Real Estate mixing things up for their latest tour

Originally published in the San Francisco Examiner on March 12

For more than a decade, Real Estate have been defined by their dependable excellence. Every couple of years, the New Jersey indie rock band is basically guaranteed to release an album of languid beauty, combining elements of catchy jangle pop, melodious harmonies and intriguing wordplay.

Although reliability has become almost synonymous for the band at this point, Real Estate have opted to do something decidedly off brand for their latest tour. Their shows have been displays of unpredictable eccentricity, with their tour opener in New York City only available to attendees with the name Daniel (the name of their latest album) and subsequent performances embracing interactive audience set pieces.

For their show last month at The Independent, the band played a game of rock bingo, where each popped ball encouraged a new prompt, such as “drummer plays guitar” and when they make their return to San Francisco for a show at Bimbo’s 365 Club on Wednesday, that same kind of random energy will be present.

“It just kind of dawned on me that we didn’t have to do the same thing every night,” said Real Estate bassist and founding member Alex Bleeker. “It’s kind of crazy that people gather in a room and are still willing to look at us after all these years. And there’s so many other things you can do than just stand on stage and play your songs.”

While the band is devoted to delivering a unique experience, Real Estate does not need to rely on gimmicks to put on a compelling show. “Daniel,” the group’s sixth full-length album, is another document of flawless and clever songwriting, crafted in the mode of their New Jersey slack-rocker predecessors The Feelies and power-pop auteurs Big Star.

The group recorded the album in Nashville, and their countrified environs bleed into the record. That’s particularly noticeable in the presence of the pedal steel, an instrument that thrusts the band from the suburbs of New Jersey into the murkier swamps of the Deep South.

The pedal steel pops up periodically throughout “Daniel,” acting as a guiding North Star (“Haunted World”), a searing and silvery complementary addition (“Interior”) and as ominous and forlorn backdrop (“You Are Here.”)

“It wasn’t like we wrote those songs with pedal steel in mind, but we just couldn’t resist,” said Bleeker. “It was about embracing the history of the place–embracing Nashville.”

Daniel is powered by the cooing vocals of primary songwriter Martin Courtney, whose pillowy delivery has become a trademark for Real Estate. His hushed tones and the band’s gentle pacing make every Real Estate album imminently listenable, but each new offering brings a different wrinkle to the group, something evidenced by the latest decision to embrace pedal steel.

And like past albums, “Daniel” features a cameo appearance from Bleeker on lead vocals, this time for the Dylanesque ballad “Victoria.” Bleeker, who also records as a solo artist and as Alex Bleeker and the Freaks, has long reveled in his supporting role—happy to act as the palate cleanser and gruffer foil to Courtney’s more placid demeanor.

“We’re not dogmatic at all about having a song of mine in every album,” said Bleeker. “Martin is our chief songwriter, so he’s like the meat and potatoes of what’s going on in Real Estate. But if I have a song that comes up during our writing process that makes sense to include and sounds good, we’ll add it into the mix.”

Although he met Courtney and Real Estate guitarist Julian Lynch as kids growing up in New Jersey, for the past decade Bleeker has lived in Marin County. His presence here has turned the Bay Area into a kind of home away from home for Real Estate, who are semi-regular presences in San Francisco, often playing at The Chapel in the Mission District.

However, the band has never performed at Bimbo’s and Bleeker has actually never stepped foot in the venerable North Beach venue.

“I’m very excited to play at Bimbo’s—it seems like it has such a cool vibe,” said Bleeker. “All the photos I’ve seen of the place just gives it this legendary kind of feel. I’ve been in the Bay Area for a decade now, so I’m almost nearing local status, which makes these San Francisco shows so much fun. I think we’re all super jazzed to be bookending our West Coast tour with another gig here. It’s going to be fun. And different, for sure.”

Torrey siblings to bring shoegaze magic to Make Out Room

Originally published in the SF Examiner on February 28

While the entire musical world might be at our fingertips now, thanks to streaming services and the internet, there are still few better methods of discovering amazing new bands than having a cool older sibling who knows about music.

