Young the Giant’s Jacob Tilley discusses the band’s breakout 2011 and plans for new album
February 2, 2012
Three minutes on stage may have made the difference between emerging success and national attention, or a career as another relatively unknown alt-rock band for the members of Irvine’s Young the Giant.
Or, as guitarist Jacob Tilley recalls, it could have meant the end of the band itself, had Young the Giant not wowed national television viewers at the 2011 MTV Video Music Awards with an electric performance of “My Body.”
“We were kind of getting to the point where we were trying to figure out if … we were going to do a second record or if it would be back to school for us,” said Tilley in a recent phone chat. “We got such a large fan base from three minutes on TV. It really changed the ball game for us.”
Propelled by that success, Young the Giant continue their tour in support of their eponymous debut album at two sold-out shows at The Fillmore Wednesday and Thursday. The quintet is now also working on a follow-up, which Tilley said should be finished next winter.
Tilley met vocalist Sameer Gadhia when his family moved to the States from England when he was 12. “He invited me to a soccer practice; I found out he played the guitar,” said Tilley, who went on to study at UC Santa Cruz. “Sameer was already friends with (bassist) Payam (Doostzadeh), and Payam played in a band when they were younger.”
Gadhia and Tilley started the earliest incarnation of the band, The Jakes, in 2004, along with a couple of other friends. Doostzadeh, guitarist Eric Cannata and drummer François Comtois joined within the next couple of years. The band members, now in their early 20s, were high school seniors at the time. Young the Giant might be a Southern California band, but only Doostzadeh is a native of the Golden State. Gadhia was born in Michigan, Cannata in New Jersey, and Comtois in Quebec, Canada.
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Sonny Smith ‘Sees All Knows All’ this Saturday + 2/4/12 @ The Lost Church
January 26, 2012
Sonny Smith, the man behind Sonny & the Sunsets, is halfway through a series of performances that are one part music, one part theater, and three parts mystery called “Sees All Knows All: A Thing by Sonny Smith.” Taking place at The Lost Church over four consecutive Saturdays that started on January 14th, the series showcases a rotating cast of local openers. The past two installments featured Alexi Glickman and Kelley Stoltz. As for the next two, Kyle Field of Little Wings will open this Saturday, January 28th, and the February 4th iteration will have Tim Cohen opening and Sunfoot closing. [More...]
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Vicky Cryer: Louis XIV’s Jason Hill gathers talented friends for new band’s first SF show
January 20, 2012
There are two foremost things you need to know about Vicky Cryer. The first is that the Los Angeles dance-rock collective is not an all-star band. Though it (currently) features the drummers from Muse and Nine Inch Nails, the bassist from The Killers, Julian Casablancas’ keyboardist, and several other notables, this is a band owned solely by Jason Hill; guitarist, singer/songwriter, and leader of the defunct Louis XIV.
The second is that despite the feminine name, Vicky Cryer is most definitely a man. Vicky (Victor) Cryer is Hill’s pseudonym for this project. It’s Hill channeling New York Dolls’ frontman David Johansen’s (who Hill has now collaborated with on two albums) alter ego Buster Poindexter.
“A lot of bands have names that you know what kind of music it is; it’s adjective followed by noun,” Hill said in a recent chat that he fit in on a Friday night between a recording session and a call from his girlfriend. “I wanted nobody to know who the fuck it was. I just wanted it to be able to define itself…I liked the idea of not being able to be pinpointed in every facet musically.”
This band of buddies, which will play one of its initial shows Thursday at Popscene, owes its existence to a Virgin Airlines stewardess on a 2009 Australia-Los Angeles flight. Louis XIV had just finished what would be its final tour and decided to “take a break or break up.” Hill and the stewardess began to chat.
Fast-forward a few days, and the two of them are at a party in a San Diego high-rise that’s home to some white-collar Australian criminal. A friend of the stewardess is there when Hill lets it slip he is looking to start a new band. The friend announces she knows Jamiroquai bassist Nick Fyffe, as well as Nine Inch Nails and Julian Casablancas’ drummer Alex Carapetis.
Hill calls the two men, in Australia and London, on the spot and they agree to fly out to record with him. “We had this … leap of faith with these guys not knowing each other,” Hill said. “It could have been a disaster, but within seconds it just started working.”
