September 22, 2010 8pm
The Summit
2210 Summit St.
(614) 268-9377
$12 adv / $14 door
ages 18+ - under 21 pay $2 surcharge at the door
Best Coast
http://myspace.com/bestcoast
Bethany Cosentino was no stranger to the stage when she began working on recordings with bandmate Bobb Bruno under the name Best Coast in 2009. A former child actress, Cosentino had started writing songs in her teens, and had garnered a strong online following by the time she was 17 thanks to a handful of squeaky-clean pop tunes she made available on her MySpace page under the nom de teen pop Bethany Sharayah. “I had interest from major labels,” she said in a 2009 interview with PopSense. “And it was kind of overwhelming and I realized that I wasn’t ready to be a ‘pop princess.’” In the years that followed, Cosentino put in time as a member of the spacy experimental pop group Pocahaunted and went to school in New York. She moved back to Los Angeles in 2009, at which point she started working with Bruno on Best Coast’s first demos.
Drawing inspiration from ’60s surf rock and girl groups, Best Coast’s noisy lo-fi sound gave a nod to contemporaneous acts like Hot Lava, the Vivian Girls, and Brilliant Colors. Best Coast’s first year saw a flurry of little releases: a self-titled 7″ single on Art Fag; a cassette tape release, Where the Boys Are, on the U.K. label Blackest Rainbow; a split 7″, Up All Night, on Atelier Ciseaux; an EP, Make You Mine, on Group Tightener; and a self-titled 7″ on Black Iris. Best Coast had become something of a sensation by the time 2009 came to a close; the band enjoyed a bit of attention from the media (notably from Nylon magazine), and Make You Mine made its way onto a few year-end lists. The band embarked on its first U.S. tour early the following year, sharing the stage with the Vivian Girls. Their profile continued to rise in 2010 with the release of “When I’m with You,” which was accompanied by an adorably cute video. The duo signed to Mexican Summer Records and began work on a debut album. Meanwhile, Cosentino made a summer single for Converse (a collaboration with Vampire Weekend’s Rostam Batmanglij and rapper Kid Cudi) and Best Coast added a full-time drummer, ex-Vivian Girl Ali Koehler. The group’s album Crazy for You, which featured Cosentino’s cat Snacks on the cover, was released in July. - ©2010 Rovi, All Music Guide
Male Bonding
http://www.subpop.com/artists/male_bonding
If you’re going to call your house party “RAGE,” you’d better deliver. In May 2008, at a shindig by that bold name, littered with disposable cameras and drenched in beer, the London noise-pop trio Male Bonding played its first gig. Although singer and bassist Kevin Hendrick concedes that a giant trampoline stole the show (“I did trampolining at school. I’m really good at it. Really can get some serious air”), Male Bonding, in a scant two years, has built up some major momentum.
The formula: “Tinnitus. And a hook.” And a speedometer pinned deep in the red.
Male Bonding plays fast. Nothing Hurts, the band’s first full-length, gets it done in half an hour, and most songs clock in at around two minutes. “I don’t like long songs,” says guitarist and singer John Arthur Webb. “I lose interest when listening to them, and I lose interest when writing them. We always end up speeding things up without meaning to. Too much coffee.”
According to Hendrick, one of the band’s key phrases is, “I like it—shall we try it a little faster?” As he taught himself to play, Hendrick spun LPs at 45 RPM. “For hours, I would listen to all these rock songs, and I’d hear the bass line and was always wondering what it would sound like sped up. It appealed to me more. Imagine these stodgy riffs fast and choppy. I loved it. I’d zone in on these lines—they were probably guitar lines, too—and I’d play along to them. The rest of the music and vocals would melt away.”
If you will know their velocity, you will remember their melodies. Every song on Nothing Hurts, whether a clipped, snarling rock anthem (“All Things This Way,” “Crooked Scene,” “Pumpkin”) or something more foggy and contemplative (“Franklin,” “Worse to Come”), carries a hook that’s immediate and permanent.
Indeed, there’s much more to Male Bonding than high-speed, high-impact punk. “We love the slower, hazier stuff as well as the punkish stuff,” says Webb. Hendrick’s favorite bands include “shoegaze” forerunners My Bloody Valentine and Ride, and he loves Teenage Fanclub’s A Catholic Education. “All my favorite pop songs,” Hendrick says, “are ballads. There’s a hippie in me and it’s fighting with the inner punk.”
Emerging from the fertile D.I.Y. rock scene in Dalston, a gentrification-proof London neighborhood with ample “lo-fi” bands and Turkish restaurants, Male Bonding paved its own way, releasing a split 7″ with the band Pens, on its own Paradise Vendors imprint, that’s now way, way OOP. (For those playing the home game, Paradise Vendors is still going strong and unique, slanging sweet records, tapes and shirts—like everything else about Male Bonding, the business is stuck on fast-forward. Check it.) When that blew up, Male Bonding toured with Vivian Girls (who are featured on “Worse to Come”) and gigged with Health, Fucked Up, No Age, The Soft Pack, Dum Dum Girls, Smith Westerns, Best Coast, Strange Boys, Metronomy, Crystal Castles, Mika Miko, and other loud-and-proud notables.
Hendrick recalls a particularly transcendental show on Halloween ’08. “It was us, Pens and Graffiti Island. It was zombie-grunge themed. You know, ‘Grunge is dead, etc.’ We were winging it. It was amazing. So much blood and green skin. All three bands were amazing. It was to celebrate a cassette release we all did together. Really felt like the start of something amazing. We’re all mutating in different ways now, but there will always be a connection between us three bands.”
“If everyone at a show is open to whatever unfolds before them,” he adds, “it amps up some kind of mutual force.”
Male Bonding’s fast songs paid off quickly. After the American label Sub Pop ordered some singles from Paradise Vendors, “we joked with them about asking us to do a 7” for their singles club,” Webb recalls. “About a week later, we were drinking Cava and eating crepes whilst signing a contract.” And here we are.
Alongside Nothing Hurts, Male Bonding is contributing to a Flipper tribute, to be released on Domino. Fun fact! For entertainment, John Arthur Webb enjoys listening to Flipper’s Gone Fishing at 45 RPM. “It sounds like Bikini Kill. I think I prefer it.”
Tin Armor
http://myspace.com/TinArmor
Indie pop meets punk, and sometimes there’s no place that I’d rather be. Heartfelt, pouring-it-all-out lyrics, delivered in a nasally MORRISEY style, backed up by jangled guitars rocking it out almost as hard as THE THERMALS. I’m a sucker for this, I can already guarantee myself that I’ll be proclaiming this CD as a masterpiece come a very drunken weekend. Did I mention the beautiful packaging to match the bountiful music? If THE HOUSEMARTINS were on No Idea. - Sean Dougan, Maximum Rock’n'roll