That time-honored tradition is what led to the creation of Torrey, a band composed of Kelly Gonsalves, his younger sister Ryann and three other members. The band will be playing on Friday at the Make Out Room as part of an album release party for its second full-length record.

“Oh, I definitely got to piggyback off all the hard work that Kelly was doing tracking down music when we were young,” said Ryann Gonsalves, who is four years younger than Kelly. “He was going on all these torrenting websites and making mixes and I would get to benefit from the trickle down of all that. I’d listen to that music, and just be like, ‘My god, this is awesome.’”

Growing up in the East Bay, Kelly said, there was always music playing in the Gonsalves household from bands such as the B-52s and the Cranberries. In the early 2000s, he discovered the albums of indie rock bands such as the Strokes and Wolf Parade, falling further in love with music and inspiring him to pick up the guitar.

Kelly began writing short compositions and sending them to Ryann, who was also exploring music. Eventually, the two started collaborating together, and Torrey was born in 2018. They released an EP in 2019, and their first full-length album, “Something Happy” came out in 2021.

Their latest album, “Torrey,” will debut on March 8, and it features some of the band’s most robust, layered and fully-realized songs to date. The Gonsalves siblings worked closely with Matt Ferrara, lead singer of San Francisco band The Umbrellas, to produce tracks that are teeming with different elements and rich in texture, resulting in gorgeous dreampop and shoegaze creations.

“By the time we were ready to work with [Ferrara] , Ryann and I had these songs that were pretty much complete, but we knew we wanted to add more to them,” said Kelly Gonzalves. “We wanted to include these flourishes and gave him (Ferrera) a lot of creative freedom to include synths and keyboards and maybe some guitar solos. It was important for us to be collaborative in that regard.”

While the first two Torrey albums were self-released, the latest LP is being issued on Slumberland Records, a legendary Oakland label that has long been a champion of local groups.

A collection of ethereal tracks that channel white noise and dissonant feedback into gorgeous, atmospheric landscapes, the new self-titled album evokes much of the great past Slumberland acts, such as Black Tambourine, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart and Frankie Rose.

Although the songs have disparate elements — scrawling waves of noise with stirring, uplifting melodies — the contrasts work in a strangely compelling way, a reflection of the Gonsalves’ siblings differing, yet complementary approaches.

“Of course we grew up together, but we’re very different people and I think that works in so many positive ways,” said Ryann Gonsalves. “It’s been super interesting to go back and forth with these different ideas and to be discussing different moods and themes. It really turns into this fun, wild-card puzzle, where we balance each other out. Somehow it all works.”

While Kelly typically draws the sonic foundation of each song, Ryann will provide melodies and lyrics. Although Ryann’s lyrics are deeply personal, they’re written in a manner that is more opaque and mysterious, providing opportunities for listeners (even Kelly) to interpret them through their own perspectives.

“I kind of make my own meanings to what Ryann writes,” her brother said. “I’m in the headspace of playing guitar and coming up with chord progressions and when Ryann adds lyrics they take on this different impression for me.”

While the duo were responsible for writing all the songs on the band’s latest album, Torrey has now grown into a five-piece live band, featuring Sinclair Riley on drums, Adam Honingford on lead guitar, and Susie Chinisci on synths and backing vocals.

Now both living in Oakland, Ryann and Kelly are just one more element of a resurgent Bay Area indie rock scene — a tight-knit, cohesive group of acts, many of them which are featured on Slumberland Records (Chime School, The Umbrellas and Papercuts, to name a few.)

“I feel like being on Slumberland is sort of like coming full circle for us,” said Ryann Gonsalves. “One of the first bands I really fell in love with was Veronica Falls, who were signed to Slumberland at the time. To end up on the same label as a band that inspiring, and to be part of this group with so many of our friends — it just feels right.”

