Foreign Born, The Fresh and Onlys

Description

As Foreign Born is a quartet, I’m curious to hear how they manage to pull off their heavily overdubbed, deeply percussive sound in person. Matt Popieluch has an engaging, charismatic voice, but the songs on their newer album, Person To Person, all live and die by their clanging, chattering beats, which feature rototoms, cowbell, hand claps and snares for miles, all panned across the stereo spread.

Some critics have described Foreign Born as a band that writes “anthems,” but that’s a shortsighted assessment. Sure, Popieluch’s melodies have big, dramatic arcs, but their clatter and clang has much more in common with scrappy young upstarts like White Rabbits or Vampire Weekend than with the anthem-chasing likes of Snow Patrol or Coldplay. Again, it’s Garrett Ray’s drums and percussion that do it, turning feel-good loops like “Winter Games” into a New Orleans second-line stomp and “Blood Oranges” into a lurching, 11/4 Bahia beach party.

Foreign Born has local roots, as Popieluch and guitarist/co-writer Lewis Pesacov met as SFSU students. Shortly after graduation in 2003, the two moved to Los Angeles, and in interviews Popieluch has described the band’s pan-global style as being “very L.A.” By day, Popieluch is a groundskeeper in Coldwater Canyon Park in Beverly Hills, and the band recorded Person To Person in a rented house up in the Hollywood Hills.

Pesacov also helps lead the 12-person Afropop band Fool’s Gold, which recently wrapped up a residency at L.A.’s the Echo and has been touring with Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros. The Fool’s Gold influence figures heavily in Foreign Born’s “Early Warnings” (aka “Early Warnings in Uncharted Reaches”), where clean-toned, high life guitar runs bubble and descend along either side of Popieluch’s vocal melody.



The Fresh & Onlys have a scrappy, shaggy take on home-fi pop that reveals their love for the Mekons and for dusty four-track garage psych. Guitars chime and jangle in a grimy stew of reverb, and rhythms speed up and stammer as a fierce reminder that, for some, analog is still king and click tracks can be damned. The year may as well be 1977, and songs like “Grey-Eyed Girl” throb with a woozy, boozy romanticism. Pretend you’re hanging out in the woods after a high-school dance, and you’re halfway there.

We’ve seen some of these players before: Tim Cohen was one of the leaders of the band Black Fiction, whose orgy of percussion makes sense as a cousin to the Fresh & Onlys’ cassette-hiss accelerations; Shayde Sartin has done time with Kelley Stoltz, Citay and the Skygreen Leopards; Wymond Miles heads up the exploratory committee of Wymond & the Spirit Children. Musical pedigrees aside, the five F & O’s bring boatloads of that ineffable and elusive v-word to their songs (“vibe”), and have a work ethic that leads to prolific production. So far, they’ve spawned three albums, two seven-inch vinyl releases, and two cassettes in less than two years.

More Info

Link

http://www.myspace.com/foreignborn

Call

415.375.3370