The Bowery Presents

The Bowery Ballroom upcoming shows

Blind Pilot

Local Natives / JBM

Venue:
The Bowery Ballroom
Date:
Sat 6/06
Notes:
18+
Doors: 8:00 PM / Show: 8:00 PM
$15
Tickets
Local Natives
official website
myspace
Local Natives make soaring, sky-scraping harmonies, dreamy orchestral melodies, and throbbing tribal beats that bash their way into your soul. Theirs are songs you can dance to almost as well as you can swoon to them. Drawing a line from the vocal stylings of Crosby Stills Nash & Young and the Zombies through the more esoteric edges of post-punk and Afro-beat, this California five piece have communally crafted a brand of indie rock all their own.

For Local Natives everything is a collaboration, from song writing duties to the band’s self produced artwork. The three part harmonies come courtesy of keyboardist Kelcey Ayer, guitarists Ryan Hahn and Taylor Rice. Then there’s Matt Frazier on drums and Andy Hamm on bass, who look after the band’s equally impressive graphics and artwork.

One of SXSW 2009’s biggest success stories, the band drove for two days to get from Los Angeles to Austin in order to play nine spectacular shows that saw them sprinting, instruments in hand, from one gig to the next. Their hectic schedule paid off as Local Natives left Austin with the attention of the UK music Industry.

Based in the Silver Lake area of Los Angeles, three of the five-piece originally hail from Orange County. Kelcey, Ryan and Taylor attended neighbouring high schools and hooked up with bassist Andy a year after they graduated, later meeting drummer Matt. They’ve been playing – and evolving - together for three years. Last year, however, the band realized that the new songs they were writing were the sounds of a new project entirely.

It was in December 2008 that the band decamped to Silver Lake, where they all live in the same house. But the Silver Lake digs isn’t the first house the band have shared. They lived together in Orange County too, in a place affectionately known as Gorilla Manor. “It was insanely messy and there were always friends over knocking around on guitars or our thrift store piano,” says Ryan, “it was an incredible experience and I’ll never forget that time.” The original Gorilla Manor, where the band wrote the majority of their record, had such an impact that the band has paid tribute to the house by naming their debut album in its honour.

The self-funded ‘Gorilla Manor’ was recorded by Raymond Richards in West Los Angeles. Chosen because he was “super talented and super affordable,” Richards co-produced the record with Local Natives in his own Red Rockets Glare studio.

Featuring twelve sumptuous slices of dappled California sunlight and beguiling percussive rhythms, the album kicks off with the moody, driving, ‘Wide Eyes’. Says Ryan, “It’s about people’s obsession with the miraculous and disastrous…with witnessing extraordinary events”. The effervescent, mandolin boasting ‘Airplanes’ follows, which Kelcey explains is about “longing to have met my grandfather, a great man and pilot, who died before I was born.” Also included is the glorious ‘Sun Hands’, which was released as a limited edition single on Chess Club back in July. According to Taylor, the lyrics describe “that all too familiar feeling of wanting what you can’t have – especially when you once had it.” There’s a cover version in the mix too, a barely recognisable version of Talking Heads’ ‘Warning Sign’. “We’ve basically flipped the song on its head,” says Matt, explaining how they switched David Byrne’s original yelped vocals into a beautiful three-part harmony.