Art-pop duo Water From Your Eyes coming to Regency Ballroom

Originally published in the SF Examiner on February 21

Listening to Water From Your Eyes — the New York art-pop duo that will be playing at the Regency Ballroom in San Francisco on Feb. 27 — can make for an utterly delirious experience.

The sonic backdrop for their songs is hallucinatory and wildly energetic, arrays of jagged guitars slicing through jittery synth compositions and throbbing rhythm movements.

The instruments all blend and merge together — not in the wall-of-sound shoegaze style, but in an alien, minimalist manner in which the original aims and purposes of each tool are deliberately upended.

On top of this beguiling combination is the dispassionate and deadpan vocal delivery of singer Rachel Brown, who emerges above the instrumental chaos with an almost angelic serenity. Brown, who uses they/them pronouns, gives the distinct impression of someone who stops by a riotous all-night rave purely for the refreshments.

“You know, when it comes to my delivery, I’m mostly just trying to enunciate my words correctly,” Brown said. “I feel like I talk pretty dryly most of the time, and that translates into how I sing. I don’t get that animated too often, unless it’s about pretty stupid stuff.”

Brown’s vocal takes might be unconventional, but they only add an illusory excitement to the work of Water From Your Eyes, a disparate approach that can make each song feel like a mystery to unlock. On the group’s latest album, 2023’s “Everyone’s Crushed,” the band’s fearlessness is taken to new heights, with traditional song structures and tropes eschewed in favor of relentless exploration.

“When we’re working on recording the vocals and doing the lyrics, the way Rachel handles everything is very natural,” said Nate Amos, the other half of the duo.

“It almost feels detached from what’s going on in the words, but that’s kind of what makes it all work,” Amos said. “I feel like not emphasizing a particular emotion in the vocal delivery turns the song into a little bit more of an inkblot. Then it can be interpreted in different ways rather than like, ‘Oh, this person sounds so sad or so happy or whatever.’”

Water from Your Eyes started nearly a decade ago, when Amos and Brown were both living in Chicago. The two were dating, but they eventually split up, and Brown relocated to New York City. Intent on maintaining their burgeoning musical collaboration, Amos moved to New York as well, and the band has steadily developed and evolved its sound over the course of five full-length albums.

The early catalog of the band is more steeped in traditional indie-rock settings, with acoustic guitars and soothing synths accompanying Brown’s expressive and expansive singing style. The duo continued to venture outside of those familiar terrains for each successive album, culminating in the adventurous atmosphere of “Everyone’s Crushed,” which was released on the legendary indie label Matador Records. Each track acts as a palate cleanser, providing an alternative reality to its successor song. The tunes include brooding, scratchy industrial offerings (“Open”), austere ballads (“14”) and sleekly polished club bangers (“Out There.”)

“I actually thought, at the time we were making this album, that it was all pretty tame,” Amos said. “There was definitely no intention of like, ‘Let’s really push it with this one’, although I guess I see why some people might think it’s a little weird.”

Despite the uncommon nature of the album, it was widely celebrated, landing on best-of-2023 lists from outlets such as The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and Pitchfork.

“It’s been really nice to see how this has been received,” Brown said. “It’s kind of been unbelievable in a way that I know this is all happening, because I’ve seen it. But in no way has any of this registered.”

The duo has come a long way from its early beginnings, a sentiment that can be best distilled from the music video for “Barley,” a propulsive track highlighted by Brown’s brazenly monotone opening line, “One, two, three, four/I count mountains.” In that video, Brown and Amos play corporate drones working in a joyless, fluorescent-lighted office space.

“Neither of us have had typical office jobs before, but we’ve both had these very frustrating jobs in the past,” Amos said. “I think we both have a greater appreciation for where we’re at now after doing that kind of work.”

Delightfully offbeat Being Dead can't wait for first-ever SF performance

Originally published in the SF Examiner on February 21

According to Being Dead, the Austin-based group that performing at the Rickshaw Stop in San Francisco on Sunday, the band’s origins can be traced back to its two founding members.

Both of them had a special appreciation for the unvarnished wonders of the human body.

