PHOENIX IN SHOES

From the lush fade-in of “To No One”, the lead track on Daylight’s for the Birds’ debut LP Trouble Everywhere (This Generation Tapes), listeners will feel suspended in a warm sonic realm once branded by the UK press with an ugly and unfortunate name.

Shoegazer.

            

Said realm of experimental volume and dissonance was once populated by bands such as Slowdive, Lush, the Wedding Present, Ride, and a few harder-driving Yankee combos like the Swirlies, Lilys, Mercury Rev and Bethany Curve. All of whom strummed in the long shadow cast by the Anglo-Irish band My Bloody Valentine, whose long-rumored re-mastered box set is due to be released—perhaps—later this year.

My Bloody Valentine went out thirteen years ago in the ecstatic detonation of its final LP Loveless, and with it went seemed to go youthful aspirations toward ambient, guitar-washed landscapes of sound.

Until now.

 

Perhaps, as with most currents of thought, art, politics and even religions, the kicked-around “Shoegazer” sound has found fertile new ground with 21st-century musicians and the audiences that sustain them.

No sound in the musical world occurs in a vacuum. DFTB is the product, as is often the case, of another band’s disintegration. Plus ça change…

 

The band in question was OnAirLibrary (Arena Rock Records), which made it as far as the opening bill for Interpol before evaporation. In its wake, guitarist Philip Wann struck out for pastures new with friend and fellow strummer Jay Giampietro. “OnAirLibrary broke up

around December 2004,” Jay explained, huddled with the rest of the band in a Japanese tea house near NYU. “Philip and I started playing and writing music together. We didn’t know exactly where it was going to go. We had about six songs after a week or so. At the beginning, the idea wasn’t so much to have a revolving cast of band members as to make the base of the band as broad as possible.” Or, it would seem, to avoid going the same way as OAL?

 

“It was such a narrow focus, if you lose one person, the whole thing would fall apart,” Philip said, slurping tea. “The idea was to have almost like a collective, all of whom were involved. That’s why you have ten people playing on this record. If you’re playing with any one or combination of those people, the overall sound is still pretty cohesive.”

            

Of the various participants (including two singers), a firm line-up of five emerged. Jay and Philip form the guitar backdrop, with Brad Conroy (late of the Boggs) on drums, Lukas Alpert on bass, and Amanda Garrett singing. This last addition cemented the band’s trajectory firmly along the co-ed lyrical line of My Bloody Valentine. Garrett’s breathy tones over the layered guitar wash will take listeners (those old enough, anyway) straight back to the glory days of the early 1990s, when the Fender Jaguar was king and its tremolo bar was the royal scepter.

            

The crucial difference is one of technology. “The record we made would have cost, God, 60 or 70K to produce,” Philip said. “The technology’s cheaper now. The process is more democratized. If you have something like Protools, you can spend a lot more time actually working on your material before having to produce it.” Having initially begun the album with Brooklyn producer Steve Revitte, the band threw the album together in a combination sound/architecture studio in Boston (engineered by Andy Hong), having first tried out its songs in various configurations with a mixed cast. “That was kind of the plan, to define the aesthetic of the band through recording instead of playing live,” said Jay. “We recorded about three or four months before we started playing live. We weren’t sure if those would be an album yet. Mainly it was just to lay down the first round of ideas.”

 

“It’s hard to pull that together in New York, because when it came to going into the studio, people would be like, ‘Well, I’ve got my own thing going on,’” Brad added. “It’s hard to find dedicated people who aren’t already involved full-time in ongoing projects.”

Aside from personnel challenges, there’s the internet, which was just revving up when bands like My Bloody Valentine were melting sound systems around the world. Being able to produce a record, even one as complex and layered as this, in a home studio, and then able to market it through one’s own MySpace page…perhaps this time is more fertile for this sound after all.

Courtesy: fanaticpromotion.com