Regardless of your familiarity with Black Joe Lewis (and his off-and-on band moniker The Honeybears), when his music plays, it commands attention. Whether it’s the beat, the horns, the power of his vocals or the power of the sum of all the parts, the music produced is not to be ignored.

Lewis first hit the scene around 2005, and it didn’t take long for the Austin, Texas, native to develop recognition both locally as well as nationwide. As a blues-rock act with a sprinkle of soul, Lewis is often compared to James Brown, while his own bio suggests roots in acts like Junior Kimbrough and The Gun Club. Just a few years after the band’s formation, they were touring nationally, opening for well-known acts such as Spoon. It wasn’t long before the band developed a large enough following to head out on their own.

More than a decade later, Lewis and his band have produced five full-length albums, had numerous television appearances, performed at most major festivals and have carved out a pretty solid career for themselves.

In the eyes of Lewis, success was unexpected.

“[I wouldn’t] quit my day job,” says Lewis in a phone interview with Submerge regarding his early days in music. “I didn’t think it was possible to make a living doing something like this. There’s a lot of people that see it coming, but I’ve always just had my own thing … hopefully I can keep doing it, and not have to go back to fucking making $10 an hour.”

Since Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears dropped their self-titled debut, they have consistently been releasing albums on a near-perfect two year basis. However, during the gap between the last couple of albums—Electric Slave and Backlash—something happened. For the first time in his music career, Lewis took a bit of a hiatus, and there was a four-year period without anything being released.

“We actually did record half of [Backlash] at one point and it took like a year to get back in there and do the rest,” explains Lewis. “We had a lot of transition going on in the band and I had a lot going on in my life and shit. I just needed to take a break. I was kind of considering what I wanted to keep doing … if I wanted to keep doing this for a living.”

After nearly a decade in the music industry, Lewis—whose career began after learning to play guitar while working at a pawn shop—was experiencing turmoil in both his personal and professional life, bringing everything to a stand-still. Ultimately, nothing could stop Lewis from returning to form to complete Backlash and head back out on the road.

“I just kind of started writing again, I guess,” says Lewis. “It’s easy to kind of get tired of what you are doing, forgetting about how cool it is sometimes. It’s a pretty good job, man. I make more money than I’ve ever done in any day job I’ve had. There’s a lot of factors but I just wanted to play music a lot. I mean, I never completely quit; it was really just the band that I played chose that gap. We just started doing it one day, and we got in there and finished it.”

A year later after the release of Backlash, Lewis is once again planning to buck the two-year pattern of the early day releases, having already finished another full-length album due out in September entitled The Difference Between Me and You. Lewis and company have already released three tracks from the album—“Culture Vulture” as well as “Face In the Scene” and “Girls on Bikes.”

“We actually have the whole thing. It seems like when you release shit now, you kind of spread it out,” says Lewis. “It’s more about the content, having that constantly coming out and pouring out than a full-length album nowadays, I think I’m going to be totally self-reliant on this one. I’m just going to do the full-length album, vinyl, as it is in its entirety; I’ll just be selling it at the shows. And when it comes out, I don’t know why but you could always go stream it or whatever. But, yeah, we’re putting these three out now and then I have three or four more coming out. We’re splitting them up in two separate [releases].

And the full-length will be out in September.”

The album will lead with “Culture Vulture,” Lewis’ take on the current political environment. Lewis is no stranger to using his voice to share a message; Backlash led with the feminist anthem “PTP” (or, Power to the Pussy). When it comes to speaking from the heart, Lewis does not make habit of holding back.

“A lot of the songs I’ve done are political, going all the way back to my first album,” explains Lewis. “You know, I don’t feel like a good debater or I’m not going to sit here and be a voice for anything because I’m not smart enough to argue with a lot of people. But, I know what I’m talking about, and doing the songs makes it easier to get the point across.”

In regards to “Culture Vulture,” Lewis takes on the likes of online trolls and tiki-torch carrying fascists, all amidst a catchy hook (“Ooh living in the West”) and a toe-tapping beat.