“We were actually in rival nudist colonies, and we met after they merged together,” said Cody Dosier, who more commonly goes by his nom de plume, Gumball. “But it turned out to be a very aggressive community and everything became very degrading. And we both decided that we weren’t having fun doing that anymore and that we should challenge ourselves by creating art — by making music.”

Sounds like a heartwarming story — but Dosier and his creative partner Juli Keller (who goes by Falcon B----) don’t always stick to it. They’ve also told reporters that they met at Yale University, at a Cinnabon bakery and at their 10-year high school reunion.

Regardless of the band’s true past, what’s most exciting about Being Dead is what they’re doing these days. The band’s long-awaited full-length debut, “When Horses Would Run,” which arrived last year, is a kaleidoscopic collection of art-rock, garage, psychedelic, pop and lo-fi tunes.

“There wasn’t some masterful design with the album — we just have a lot of different kinds of musical tastes,” said Falcon B----. “We tried to put things together and weave them all into one interesting piece. Then we just kind of crossed our fingers that the outcome would be fun. It feels like an adventure that way.”

The songs range from delightfully offbeat gospel tunes (“God vs. Bible”) to careening surf-rock anthems (“The Great American Picnic”), to jazzy renditions of female empowerment (“Muriel’s Big Day Off”). And of course, no album is complete without a mission statement hyping up the band’s aim of “having a good time” (“We Are Being Dead”).

Somehow, it all works — listening to the album feels exactly like the kind of winsome journey hoped for by Falcon B----.

It can be fun to play spot the influences on the album — there is the shrill dexterity of icy post-punk group Women; the reckless, nobody’s-behind-the-wheel manic energy of Dehd; and the ebullient, adventurous nature of the Unicorns — but collectively, the sound is pure Being Dead: a singular and unique output.

“Considering that we basically just threw random darts at a dartboard, the album sounds pretty cohesive,” Falcon B---- said. “There were a number of influences we wanted to include, but it was pretty much all improv. It works, but that’s just mostly by chance.”

The rollicking sonic landscape of “When Horses Would Run” is matched by equally evocative lyricism, with Falcon B---- and Gumball detailing mythical creatures, strange cult scenes and images of suburban ennui. They have an endearing soft spot for animals, particularly the equines that make up the album title.

“Horses are very strong, and they’re actually the fastest land animals in the world,” Gumball said. “It’s called horsepower for a reason. I’ve never heard of anything called cheetah power.”

While “When Horses Would Run” marks the band’s first full-length recording, the band has been playing live since 2016 and has built up quite the cult following, particularly in its hometown of Austin, Texas. Their frenetic shows have a reputation for being surreal pieces of performance art, with the occasional audience plant provoking the band into increasingly outlandish acts of onstage zaniness.

“We’ve always had this small underground following, which has been pretty neat,” Falcon B---- said. “It definitely makes the shows more fun and interesting.”

Falcon B---- and Gumball — who are joined in the band by bassist Ricky Moto— are already working on their follow-up album to “When Horses Would Run,” which they hope to release this fall. Their current tour, in which they are opening for the atmospheric act Husbands, is the most extensive of their career to date, and they have plans to visit Europe and the U.K. in 2024 as well.

Sunday’s show at the Rickshaw Stop will be the band’s first-ever appearance in San Francisco, a moment its members are eagerly anticipating.

“I was planning on living in San Francisco for a while, but I have never been there in my adult life,” Falcon B---- said. “I can’t wait to go to Golden Gate Park and look at sailboats crisscrossing the big blue ocean. We both think San Francisco is a great city.”

It might not be a nudist colony (or a Cinnabon), but with its long history of proudly celebrating unconventional characters, San Francisco seems like the perfect venue to host Being Dead.

Snail Mail to host two days of music at Great American Music Hall as part of annual Noise Pop fest

Originally posted in the SF Examiner on February 21

If you are fortunate enough to run into Snail Mail singer-songwriter Lindsey Jordan in public these days, you’ll probably notice that she’s holding a camera or a phone to document the moment.

