Signs of Life 2008: Best Music
Leona Naess - "All is Fair"
the everybodyfields - "Worth Keeping"
Life, Camera, Action: Movie Hopping While Rome burns
Live at Paste: Whitley
Hometown: Austin, Texas
Fun Fact: Following its debut in New York, the band and 14 friends found an above-ground pool in Brooklyn and created a DIY water park, making whirlpools and a lazy river.
Why Its Worth Watching: Without much direction or intention, the band created an intriguing and cerebral EP that is finding its way to fans across the country and only teases what is to come.
For Fans Of: Midlake, !!!, Sparklehorse, Califone
In an antique shop somewhere in Texas, an obscure children’s book was looking for a new home. So was Evan Jacobs, a founding member of Midlake and a moonlighter of Polyphonic Spree. Jacobs and drummer Jason Freidrich were experimenting with some new sounds but didn’t have predefined expectations for their project. Taking its name from the book in the antique store, the project eventually became Tacks, the Boy Disaster, a band that, like the book, no one knew much about — even its members.
With its foundation in place in June 2005, Tacks, the Boy Disaster entered a battle of the bands competition in Austin, Texas. Before the battle though, the band would need a new bass player. Jacobs called upon old friend Alán Uribe to fill the role. “I teamed up with Evan and Jason and was really impressed,” recalls Uribe. “I hadn't really heard anything that Evan had been working on, except music that we had jammed on, and the time we were in Denton together at University of North Texas. And so, long story short, we won the battle of the bands and—”
“We got a pizza or something,” concludes Jacobs.
“Yeah,” Uribe agrees, laughing. “We got free parking in Downtown Austin.”
The band members quickly put their collective experience to work and, at the recommendation of Quinn McCarthy, added Nathan Stein as another vocalist and instrumentalist. “We had him come to rehearsals and learn the songs,” Jacobs sasy. “Things really seemed to snowball from there.”
Intending only to produce a three-song demo, the band started recording at Jacobs’ house and came out with the lush and cohesive seven-song EP, Oh, Beatrice. Opening song, “Frozen Feet,” offers up science fiction-esque sound waves and catchy hooks, while the dreary lyrics of “Paris” are complemented by the pitter-patters of piano and drums. If a group of musicians had been snatched from the planet in 1970, this is the postcard they would have sent from their travels around the galaxy — a mix of sounds both familiar and foreign. Stein explains this sonic amalgam as the product of their communal and experimental environment in Austin.
“It's interesting because it's more than just a bunch of indie rockers collaborating with each other,” Stein says. “I feel like there's a lot of overlap between lots of different scenes. Jason's been involved in a lot of free jazz, so there's a lot of cool experimental stuff that no one who's just into indie rock really knows about it. [It's] not just the old Austin sound. It’s really helping the creativity. The new generation.”
Check out Paste's October 4 to Watch artists below:
Anat Cohen
Cave Singers
Jesca Hoop
MGMT
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