“I just wrote that about all this stuff that’s been going on lately,” says Lewis, “like people hating other groups of people you’ve never even met, and the powers that be are feeding the anger on both sides. People sit online all night reading this hate speech, and they’re like, ‘yeah, that’s how it is’ when they’ve never met a black person or a gay person or a white person. In the song it’s like porno for the agency … the powers that be just sitting there laughing at us, fighting amongst ourselves like idiots. So, I thought I would touch on that stuff.”

While Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears keep fans returning because of their funky beats and catchy hooks, it’s Lewis’ authenticity that seals the deal. The upcoming release, The Difference Between Me and You, got its title to illustrate Lewis’ claim to legitimacy.

“I was just trying to think of a record that’s like, ‘this is the real thing,’” says Lewis. “We think that we play the real blues; we’ve lived it. We’ve been around for a while, we’ve had a lot of things come and go, and we’ve had a lot of fucked-up situations on the way out. We’ve been at the way top of our game, we’ve been at the bottom. I feel like a lot of people suppose that they can talk. Like hip-hop now, at this point … when I was growing up, in order to take a rapper seriously, you had to be street and live it or whatever. Now it’s just … like, Drake’s an ex-Disney child actor, and I listened to [A$AP] Ferg and it turns out he was a rich kid.

“The difference between me and you is I actually lived this shit.”

Shake your moneymaker with Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears Monday, Sept. 17, 2018, at Harlow’s (2708 J St.). Tickets are $18 in advance and $20 at the door, and the show is for those 21 and over. Paul Cherry kicks things off at 8 p.m. when the show begins, and doors are at 7. Check out Blackjoelewis.com for more info!

**This piece first appeared in print on pages 20 – 21 of issue #273 (Aug. 29 – Sept. 12, 2018)**

Best Fwends, WHATEVAWHATEVAWHATEVA, Loch Lomand
Luigi’s Fungarden “¢ Nov. 11-13, 2009
Words by Vincent Girimonte

Last week, I ended up at Luigi’s Slice three consecutive nights, and it has culminated into the following article which will hopefully explain why a grown man is still frequenting pizza parlors by himself.

Wednesday
Exactly one other person and I went to Luigi’s to see Texas electro-punks Best Fwends. Two people still don’t make a crowd, apparently, and the show was cancelled, officially ruining an otherwise great laundry day. The Fwends gave me their drink tickets, though, and Luigi’s gave me a free slice of pie, which incidentally explains why I was so confused about paying on Thursday.

Thursday
I sauntered over to the Press Club to watch the fighting Singletarys not lose to the Bears. Jay Cutler hit more 49ers than did Alex Smith, but for some reason the outcome was close enough to merit a few yelps—a terrible game, by any measure. There I met two acquaintances from high school and three hours later we were asking why our Luigi’s slices actually cost money—like physical money—and why so much of it. Upon leaving, a couple of 300-pound men gave us a shoulder-charge. Retaliation was postponed.

Friday
Loch Lomond is a folk group from Portland, Ore. and they look and sound like a folk group from Portland, despite songwriter/frontman Ritchie Young, a dainty firecracker of a folksinger who wore a cherry-red shirt and a slick haircut. Being the symbolism junkie that I am, this image more or less reflects how I feel about Loch Lomond: one bright spot.

At certain points, I was willing to describe the sextet as perfectly adequate folk/pop, which is usually about as far as I go into admitting boredom. Long-winded meandering tunes, most off their new Night Bats EP, left me craving either a larger venue or fewer musicians. Triple harmonies, melodies tickling all over, “tuning parties” in between songs—Loch Lomond is no doubt a band of seasoned musicians but perhaps it doesn’t need to be, at least for my taste. The catchier numbers, such as “Blue Lead Fences” and “Field Report” seemed to be more brass tacks, mariner songs, and the ones that ultimately kept me awake.

It was a splendid effort, though, all passive-aggression aside. And Young—a diminutive, Annie Lennox-type with all the chops and panache you might expect from such a creature—can sell the symphonic nature of his band even if his songs sometimes do not. Each number seemed to require a different tone; he was as capable in providing the tiniest falsetto, as he was the stormy, operatic boom. As he became anecdotal between tracks, nobody was surprised to learn he was a precocious little shit in his childhood, which made him all the more endearing and explained so much regarding Loch Lomond’s overly ambitious set.