Jordan first burst upon the scene nearly a decade ago as a precocious wunderkind, releasing her debut EP, “Habit” as a 16-year-old. Her first full-length album — 2018’s “Lush,” a fully-formed collection of wistful indie-pop songs — landed her on endless music publication lists for album of the year.

Yet during those halcyon early days, when she was touring relentlessly and playing nonstop, Jordan had little time to reflect and appreciate the uniqueness of her situation. Now, she said, she has a renewed focus on capturing and cherishing the ephemera of her prodigious music career.

“I’m way more in like an archivist period in my life,” said Jordan, now 24. “I’m keeping passes and souvenirs from everywhere now. When everything first happened, it was just so much, so fast, and it wasn’t like I wasn’t grateful for everything, but it just didn’t really register. Now, I want to take a lot of pictures and, you know, keep wristbands and just try to appreciate everything a little more.”

Expect plenty of Polaroids to snap on March 1 and 2, when Snail Mail hosts two days of music at the Great American Music Hall. A festival-within-a-festival, the two shows are being billed as the second annual Valentine West, an event curated by Jordan featuring some of her favorite artists (the event title is a tribute to her sophomore album, “Valentine.”).

The two-day gathering will be a highlight of this year’s Noise Pop Music and Arts Festival, an annual weeklong-plus music event that takes place in multiple venues throughout the Bay Area.

This year’s Noise Pop lineup features legendary hip-hop group Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, lo-fi troubadour John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats, and avant-garde impresario Laetitia Sadier of the post-rock outfit Stereolab, among more than 100 other acts.

There will be plenty of Bay Area groups included in that lineup, including ubiquitous musician Stephen Steinbrink, who will open for Snail Mail on March 1, and Richmond district dream-poppers The Reds, Pink and Purples, who will take the stage March 2.

“We toured a little with Stephen when he was playing in [now-disbanded] Girlpool and just became massive fans of his work,” said Jordan. “I haven’t been following the San Francisco scene super closely, but every band I’ve heard from The City, I’ve really liked.”

Valentine West will be one of only a handful of live dates for Jordan and Snail Mail this year. Even though it’s been more than two years since the release of “Valentine,” Jordan said she is intent on keeping up a semi-regular touring schedule for Snail Mail (which is a multipiece ensemble live) to keep its performances tight, and also to ensure that the band stays on people’s peripheries in an age of ever-dwindling attention spans.

She’s also mindful of maintaining a healthy approach to her work. Following the runaway smash success of “Lush,” Jordan said she struggled with the overwhelming stress that accompanied the whirlwind life of a musician.

Despite those challenges and a lingering sense of outsized expectations entering her second album, Jordan managed to dazzle again with “Valentine,” which was released in 2021. Featuring slight changes to her vocal inflections, more emphasis on gauzy synth work (Jordan is a highly celebrated guitarist) and increasingly mature lyrical interplay, “Valentine” represented the next logical evolution of a talented artist.

“I’m really proud of that album, because I was just going through so many natural disasters in my life at the time,” Jordan said. “Coming off ‘Lush,’ I was putting myself through the wringer, asking myself, ‘How am I going to do this again?’ But eventually I was able to navigate things and I just feel so much better as a result of that experience.”

Jordan said she’s working on new material, although she doesn’t have a definitive timetable for the next Snail Mail record. She said she doesn’t want to push the album too far out, though, because she understands just how precious the opportunity she has at the moment.

“I started this thing off as this teenage pop project, which always made me worried that people’s attention would kind of fade away after the whole teenager thing kind of died down,” she said. “I was always nervous that I wouldn’t be able to come up with enough songs to keep us from fading into obscurity, so it’s been so important for me to keep myself out there and continue pushing myself as an artist.

“But I feel like I know what it takes to keep the Snail Mail ship running now. It’s kind of a rickety pirate ship at times, but we make it work.”