In 2010, Hill moved from San Diego to his new home in the Hollywood Hills. “I just had the idea I kind of wanted to live by Jack Nicholson if I was going to live in Los Angeles; he’s somewhere around the corner from me,” Hill said. “(It has) banana trees in the yard, and it’s like this old, weird hunting lodge. Instantly I thought, I could really make a racket up here any time of night. It just has so much character, and it spoke to me.” He built a recording studio in the home and named it Ulysses, the name that first entered his head when he first saw the home.
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Friends of Friends: Getting to know Cruel Summer
December 13, 2011
Friends of Friends is a new feature on The Bay Bridged, where a little name-dropping never hurt anyone. We interview a local band and get the lowdown on the music scene from their point of view. Who will they recommend for the next installment? Keep reading to find out.
When I wedged myself into the corner where the stage met the beer-caked floor at The Knockout’s packed POW! show last month, awaiting the night’s opening act, Cruel Summer, my thoughts alternated between shock and awe. The amount of buzz around a band with no releases and who have never before played a show — in other words, zero notches in their rock-and-roll bedpost — is more common nowadays, but still weird to some, including yours truly. However, Cruel Summer, consisting of singer and guitarist Thea Chacamaty, guitarist Josh Yule, drummer Sean Mosley, and bassist Chani Hawthorne, lived up to the hype.
The group’s self-description as “sound[ing] like Sonic Youth making illegitimate kin with the Wedding Present” is not far off, and I’ve been humming a mish-mash of the infectious concoction ever since. Who better to start this column off with than a band that is so up-and-coming that they arrived and killed it, practically uninvited? I didn’t even know I wanted you, Cruel Summer, but I do now. Here, come sit down. Have a drink. Let’s chat.
I met the band at Doc’s Clock in the Mission just in time, as the rounds of Fernet and PBR started passing hands.
TBB: Describe the Big Bang of Cruel Summer.
Josh Yule: I guess we’ve been a band for…
Thea Chacamaty: …about a year…
JY: …about three months…
TBB: ?
TC: Well, Sean and Josh and I started playing music together earlier this year, and then three months ago Chani started playing with us. So, that’s when it started coming together, overall…
JC: …before, it didn’t…
TC: …yeah… (giggles)
JY: Well, we didn’t have a bass player. The first time I met Chani, though, she just moved here and would come into the coffee shop that I worked at. One day I was playing My Bloody Valentine and she told me she named her rabbit after them. You named your rabbit My Bloody Valentine? And she’s like, No, dummy. It’s My Bunny Valentine. We’ve been friends ever since.
Chani Hawthorne: (laughs) I just wanted a rabbit so I could have a My Bunny Valentine.
TBB: How do you guys click?
JY: Until Cruel Summer, I hadn’t played music in ten years. I used to play with two really good friends in Gainesville and I just assumed I would never have that kind of comradery and tightness with anyone else so I just said forget it and played guitar in my room, wrote riffs….
TBB: So, you feel that comradery with Cruel Summer?
JY: I do. I do. This is the band I wanted to play in in 1996. It just took a long time.
CH: When we practice, Josh and Thea start making a bunch of noise and then Sean and I are like, ok…
TBB: Is that your songwriting process?
TC: Usually what happens is Josh will write some amazing guitar riff and we’ll use that for the verses, and then I’ll write some pop chorus…
JY: And sometimes we’ll be playing two different things and Sean will pull it together and say, Put that part with that part…, so we end up having one good song instead of two bad songs.
TC: (laughs) Yeah, he’s like the editor.
TBB: Why do you think San Francisco is a special place for music?
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Trampled by Turtles: an unconventional bluegrass band inspired by metal and Dylan
December 6, 2011
Trampled By Turtles – “Wait So Long”
Burrowed halfway between Minneapolis and Canada’s Thunder Bay, along Minnesota’s corner of Lake Superior, Duluth is a small city surrounded by forests, hills, streams and lakes. Considering the population is only 90,000, an annual weeklong music festival with 150 local bands may seem out of the ordinary.
Yet the “Homegrown Festival” is symbolic of just how musically diverse the birthplace of Bob Dylan is.
“Per capita, there has to be more bands there than anywhere that I know of,” said Ryan Young, fiddler for alt-country/bluegrass band Trampled by Turtles, who play Thursday at the Great American Music Hall (9pm, $21). “Everybody knows each other, and there are quite a lot of people that are in more than one band.”