Gym Class Heroes’ Disashi Lumumba-Kasongo on His Quiet Life in the Spotlight

Often the inception story of Gym Class Heroes revolves around its founding members, drummer Matt McGinley and frontman Travis McCoy. It’s the fabled story of high school friends who met in gym class, started a band and kept at it despite rotating members, until they received the Pete Wentz seal of approval. They started the band, so they get the fame, right? Read the biography on the Gym Class Heroes Web site and it’s McCoy and McGinley who won the MTV Best New Artist award.

Before their breakthrough record Cupid’s Chokehold had teenyboppers singing a Supertramp melody while their parents suffered acid flashbacks, Gym Class Heroes was down a guitarist. The band was in upstate New York, Ithaca to be exact, recording with Patrick Stump of Fall Out Boy. The missing piece was in town as well, attending Cornell University, but fussy with the academia status quo.

Disashi Lumumba-Kasongo has a name that challenges promoters, reporters, industry execs and fans alike, to a point that he tries to make them more comfortable by shortening it to “Sashi.” His name derives from the African Congo. “I’ve heard so many variations of my name,” he said. “Luckily I had plenty of practice with explaining my name growing up that when I joined a band I was used to it. Lately though, I’ve overheard people using my name in conversations and it always surprises me when they pronounce it or spell it correctly.” But, do not call him “D.” “That’s the only thing that irks me,” he said. “There was this one lady who couldn’t get my name and said, ‘I’m going to call you D.’ I feel like that’s disrespectful because she decided to just not put the effort in.”

Two years prior to joining GCH, guitarist Disashi’s pop-punk band played a show with his future band mates, unaware that the impression he made that day would lead to a life-changing phone call. “I was no longer playing regular shows with that band when [Gym Class Heroes] called,” Disashi said. On the same day he joined the band in the studio, groundwork for Cupid’s Chokehold was laid down. GCH previously spent several stints on Warped Tours and built a respectable fan base in upstate New York, but the inclusion of Disashi on guitar seems tantamount to the pop success it would achieve with one song.

With McCoy rapping and singing lead vocals, GCH was already pushing rap/rock boundaries, causing headaches for record store clerks trying to categorize their albums. The band’s aversion to narrowing its scope or ruling out genre influences forced Disashi to jog his memory for inspiration. “Learning how to use the different styles I had learned over the years was the biggest challenge,” he said. His previous band played with a heavier edge. Disashi said he had to learn how to play “clean guitar.”

Life speeds up when you have a hit single. Disashi admits it’s a welcome change, one of those good problems, to be constantly touring in front of hundreds to thousands of fans. But with the release of GCH’s fourth studio album, The Quilt, attention toward the band was less about the music, more about McCoy’s affairs.

With the spotlight fixed on McCoy and his breakup with pop star Katy Perry, the rest of the band was free to create without distractions. “Whether it’s people I’m meeting for the first time or people I haven’t seen in a while, they’ll be like, ‘Oh, I’m surprised you’re down to earth,’ or say things like that,” he said. “They do expect you to act a certain way, but that’s the overall perspective of how this industry works.”

Outside of GCH, Disashi quietly works on his solo project Soul. Soul is still in the bedroom stages, with Disashi acting as a one-man band. But Soul is not a backup plan should GCH dissolve; instead, his solo work suffers from a commitment to his band mates. Two of The Quilt‘s most critically acclaimed songs were originally meant for his Soul project, but once McCoy heard “Live a Little” and “No Place to Run” Disashi was coaxed into giving up two of his coveted babies. “At the time that I wrote those songs, they were my songs,” he said. “It was tough to give them up once Travis heard them, but it’s a cool thing that I was able to share these special songs with my band and play them every night in front of our fans.”

In reviews, The Quilt is often negatively critiqued for a lack of cohesive flow as purely hip-hop tracks featuring Busta Rhymes and The Dream, drenched in bravado and deviancy, are followed by power pop songs of urgency. “One thing that is challenging in working with other producers is we have our own thing going,” he said. “But I do think when we focus as a core group, it’s when we’re at our best.” While the singles that broke GCH into the mainstream were not fully appreciated until a year and an album late, the marginal success of the The Quilt and its singles, coupled with Disashi expressing no plans to push another single, suggests a band ready to move on.