Adventurous art-rock outfit Mandy, Indiana to make its SF debut Friday

Originally posted in the SF Examiner on December 7, 2022

One of the great joys of listening to Mandy, Indiana’s debut full-length album, “I’ve Seen a Way,” is not knowing what comes next.

At one moment, the band is a sleek synth-pop group, writing tunes made for the dance floor. Later, it's a grimy industrial outfit, making music you’d hear in the dimly-lit underground clubs of Berlin or Paris. Then suddenly, it's a brainy and cerebral art-rock unit, creating thought-provoking tracks that challenge the notion of traditional song structures.

That dizzying combination is by choice. While every number shares one unifying commonality — an urgent, latent sense of angry defiance — the eclectic array of musical approaches was meant to push the boundaries of what kind of songs can and should correspond with another, according to the band’s founder, Scott Fair.

“A lot of album writing is kind of contrived — like, there are instances where people are telling themselves, ‘oh, we need a ballad here,’ or ‘now we need a fast song here,’ and there’s not much thought beyond that” Fair said. “We looked at this album as an opportunity to put the most jarring elements together to see if they could work.”

Despite the rebellious nature of the album, it has been a hit with fans and critics. Pitchfork recently named “I’ve Seen a Way” No. 20 on its list of the best releases of 2023, and the band just played a raucous sold-out show in Brooklyn. On Friday, it will make its San Francisco debut with a performance at the Brick and Mortar Music Hall.

The roots of Mandy, Indiana can be traced back to 2016, when Fair and vocalist Valentine Caulfield met in Manchester, England, while playing a show together with some of their former bands.

The two both expressed an affinity for each other’s musical styles, and when their respective groups came to an end, they decided to link up for a new creative endeavor. Despite, the transcontinental nature of Mandy, Indiana — Fair, synth player Simon Catling and drummer Alex Macdougall are based in Manchester, while the French-born Caulfield is located in Berlin — the band was able to collaborate on songs that blended their diffuse and discordant musical tastes.

After years of experimenting together, the band (whose name is inspired by the ’90s cult teen show, “Eerie, Indiana,” about another fictional town in the Midwest) released a five-song EP in 2021 that generated significant notice in hippish music circles. The group took the template set out by that EP — random bursts of violent noise combined with irrepressible synth beats — and expanded it to create “I’ve Seen A Way,” which came out in May.

The band is uncompromising in its artistic vision, as the songs of “I’ve Seen a Way” lack anything resembling a chorus or traditional song arrangements — and Caulfield made the conscious decision to sing all the vocals in French.

“I come from a classical music background, and I was always inspired by the opera,” Caulfield said. “And a lot of times those songs are being sung in German and Italian, so one really understands what they’re saying, but people very much appreciate that sense of performance. And I wanted to replicate that feeling, because this band is really a way for me to perform.”

Despite the growing buzz surrounding their debut full-length album, the various members of Mandy, Indiana all kept their day jobs, a sense of economic security that they said contributed to the adventurous artistic nature of their work.

“This has never been a full-time thing for us — it’s a creative outlet that lives alongside our regular lives,” said Fair. “I think that’s actually quite liberating because it means we’ve never sort of focused on how to make it more commercially appealing or viable. We use this as an escape to be as kind of out there as we want to be, which is where our tendencies really lie. That gives us a lot of creative fulfillment.”

The sequencing of “I’ve Seen A Way” keeps the listener perpetually alarmed. A cavernous, clanging post-rock number (“Mosaick”) is followed immediately with an auto-tuned dance anthem (“The Driving Rain (18)”); a jaunting and stomping punk track (“Pinking Shears”) is paired with a nocturnal, darkwave offering (“Injury Detail”).

Anyone expecting convention and uniformity in their music will be sorely disappointed in this album — and that’s fine with the members of Mandy, Indiana.

“When we were making this album, I thought there would be like, at most, 50 people who would listen, but they would absolutely love it,” said Caulfield. “So, it’s been quite weird seeing how well it’s been received. It gives me hope that there is a space out there for weirdos like us.”