Take Young’s band, for instance. The fiddler previously played guitar in a speed metal band, various rock and jazz bands and even a hip hop troupe. The other members of the all-acoustic band – guitarist/vocalist Dave Simonett, bassist Tim Saxhaug, mandolin player Erik Berry and banjo player Dave Carroll all played in traditional electric rock and jam bands.
Simonett built the quintet over the course of several months in 2003, plucking each of his band mates from other bands; Trampled by Turtles was supposed to be a side-project, and it was never the goal to create an Americana band. “It just kind of happened; it wasn’t premeditated,” Young said. “It was acoustic guitar, a mandolin and a banjo. That kind of just lends it self to bluegrassy, folky music.”
One by one, the musicians’ other bands fell by the wayside. Five albums in, it’s safe to say Trampled by Turtles is a side project no more. Their most recent release, 2010′s Palomino (Banjodad/Thirty Tigers), spent more than 50 consecutive weeks in the top 10 of the Billboard bluegrass chart.
But Trampled by Turtles don’t play your grandparents’ brand of bluegrass. The frenetic, fast-tempo and raucous melodies owe just as much to Young’s days in the metal band as traditional country and folk. A ballad here or there notwithstanding, most Palomino tracks start at warp speed and only build from there.
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Interview: Water Borders scoring short films at free Celluloid Salon event Tuesday
November 14, 2011
Water Borders, San Francisco’s resident electronic maestros of the macabre, will be switching up their familiar sound for a lighter set this Tuesday, as they live-score four short films from the early 20th Century as a part of the free-with-RSVP Celluloid Salon 2011 at Public Works (7pm). If that wasn’t enough to arouse interest, maybe these two words will: open bar.
I joined Loric Sih and Amitai Heller in Heller’s sunny Mission living room for a chat, sans Matt Rogers, their newest acquisition. “He’s shy,” they tell me, “so he won’t be joining us.” When I sit on the couch next to Loric, he is Google-imaging the Crass Records logo and talking to Amitai about how to manipulate it. “What ‘ya doin’ that for?” I wonder out loud. “We were talking about making a Crass Records/peace punk mix called Now That’s What I Call Peace Punk.” Get it? Like the prolific Now That’s What I Call Music series. And so sets the tone for the next 30 minutes as I talk to these smart, funny, and articulate guys.
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Interview: The Soft Moon’s Luis Vasquez discusses the new ‘Total Decay’ EP and his favorite Halloween costume
October 31, 2011
What better sort of grownup Halloween activity is there than to go see a band as spooky as The Soft Moon on Halloween? They’re playing tonight to celebrate not only the holiday, but the band’s newest Total Decay EP (out on Captured Tracks). The Bay Bridged caught up with Luis Vasquez to see in what direction the project is going with the latest release. See The Soft Moon tonight at the Independent with LED ER EST and Chelsea Wolfe – tickets are still available (9pm, $13, RSVP).
Interview after the jump . . .
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Interview: Nick Waterhouse is more than a sum of influences (playing tonight at Slim’s)
October 19, 2011
Editor’s Note: Nick Waterhouse is a local musician taking part in a revitalization of soul and R&B music here in the Bay Area. Nick Waterhouse and The Tarohs feat. The Naturells play tonight at Slim’s. Also performing are the Allah-Lahs and DJ Carnita from Hard French. Check out our exclusive interview with Nick below.
The Soul and R&B resurgence of the last few years in the form of dance parties starting with 1964, and now Oldies Night, Lost and Found, Hard French, and others are nothing novel. San Franciscans have had a pan-generational love affair with Soul and R&B music for decades now. The City by the Bay was home to Sly and the Family Stone, Sugar Pie DeSanto, Darondo, and others who have come and gone, along with the throngs of transients, leaving behind relics of a bygone era — namely vinyl records for young collectors to rediscover. DJs like Nick Waterhouse, Primo, and Lucky have all contributed to this second renaissance, of sorts, while rejecting the false sense of nostalgia that comes with a theme party. “It makes non-subculture people more comfortable getting to the core of what’s great about the records instead of the cultural baggage that goes with it,” observes Waterhouse.
For the San Francisco-based devotee to the old school, it’s always been about the music and nothing more — whether DJing, composing, producing records for his label Pres Records, recording at the Distillery, or performing with his live band, The Tarohs, and his back-up singers, The Naturelles.
Embracing cyberspace as a means of convenience, I chatted with him via email about his love of music, his obsession with analog recording, and what is on the horizon for Pres Records.