My talk with Disashi interrupted a pre-show nap in Connecticut, but after some light conversation he snapped out of his groggy state to discuss the group’s plans after its college tour. “For the next record we’ve already started writing together,” Disashi said. “It was cool to have some other producers on the last record and have songs I had written myself. It was cool to go all different types of places, but with this next one the best way to start is writing songs together, as a band.”

Between tours, GCH retreats to where it all started, upstate New York, living together, demoing and writing new material in an old church basement. Disashi described the output thus far as “organic.” He said they hope to have next record out by mid-2010, but Disashi is not making a concrete quote on that due date. Along with rejuvenating his hit-making band, he’s pushing his Soul project out of the bedroom and onto the stage. Disashi said he has a drummer ready to go, but is still filling out the other members.

Returning to his almost-alma mater, Disashi often crosses paths with former Cornell classmates, most of whom are now alumni. Four years into Cornell, he left to be a full-time musician. When he runs into old college friends, Disashi notices the hesitancy of approval in his aberrant rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle over graduating from a prestigious Ivy League university, but it doesn’t faze him. He has an MTV Best New Artist trophy to acquit him of regret. “When we won the VMAs it was like the whole world was watching us gain acknowledgement,” he said. “Now, everyone can see I’m not just goofing off. Well, I have been, but now I’ve been rewarded for the band.”

Recently, Gym Class Heroes played as backing band for Onyx and DMX for the VH1 Hip Hop Honors ceremony. “DMX introduced me to hip-hop when I was younger, so it was a trip to meet him,” he said. Most would not think DMX, who barks when he raps, could be described as polite, but Disashi said it with earnest that each time they practiced with DMX, he made a point to greet each band member. “The most striking thing was rehearsing for the show,” he said. “There were only eight or so people there, but his energy level, you would have thought he was playing for thousands at Madison Square Garden.”

During the rehearsals, Disashi realized he needed batteries from the Target across the street. He strolled into the store conscious of his incognito, comforted by it. Minutes prior to his errand, he was playing alongside with living legends of hip-hop, but in Target he’s still another casual shopper in need of batteries. “It was funny because I was thinking about how much I value the freedom to be out and not get bombarded,” he said. “But as I was leaving the store, a guy came up to me and said, ‘Hey, I know who you are.'”

The Sweet Brag Tour w/ The Devil Wears Prada, A Day to Remember, Sky Eats Airplane, Emarosa
Club Retro, Orangevale | April 19, 2009
Words and Photos By Russsell Wonsley

Club Retro has not seen or felt such a concert for sometime. Before the show, a line of kids wrapped around the building and then continued onto the back of the church’s property. All of them to soon witness the chaos that would take place within the walls of the venue. Crammed against the newly added barriers, the kids waited for the show to begin.

There was almost a nervous chatter among the crowd of people. No one knew what to expect of such a dream team lineup the Sweet Brag Tour had to offer. Suddenly the lights dimmed, and the men of Emarosa took the stage. Leading the group with his recognizable voice, Jonny Craig started off the show with a great quality performance. Warming the crowd with songs such as “The Past Should Stay Dead” and leaving them wanting more with the song “Set It Off Like Napalm.”

Next to take the stage was the electronic-powered band Sky Eats Airplane. The band brought with them more of a hardcore sound that would continue into the rest of the night. With high stage jumps, Jerry Roush got the kids to start moving within the depths of the pit.

A Day to Remember were next to the stage for an anticipated performance.
They dropped their third album (and fourth overall) with Victory Records, Homesick, just about a month ago. It seemed as though the crowd had already caught on to the many gang vocals that the record contained. With beach balls flying into the crowd, ADTR took the stage playing the first song off the new album “The Downfall of Us All.” Jeremy McKinnon (vocalist) took control of Club Retro with his catchy lyrics and overwhelming stage presence. In addition to new material, the band pleased the crowd with classic hits such as “A Plot to Bomb the Panhandler” and “Why Walk on Water When We Have Boats.” Nearing the end of their set, Club Retro had become a sauna of sweaty teenagers.

