FEEDING PEOPLE @ Echo

8:30pm / $8adv.; $10 dos / 18+

Crystal Antlers || Listen||Watch
Long Beach’s Crystal Antlers covered the same Mose Allison song as Blue Cheer on their first 7-inch—which is now trading for upward of $100 among people who didn’t have the opportunity or sense to go buy ’em fresh at Long Beach’s Dyzzy On Vynyl. They grew from there into a fearsome beast that was part American fringe-garage freak-out and part early Funkadelic, with long, loping songs just bristling with guitar. After unfair hard luck when their label Touch and Go went under just after releasing their first LP, Crystal Antlers regrouped with a recording retreat to Mexico and a self-released single that added a strange, engaging pop sensibility to their much-loved heavy-rock madness. They haven’t made bands like this since the heyday of SST—independent, unpredictable and righteous in both riff and deed.OC Weekly

Sleepy Sun || Listen || Watch
Sleepy Sun is a California band from many Californias. They hail from the rolling oak and sage hills of Sierra Gold Country, The San Francisco Peninsula, where Kesey raged and the Dead were once Warlocks, and the forever-sunshine climes of the Southland. They came together young and garage strutting in the coastal Northern California crucible of Santa Cruz. And there they birthed the Sleepy sound dead blues shaken alive, razor sharp and ramblin’, soul, sonic science and dead-on pop surgery. Wooden, earthy, stratospheric, and swinging California music of beautiful contrasts for conflicted times.

Now, two records into a frighteningly fast-blossoming evolution, Sleepy Sun are a living machine of fire and focus. Their first release on ATP records Embrace illuminated the golden path to Sleepy land hard-riffing, delicate, dreamy and cultivated. The latest ATP release, Fever, is arrival at the palace the path promised.

Fever is the honey harmonies and danger wailing of Bret Constantino; the wing-on-wing guitars of Matt Holliman and Even Reiss in screaming dives and sweet ascending circles; the lowdown served up tough and thundering from drum and bass authorities Brian Tice and Jack Allen.

Fever is a band working, like the heroic combos of old real, made by hand, eyes ahead on an unbridled future and giving two shits for the sideways glance of the lurking trend spotter. A band working, and a working band Sleepy Sun’s soaring and soul-stirring live shows are already mowing down audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. They’ve opened for Autolux and Mudhoney, rocked Primavera and Treasure Island, and relentlessly toured the capitals and humble hamlets of North America and Europe. And in their path, the converts are fast becoming legion.

They are a band of musical adventure too tackling Graham Nash’s “Chicago” for a forthcoming compilation celebrating the Hollie/CSNY legend’s work. English electronic collective U.N.K.L.E. have taken note of Sleepy Sun’s eclectic energies as well, working collaboratively on a track with the band for an upcoming single and LP.

Sleepy Sun won’t relent in 2010. Fever in May, SXSW and the Arctic Monkeys in spring. And as always, a hundred twists yet untold in a message sent with burning love and rock-solid soul from California to the whole damn beyond…

Feeding People
“At one level, this is garage rock … But the music on Peace, Victory and the Devil breaks out of those constraints, not as if it’s struggling but as if it’s shrugging off any concern for rules, as if it’s easy to pioneer a new sound.

Whether [Jones] is channeling spirits, or whether Feeding People is simply a band of spirited musicians all pulling together to make her glossolalia of gloom the official soundtrack for these apocalyptic times, Peace will make you want to stockpile this album and hole up in your bunker to await the band’s next revelation.”

— Dan Collins, LA Record