THE MUDDY REDS @ Echo

8:30pm / FREE / 21+

The Dead Ships || Listen || Watch
“The two-man crew’s music is a bluesy wrecking ball, ranging from the throaty ’50s-style ballad “You Were Young” to the riff assault of “Amaze.” The group’s no-frills drumming and smoldering guitar tones nod toward the White Stripes and the Black Keys, but their tuneful charisma separates them from the legions of garage-rock imitators” – LA Times

The Dead Ships are a garage rock duo based in LA, recently nominated as “Best New Emerging Artist, LA 2011″ by Deli Magazine.

They were officially selected to showcase at the CMJ Music Marathon in NYC, and will be performing at SXSW 2012.

2011 saw The Dead Ships play sold out shows @ The Troubadour, The Echo, & The Echoplex
with the likes of Kevin Devine, Anthony Green, King Khan, The Cosmonauts, and Girl in a Coma. And played w/international acts PS I LOVE YOU, Those Darlins, An Horse, & My Jerusalem. Following a great residency @ Central in Santa Monica, The Dead Ships embarked on 1st US tour to support a 7″ release and showcase officially @ CMJ Music Marathon.

The Dead Ships debut LP, Electric Ahab, was recorded in a weekend (July 2011) in San Francisco, CA @ Center of the Mile Stuios with Donny Newenhouse (Film School, Holly Golightly) Recorded live, in 2 takes on vintage analog gear, to 2″ tape.

photo by: Nick Maggio
The Ross Sea Party || Listen || Watch
The Ross Sea Party is a typically unusual Los Angeles family. Five friends who wanted to transcend the disconnected and nonsensical nature of life in the city to create something consequential, the band embarked with hollow-body guitars, well-tuned drums, and a glockenspiel.

Like its namesake (a little known yet heroic wing of Ernest Shackleton’s famed 1914 Trans-Antarctic Expedition), The Ross Sea Party can be characterized by their easy navi- gation across an ever-changing atmosphere, as expeditionaries of boundless inspiration. From the idiosyncratic guitar work of Neil Young and the irreverent pop of The Talking Heads, to indie contemporaries Delta Spirit, Arcade Fire and The Dodos, The Ross Sea Party pay homage to their influences, while simultaneously creating an unmistakable sound of their own. Spacious instrumenta- tions atop energetic, pervasive rhythms provide the foundation for singer Brady Erickson’s unique voice and the band’s ema- nating harmonies, as the songs remain simple, catchy and melodic at their core.

Hello Echo || Listen || Watch
For me, the most satisfying scene in the whole Lord of the Rings trilogy was the bit where the Ents finally mobilize and move to tear down the… what was that they were destroying? Some sort of orc factory? I don’t remember, honestly, but as thinly veiled as the environmental allegory of the scene was, the justice inherent to a bunch of trees taking out the very industrial operation that had been depleting the forest was quite satisfying. The album art for Hello Echo’s debut album, Hello, takes that image and makes it several times more literal, showing an Ent-like tree, dukes up, squaring off against some sort of smokestack skyscraper monster, and the images continues onto the back of the digipack to reveal a nearby city about to be wiped out by a towering wave.

The overt environmentalism of its cover art doesn’t quite carry over into the album’s music, but it is reflected somewhat in the album’s tension between the pastoral and the urban. The songs are full of images of moving out where people don’t dominate the landscape, to the desert or the seaside, and in the case of the desert, they even juxtapose the landscape with the technology that moves them through it, in this case a car’s engine. The trio is lead by guitarist Sean Aylward, best known for a one-album stint in Apollo Sunshine, whose drummer, Jeremy Black, produced Hello. He’s joined by bassist Mike Sarno and drummer Mikey Silva, and together they make an interesting trio– they have a pretty normal set-up, but Aylward’s guitar is an unusual halfway point between lead and rhythm playing, especially when he’s playing electric.

Aylward’s style has its best showcase on “Stone”. He layers acoustic and electric guitar into a cycling rhythm that imparts urgency to the song’s unison singing, but when he breaks out for a little solo near the end of the song, it’s very tied in to the structure of what he was already playing, an embellishment of the rhythm part. It’s a good style that enlivens the band’s songwriting, which is mostly quite strong but occasionally a little short on developed lyrics. Opener “When Push Comes to Love” is good to begin with, but his rattling, spiraling leads really blow it up into something huge. The best piece of pure songwriting is the quiet, country-tinged “Disconnect Me”, which backs Aylward’s nearly twangy lead vocal with spectral, wordless harmonies and just a few well-placed electric guitar accents.

That “Disconnect Me” succeeds so well without Aylward’s guitar dominating it is a good sign for the band’s future and potential to branch out. And I do hope they get the chance to branch out. Hello is a very solid debut by a band with plenty of talent– it’s not often I wind up spending so much of an indie rock review talking about a particular player’s instrumental style, but Aylward really seems to have found his own voice on the guitar.Pitchfork

The Muddy Reds || Listen || Watch