Exhausted from what ADTR had just thrown down, the bustle of crew members preparing the stage for what everyone had gathered for beckoned the audience to reach back for more energy.

It looked as though the new label has been taking care of The Devil Wears Prada, as the stage was littered with professional lighting. The set opened with just purple ultra violent lights that casted an almost solid column of light up into the ceiling. The scene was chilling, as the battle was about to break out between good and evil.

It all began out of nowhere. The Devil Wears Prada took the stage and without wasting a second Mike Hranica pulsed the crowd with his heroic growls; he held the energy of the stage in the center. To his left fellow gutarist Jeremy DePoyster sweetened the songs with his soft harmonizing choruses. You could feel the whole band in tune with one another as they pummeled the venue with breakdowns and grueling guitar riffs. Playing every hit song from both records, the band even treated Club Retro to a new song from their upcoming album With Roots Above and Branches Below titled “Dez Moines.” Fans stretched out to the stage hoping that this would bring them closer to the madness.

Also check out our interview with The Devil Wears Prada

The Devil You Know

Two nights in New York City have taken its toll on Jeremy DePoyster. America’s largest city is a lot to take in for new visitors and longtime residents alike, but for a member of a band whose star is on the rise, New York’s hectic pace can reach exhausting levels. DePoyster, guitarist/vocalist for Dayton, Ohio’s The Devil Wears Prada, has been shuffled from meet-and-greets to photo shoots to interviews, not to mention playing two shows at The Fillmore at Irving Plaza, which he says were “probably the craziest New York shows we’ve had.” DePoyster doesn’t mind all the fuss, though.
“I’d still take this over any other job,” he says through intermittent yawns, early in the morning after the band’s second show.

Submerge rustled DePoyster out of bed for the following interview.

What did tuning lower do for your songwriting?
We could still write our same style and still do our same thing, but it had a different feel to it, just because we’re not used to playing in that tuning. Playing our same style of things and our same style of writing in a different tuning, it added a different feel to even the singing parts and everything like that. It was heavier.

Do you think it opened you up creatively?
Yeah, definitely.

Was there a particular song that was really benefited by using the lower tones?
There were two songs, I’d say, “Assistant to the Regional Manager” and “Wapakalypse,” that would have suffered if they weren’t in that lower tuning because of the style of the riffs and stuff like that. They were definitely helped by being in that lower tuning. There was this other song that we did that had this really epic singing part at the end of it that I thought was cool just because it was in a different tuning with different chords than we would normally play. I could do some different stuff with it, and if we had done 10 or 11 more songs in drop-D, it would have just been too monotonous. It would have been just like Plagues.

I read a quote by someone in the band that said the new album is “more mechanical” than what you’ve released before. Would you agree with that?
I don’t know who said that. I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s more mechanical. Maybe they meant better structured because I think we’ve become better songwriters together than our last two records. Plagues was a big step forward in our songwriting, but I think this one even more so. The songs flow better through out. Other than going into some weird tempos and things like that. We’ve done that before, and that was cool, but it’s not really what we want to do now. We want to write better songs and not just breakdowns and big metal riffs and stuff like that. I think it [With Roots”¦] is easier to listen to and it’s more catchy because they flow so well all the way through. My favorite songs on the last record were songs like “HTML”¦” and “Hey John”¦” and stuff like that, because they flowed pretty fluidly throughout the song. We tried to do that with all the songs on this record.

So it’s less about seeing how much you could cram into one song than it is making the songs cleaner?
Yeah, exactly, and I think we were a lot more apt to, like, if it didn’t make sense in the context of the song, we would just scrap it. As opposed to before, we would be like, “What should we play here, this weird little thing? Yeah, let’s do that. Why not?” This time we were stricter on what made the cut and what didn’t.

I was reading the lyrics for “Dez Moines,” and one of the lines goes, “Profit zero, achievement zero.” I know the band’s name deals with materialism, and that seems to work into that song in particular, as well as being a recurring theme within the band. