Local Natives
Bands as sturdy as L.A.’s Local Natives don’t come around too often, and neither do debut albums as fully-realized as 2009’s Gorilla Manor. In our “Best New Music” era, where music listeners are constantly bombarded every five minutes with the “next big thing,” here was an indie-rock band that screamed longevity straight out of the gate, with three multi-instrumentalist songwriters (Kelcey Ayer, Taylor Rice, Ryan Hahn) and a tastefully dextrous drummer (Matt Frazier), all of whom wrote and played with a grace and subtlety of a band two decades into their career. In our flashy digital age, Gorilla Manor sounded like a thrillingly organic relic from another time: choral harmonies, artful arrangements, lyrics that felt lived-in and wise.
But even if their music sounded assured beyond its years, this was still a young band—one faced with that cliched dread of the sophomore slump. In the face of the obvious critical and commercial pressure, they could have taken the early Beatles approach, quickly cranking out another album to build on their blossoming momentum. Instead, they followed their instincts and took the high road.
“Any sort of pressure that we felt would be self-imposed,” says Kelcey Ayer. “In the end, we all would just love to do this for the rest of our lives and have a career like so many bands we look up to, so I think we all knew what it would mean to have a great second record or a shit second record and what that would mean for us going forward. We wanted to write something we were proud of, and we weren’t that concerned how people would react. It was less about what people want to hear and more about us trying to evolve. We didn’t want to repeat ourselves. I think we all really look up to artists who move in one direction or another between albums. So that’s definitely something we set out to do, but we didn’t want to put something out there before it was ready, so we wanted to take all the time we needed to do it right.”
And time they took: After touring the America and Europe (opening for high-profile acts like The National and Arcade Fire), the band retreated to an abandoned bungalow rehearsal space in Silver Lake, where they immersed themselves in sonic experimentation, testing out the various effects and juxtapositions that would define their forthcoming album. After initially tracking in Montreal, they enlisted the assistance of National guitarist-producer Aaron Dessner, who invited the band to his Brooklyn home, where they lived while tracking in his convenient studio-garage. The result is Hummingbird, their more varied, visceral, and vulnerable sophomore album.
“There were a number of other songs that didn’t make it on the record that were pretty cool,” Ayer says, “but if it didn’t have the fingerprint of each member, it wasn’t going to feel like a band song. But with that in mind, we always try to collaborate as soon as possible on an idea so that it can grow with two people and bring another person in and finish it with the four of us. It can happen in a number of ways—Ryan and Taylor and I write, in any incarnation of us, and Matt on drums will always try to see where it goes. It’s a bit of an argument process—it just takes us a long time to work on stuff and get on the same page because everyone’s so opinionated. And everyone’s involved—it’s not just one main songwriter writing everything. That can lead us to be frustrated sometimes, but I think everyone in the band is so focused on when the four of us can create something we all like and we all want, but it’s just hard to get there.”
Dessner’s presence on production was undeniable. Tracks like the jagged, tense rocker “Breakers” seem to draw influence from their mentor’s own band—but his influence was more vital as a sounding board, another opinionated voice to help resolve disputes and focus the sprawl of three songwriters and their grand musical ambitions.
“Most of all, we did look up to his opinion a lot,” Ayer says, “but what was cool about Aaron is that he could provide perspective outside of where our heads were at. We’d been writing songs for a year before he came into the mix, so it was cool for him to have one foot in on the creative process and help us sort things out, and one foot outside of it. He would just always say, ‘Don’t over-think.’ And we tend to do that, but he helped us step outside of that: ‘Don’t worry about that part; don’t worry about that line.’ It was nice to have that kind of help.”