one of those albums that really comes together as a whole and deserves to be listened to in one sitting rather than split up into various mp3s.
Here’s Source Tags and Codes’ “How Near, How Far”:
The Secret of Elena’s Tomb (2003)
Grade: A
After delivering quite the statement with Source Tags and Codes, Trail of Dead’s next release was the EP The Secret of Elena’s Tomb in 2003. This unique EP saw the band experiment with a variety of sounds on each respective track. “All Saints Day” very much resembled Source Tags and Codes, “Counting Off the Days” is as close to an acoustic ballad as the band had ever gotten up to that point, and “Intelligence” is a surprisingly rowdy dance-punk song. Put it all together, and The Secret of Elena’s Tomb is a very underrated EP and one of the best uses of limited EP running time I’ve ever heard.
Listen to “All Saints Day”:
Worlds Apart (2005)
Grade: A
2005’s Worlds Apart had the tough job of being the album that had to follow Source Tags and Codes. In this light, it was unfairly panned as a weaker follow-up that seemed to be filled with more radio-friendly material. This assumption was very far from the truth. While this album doesn’t quite have the grade scale of Source Tags and Codes, the quality of songwriting is still extremely high, and in retrospect, still superior to most other music released in 2005. “Will You Smile Again?” contains one of the best extended opening to any song I’ve ever heard and still gets plenty of plays from me even as a lot of hard rock music has sounded stale in recent years. “Summer of ‘91”, “The Rest Will Follow”, and “Let It Dive” are a trio of songs that truly define the year 2005 for me and are as good as the glowing nostalgic feeling I get whenever they come on.
Check out “Let It Dive” here:
So Divided (2006)
Grade: A-
So Divided saw the band get back into writing lengthier songs like its title track and “Life”, with its Bonham-esque stomp. Trail of Dead’s 2006 album contains perhaps the band’s greatest single song “Wasted State of Mind”. So Divided came out quickly after Worlds Apart and was the final album they released for Interscope. If it was an album they quickly released to get out of a contract, then it still doesn’t sound rushed at all. The band managed to find time to experiment somewhat with the folk rock ballad “Witch’s Web” and by covering Guided By Voices song “Gold Heart Mountaintop Queen Directory”. The band rarely (if ever) plays songs from this album live, which is a shame because the quality of songs on So Divided are too high to be disowned by the band.
Listen to the incredible “Wasted State of Mind” below:
The Century of Self (2009)
Grade: B+
Trail of Dead took some time after So Divided to work on 2009’s The Century of Self, which they eventually released on their own Richter Scale Records, free from Interscope. New label, same gameplan: The Century of Self is yet another solid album full of towering jams such as “Bells of Creation” and “Isis Unveiled”. Lots of quiet-loud-quiet moments on these songs (“Pictures of an Only Child” and “Insatiable (Two)” come to mind) resemble Trail of Dead’s earliest work with fantastic results.
“Pictures of an Only Child”:
Tao of the Dead (2011)
Grade: B
Now seven full-length albums in, Trail of Dead continues to speed right along and still bring fresh ideas to the table. Tao of the Dead is the most conceptual and experimental album yet from a band who already have a diverse and wide-ranging sound. This rock opera-like album is split into two halves. The first is a steady flow of relatively short pieces (the best being “The Spiral Jetty” and “Cover the Days Like a Tidal Wave”) that make up ‘Part I: Tao of the Dead’, while the second half was released as one 16-minute multi-sectional piece (‘Part II: Strange News From Another Planet’). There’s a lot going on during both half of Tao of the Dead that you’ll be coming back to it again and again to dissect all of the little movements that make up this great record.
