HAIM @ Echo

8:30pm / FREE / 21+

A lingering conversation (and walk to your car) with your crush after last call; the nostalgic daydreams of a memorable decade-old moment in time; the seductive taste of someone’s breath right before you first kiss them.

Every once in a while there is a band that breaks through the stale, inanimate boundaries of modern musical genres and seems to psycho-sonically sum up the story of one’s life.

For me, that band has become Electric Guest, the creative conception of lead singer, Asa Taccone, and drummer, Matthew Compton–with some inspired production by Brian Burton (a/k/a Danger Mouse of Gnarls Barkley and Broken Bells fame). An unsigned band boasting only a handful of shows and a limited amount of internet fanfare, the mysterious Electric Guest are slowly, effectively gathering nods from industry élite and word-of-mouth promotion by savvy music appreciators.

“ Everything on the album is written out of something from my life.”Asa Taccone Electric Guest has held the attention of new fans with their captivating live shows and their ’60s-esque, melody-driven beatitudes dedicated to the dynamic viscera of feeling.

Even with the polish of production and the undoubted sparkle of talented musicianship, Electric Guest’s music lacks any of the contrived, mechanical ploys of many modern pop-rock bands…KROQ

Cuckoo Chaos || Listen || Watch
This five piece is what some might call a San Diego “Super Group” – comprised of players from other bands including The Vision of a Dying World, The Paddle Boat, Black Mamba, and Cousins. The immense musical talent in this line up is apparent in Cuckoo Chaos’ live show. These players are tight, energetic, and show personality that is rare in a climate of “cool kids” stoic expression in indie music theses days. In 2010 they won “Best Alternative Band” at the San Diego Music Awards and are currently finishing their highly anticipated debut full length record.

Summer Camp || Watch
We started Summer Camp one wintry weekend in October 2009, basically to fill time. After two days of work we put our lo-fi cover of ‘I Only Have Eyes For You’ online under a fake Myspace, where we claimed to be seven Swedes who met at summer camp when they were 14. Sweden, we apologise. We didn’t expect anyone to find the Myspace, but if they did we thought they’d make fun of us, hence we hid our identities. This is also why we dug into our huge collection of yellowing found photos rather than using pictures of ourselves.

Things happened very quickly after that. Sahil at Transparent found the track about an hour after we put it up, and hosted it on the blog. Then Gorilla Vs. Bear, and other awesome blogs we’re eternally indebted to, followed suit. We were quite overwhelmed and decided to try writing a few songs of our own. Moshi Moshi Records got in touch and asked to release ‘Ghost Train’ as a single, and we obviously said yes. But we still weren’t entirely sure we wanted to do the band seriously, and definitely weren’t interested in playing live – in fact at that point, Elizabeth had never sung in public before.

Since we both had other careers – Jeremy a producer/singer who had released two albums on Transgressive and Elizabeth a writer/actress, it took a while to come to terms with the fact that this was what we wanted to do. Eventually though, we did, the turning point perhaps being when NME asked Elizabeth to write a Radar piece about “new band Summer Camp”, having no idea she was a member. She grudgingly declined. Our first gig was a sold-out show in London at the Lexington, in March 2010. We think it’s fair to say we were pretty awful, but we persevered, although growing up performance-wise in public wasn’t easy. Put it this way: Googling ourselves during that period wasn’t much fun.

Luckily Moshi hadn’t lost faith and we released our EP Young in September of that year, following a tour with the excellent Slow Club who taught us a lot about on-stage banter. As that year ended we toured with the inimitable Frankie and The Heartstrings, and met Steve Mackey, bassist in Pulp and expert in Chicago house music, who produced our debut album with us. We have spent most of 2011 working on the album. Although we also went to SXSW and whined a lot, and then toured the UK with Wild Beasts (amazing). We’ve now finally got our live show to a place where we’re really happy with it, projecting our found photos, some donated by our fans, and adding a drummer, the amazing William Bowerman.

From day one of writing together we were inspired by teen films and coming-of-age stories for their specific yet universal themes. We’re huge fans of 80′s pop-culture, but we steal from every era and genre. Still, the films of John Hughes are a major reference point for us. We love the way he wrote about characters who all lived in the same fictional town in middle America – Shermer, Illinois. Following his example, with our album we created an imaginary town in California called Condale, which is located in a suburb of LA. All the songs are set here in various decades, and there’s a cast of lovelorn sweethearts and oddballs. These include Cathy, a 16-year old who’s obsessed with rock-star-in-the-making Brian, lead singer of local band the Alleycats. Then there’s Louis Sley, the town mayor in 1954 who embarks on an illicit affair with Bebe West, a tragic starlet who can’t escape the shadow of what she once was.

We were lucky enough to be able to fund the album with the help of PledgeMusic. People who like our music can pre-order the album as a digital download, or, for a little more, can Pledge something a little more exciting: a signed CD, a home-made fanzine about Condale, a batch of Elizabeth’s home-made brownies or even an intimate exclusive gig in their front room. We’ve already done a couple of the acoustic gigs and they’ve been some of the most fulfilling & enjoyable gigs of our career.

‘Welcome To Condale’ is our love letter to the days of being a teenager, when everything is So Important, and you’re transformed irrevocably by a miserable relationship with a spotty youth called Darren who works at Pizza Hut. We believe that you never really escape that time, for better or for worse. It’s the things you fall in love with then that will stay with you forever. Well, except Darren. Hopefully.

Haim || Listen