Local Natives’ debut album ‘Gorilla Manor’ comes out on November 2nd in the UK through Infectious Music.
Blind Pilot
official website
myspace
There’s no shortage of angles to Blind Pilot’s story: the tours by bicycle, the sheer volume of
iTunes downloads, the dizzying ride from relative obscurity to headlining a national club tour in
less than a year. But the real story of Portland, Oregon’s Blind Pilot is about the songs. Led by
the acoustic guitar and gentle voice of songwriter Israel Nebeker, Blind Pilot’s heartfelt music is
the sort that cultivates devotion among fans, that elicits sing-alongs at concerts, that inspires late-
night mixtapes.
Portland is a city positively littered with folk-pop bands, but the sincerity and modesty of Blind
Pilot’s music stands out from the pack. Once heard, the gorgeously seductive songs are not easily
shaken or forgotten, as more and more people are discovering. The band has performed on
Carson Daly’s show, has opened arena shows in England, has been selected as iTunes’ Single of
the Week—but these achievements belie the intimacy of the group’s music. After a busy summer
that included the Lollapalooza, Sasquatch!, and Outside Lands festivals and a high-profile slot
opening for fellow Portlanders the Decemberists on select dates, Blind Pilot is embarking on a
national headlining tour to support their magnanimous debut, 3 Rounds and a Sound, released
last year on Expunged Records. Initially a duo of Nebeker and drummer Ryan Dobrowski, the
group now includes Kati Claborn on banjo and dulcimer, Luke Ydstie on upright bass, Dave
Jorgensen on trumpet and harmonium, and Ian Krist on vibraphone.
Nebeker and drummer Ryan Dobrowski first met as college students at the University of Oregon.
They played together in the occasional band, but the roots of Blind Pilot didn’t take hold until the
two friends spent a summer abroad in Newquay, England, a laidback surfing town in the coastal
county of Cornwall. Nebeker says, “The first night we saw a musician playing on the street. A
cop came up and we thought, ‘This guy’s going to get busted.’ But the cop stood and listened,
then flipped a pound into the guy’s case and walked off. So we said, ‘Oh, we’re doing this!’”
Nebeker strummed an acoustic guitar while Dobrowski, a fine art student, kept time on a
makeshift percussion kit constructed out of a sketchpad and pencil tin. “I used that sketchpad
more as an instrument than for artwork,” laughs Dobrowski. “By the end of the summer, the tin
was all flared out from me hitting it.”
After that summer of busking by the English seaside, it was a couple more years before Blind
Pilot became a serious endeavor, but when Nebeker and Dobrowski decided to focus on making
music as a duo, they again sought the ocean air for inspiration. In 2006, the pair relocated to the
dramatic landscape of Oregon’s Pacific coast, a few miles north of Gearhart, Oregon, where
Nebeker grew up. His hometown memories are strung throughout the lyrics to 3 Rounds’
“Things I Cannot Recall”: “We took off sleeping by the river and the beaches in your car/Up
where you taught me how to drive a stick and told me your family secret.”
In the fishing town of neighboring Astoria, Oregon, the pair camped out on the top floor of an
old cannery to prepare songs without outside distraction. The building jutted out into the water,
not far from where the Columbia River’s broad mouth collides with the Pacific Ocean. Against
that tumultuous backdrop, the gentle songs took sturdy formation. Nebeker’s honest delivery,
accompanied by Dobrowski’s uncluttered timekeeping, steered a batch of very personal songs to
completion—much like the river’s pilot boats, from which Blind Pilot derived their name, guide
the mammoth, freight-laden barges up the Columbia.

Both avid cyclists, Nebeker and Dobrowski decided their next move would be a tour by bicycle.
Once the songs were together, and a batch of CDRs was readied and hand-pressed, the two
embarked without a map or any gigs scheduled. They biked down the West Coast, playing
wherever they could along the way. The effort of touring by bicycle was reward in itself. “If we
rode all day and we couldn’t find a show, or we played for just ten people, we still felt good
about our day,” remembers Dobrowski.
The first Blind Pilot bike tour started in Vancouver and ended abruptly in San Francisco after
their bikes were stolen. But when 3 Rounds and a Sound was finished in Portland last year, they
toured again by bicycle, this time making it all the way down to San Diego with new members
Claborn and Ydstie in tow—Ydstie’s upright bass lumbering behind in a coffin-like trailer. Says
Nebeker of touring by bike, “Ironically, the harder you worked, the more fun you had, as long as
it’s good work for a good reason. When you just sit all day in a van, that’s not as much fun.” Of
course, for this upcoming national tour, Blind Pilot will be traveling by van—a circumstance
borne out of practicality, and a necessary side effect of the group’s remarkably quick success—
but they hold future hopes to tour by bicycle again as soon as possible.
In the meantime, the songs of 3 Rounds and a Sound have stood up after countless miles of road-
travel, and Blind Pilot has evolved into a live unit whose group dynamic elevates the music with
a seemingly effortless grace. On record, songs like “The Story I Heard,” and “Go On, Say It” are
intimately personal meditations, but in the live setting, they take on a communal, celebratory air.
The luminosity of Nebeker’s voice is buttressed by Claborn’s and Ydstie’s soaring harmonies,
and the folk-spun, roots-inspired arrangements take on both the austere gorgeousness of classical
chamber music, and the breathing, perspiring qualities of a great rock ’n’ roll show.
“They’re playing our song/Can you see the lights?” sings Nebeker in 3 Rounds’ title track. “Can
you hear the hum of our song? I hope they get it right/I hope we dance tonight before we get it
wrong/And the seasons will change us new.”
Those lyrics are of careful optimism, accepting of the ever-changing nature of things—but Blind
Pilot already has much to look forward to. Very near the start of their journey, they’ve reached a
broader audience than they’d ever imagined, yet they’re not willing to make themselves
comfortable, even insisting that their first European tour will be via bicycle. “And one of the
things I’m most excited about recording the next album is to see how different we can make it,”
Nebeker adds. “The sound that we have going is working really well right now, but I’m totally
excited to mess it up.”
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