BELL GARDENS @ Echoplex

8:30pm / $10adv; $12dos; $13dos at the door / 18+

Slow Club || LISTEN|| Watch
Like all good clichés, there’s more than a seed of truth to be found in the saying: “a band has a lifetime to make their first record”. So what happens when that band comprises of just two of you, friends and partners in rock for almost ten years, and suddenly it’s time to make record number two?

“With the first album we’d probably played those songs about 1000 times before we actually made the record,” says Charles Watson, guitarist and one songwriting half of Slow Club, of the band’s debut, Yeah, So. “And for this one,” says Slow Club’s other half, Rebecca Taylor, “we locked ourselves away in this little room in Finsbury Park in north London. And we forced ourselves to write in a very different way.”

This was, Rebecca says, “like swimming through treacle”. Compared to their previous lives in Sheffield, where Taylor and Watson met through the local music scene in their teens, joined forces in the band Lonely Hearts – “We were like… a really bad version of the Walkmen” – and then split off to form Slow Club in 2006, the experience of writing in London proved to be a difficult but necessary rite of passage. “I used to write songs in my parents’ living room, when they were in bed, with my headphones on. Charles used to write in his mum’s kitchen,” says Rebecca. “Then we’re locked up together having to write for more than an hour at a time without wandering off to get a cup of tea.”

But the band were keen to show how they had grown up both as people and musicians since the “wahwahwahfitallthewordsin!” (as Rebecca describes it) lyrical content of their 2009 released first album, and from Slow Club’s concentrated period toiling away in north London, the album Paradise was born. The band’s sophomore album consists of ten songs which capture the duo’s idiosyncratic dynamic, at once both upbeat and melancholic, and a perfect balance of masculine and feminine. Even when the melody is gorgeously light, or the riffs are delivered with furious delight, there are still lyrics such as Where I’m Waking’s despondently romantic: “I can feel you getting closer…Don’t think about when things get older”. Perhaps that’s because Paradise, despite its felicitous name, has a quiet preoccupation with mortality, or more obviously, of loss. “Heartbreak is the dominant theme of Slow Club’s music because that’s something we have both experienced the grief of,” says Rebecca, though in a distinctive flash of self-deprecating humour, she deadpans: “Yeah, I’m the dumped girl. That’s my thing. I imagine my autobiography will be called Tears of A Clown, I’ll just joke about it then cry about it at home” ……….Flower Booking

Signals
From inception, Signals has constantly evolved. Birthed from the roots and ashes of
other works, Signals has shed all past iterations and mutated to a unique genre of electro-positivity. Over time this has been carried on through front-man, Jon Gray.

It starts in your belly, best when combined with drinks (herbal and caffeinated,) and transforms into anthemic, happy jams, causing unstoppable dancing (or head bobbing).

Past-member, Bill Gray, is quoted as saying, “Signals is a band, but it can also be one man.
It was from Los Angeles but now, from where the man, or the band, feels like residing.
Bleeps, bloops, and deaf-defying grooves have been a main inspiration. As well as a
desperate urge to understand more about what this ‘Signals’ could potentially be.”

Expect the high energy, sweaty dance infused performances from days of yore.

You will leave with a smile pasted on your face, wanting to pay forward the good times you just experienced.

“Every taboo tackled; every muscle accounted for. Hoorah.” Bill Gray (Ex-Brother)

Bell Gardens || LISTEN|| Watch
Bell Gardens began with just two friends (Kenneth James Gibson and Brian McBride) over many late nights talking and playing for each other the songs that have inspired them over the years. Songs such as the Beach Boy’s Cuddle Up, Jack Nitzsche’s We Have to Stay, and even a Bobby Vinton song or two, seemed to make sense of their lives at the time. Even when the duo first thought about making music together, Skeeter Davis’s End of the World was unanimously chosen as a piece that the duo would aspire to properly cover.

When Brian traveled to Europe in the Fall of 2007 to tour for Stars of the Lid’s And The Refinement of the Decline, Kenneth had sent him some demos of some tracks he had been working on. While Brian sat in the van awaiting his next performance, he starred out at the European countryside studying the Gibson’s tracks and other songs that he had loved for some time but wanted a better understanding of why. Occasionally before the beginning of a performance, Brian would turn to these recordings. Upon returning from tour, recording for the duo began.

Initial recordings found Kenneth and Brian trying to stay faithful to a time period in which songs had been recorded. Wanting to experiment in what they believed to be a classic type of sound, the two used mainly live instrumentation, thinking about what was available in studios from the 50s to the mid 70s. Pre-set software sounds were rejected for their own recording of pianos, strings and horns. Even the sounds of the strings were often recorded flat in an attempt to preserve both room sounds and the natural sound of the instrument. If you were to ask Kenneth and Brian about the process of recording, they would probably say that the music they’re making in Bell Gardens is more “experimental” for them than their previous work.

A search for Kenneth James Gibson in the Discogs.com database, will turn up eight or more different monikers, from the California dream noise rock project of the middle 90s, Furry Things to his current techno artisanry as [a]pendics.shuffle. Brian McBride is better known as one half of the nocturnal lullaby giants, Stars of the Lid.

The EP Hangups Need Company by Bell Gardens is loosely based on a sense of “pop” from another time. Although pop is what you could call it, there is still a sense of restraint and unhurried beauty here combined with a sense of heady beds of weirdness. The LA Weekly describes it like this: “It’s gorgeous, rapturous pop balladry with candy-coated Beach Boys falsettos and pre-afro-Phil Spector production. It’s weightless with gravitas. Gibson might be the techno flavor du jour, but this is the stuff that will mark his place. I found him.”

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