TV GIRL @ Echo

8:30pm / $12adv; $14dos / 18+

Fujiya & Miyagi are a curious hybrid of time and place. Their insistent grooves owe much to the pulsing motorik of 70s Germany – Can and Neu! especially – but their taut white funk and skinny beats jiggle somewhere between 80s New York clubland and early Human League. That’s not to say they’re retro. Like James Murphy and LCD Soundsystem, it’s the way they assimilate the pieces that makes them worthy of attention. Then there are the songs themselves. 2006’s Transparent Things provided strutting odes to ankle injuries and shoelaces; while Lightbulbs (2008) offered tributes to the late Viv Stanshall and former US chess champ Bobby Fischer.

Ventriloquizzing, their fourth album, finds the quartet in more experimental mode, though they’ve clearly not abandoned their dance aesthetic. Both Cat Got Your Tongue and Yoyo dash along nicely, David Best’s trademark whispered vocals adding a vaguely sinister sense of foreboding. But producer Thom Monahan (Devendra Banhart, Vetiver) also helps coax a new set of textures. Spilt Milk, for instance, starts off all Kraftwerk, then just gets progressively weirder. As does Pills, which builds like some spacey 60s psych oddity, replete with plinks of trebly electro.

There are strange lyrical twists too. Minestrone, with its Doors-y keyboard motif, summons up an old satanic rite enacted around a hill fort in the South Downs. And Tinsel & Glitter seems to be a less than flattering address to X Factor culture: “We can stick our fingers in our ears / A pair of stilettos can hit the high notes / Dressed up in ribbons and bows”. There’s a delicious moment where synth player Steve Lewis delivers a chugging riff that sounds hot-wired from Suicide’s first album. Other stylistic forays aren’t quite so successful. Take Sixteen Shades of Black & Blue, which thumps along to a stack-heeled glam beat, but doesn’t really go anywhere.

It’s a minor quibble though. Fujiya & Miyagi are an invigorating mix of the cerebral and the visceral. In a just world, they’d be the new lords of the dancefloor.

Evan Voytas || Listen || Watch
Pennsylvania-bred, L.A.-based Evan Voytas makes spacey, whimsical synth-pop that borders on the cheeky, but there’s more than a little bit of soul in the series of EPs and singles he has self-released so far. Prior to his relocating to Los Angeles, Voytas apprenticed as a sideman for teen phenom Teddy Geiger; Voytas has an innate feel for a pop song’s workings but tinkers with the constructs like a gamer. He’s come a a long way in two-plus years in L.A., and with a (still-untitled) full-length album finished, it’s a good bet some record labels will be sniffing around very soon..Buzz Bands

TV Girl || Listen
Post modern pop band TV Girl features former Da Bears guitarist/keyboardist Trung Ngo — now also a vocalist — and singer Brad Petering. When the band formed in 2010, Ngo was working at a local marketing firm, while Petering attended UC Davis. Petering and Ngo grew up in the same Scripps Ranch neighborhood and attended the same high school. But they met and discovered a mutual appreciation for music while skating a mini-ramp in a friend’s backyard. They started making music while in college. “Random projects here and there,” says Ngo. “It’s always been a side thing that we, like, did.”

TV Girl’s unique sound comes from the combination of Ngo’s sweet voice and subtly twisted lyrics over Petering’s lushly arranged beats, built from samples of everything from Dylan to Tracy Chapman to, as Petering puts it, “some obscure 1960s garage rock song” downloaded haphazardly off the internet.Their eponymous four-song EP TV Girl was released via the music-sharing site called Bandcamp (tvgirl.bandcamp.com). In late 2010, a song from the EP “If You Want It” earned a spotlight on the Pitchfork website’s Forkcast column. “I remember seeing it and doing a double take,” says Petering of the online mention. “It was kind of weird, like, getting picked up so fast.”

The reviewers at Pitchfork described TV Girl’s ballad “If You Want It” as “balmy and inviting, despite its narrative about a drunken love interest’s sloppy evening.” They called TV Girl’s use of a sample lifted from the once-popular “Hello It’s Me,” Todd Rundgren’s 1973 hit, “ballsy.” A Pitchfork mention carries no small weight in the music business. Their often snarky reviews have a reputation for making or breaking CD sales and band careers. “They found us,” says Petering. “We sent our stuff to some smaller blogs. We didn’t bother sending it to the bigger blogs right away.” He says their song took off and got picked up by a lot of other blogs.“Eventually, it got to Pitchfork.” Eventually, in virtual terms, means one week in this case.

“Yeah,” says Ngo. “That [Pitchfork review] was only about a week after we self-released the EP.” Petering says it got picked up next by the bloggers at the UK Guardian. “And, I heard it was on a BBC podcast,” he says. However, in summer 2011, “If You Want It” essentially vanished from the internet, after Rhino Entertainment, a subsidiary of Warner Music Group, issued notices to websites to remove the song due to the allegedly illegally sampling Todd Rundgren’s song “Hello It’s Me.” The takedown notices all but wiped the TV Girl cut from the internet.

With Joel Williams added to the roster, (DUDES, D/Wolves, Kris Kraft), TV Girl released their Benny and the Jetts EP in July 2011. San Diego Reader

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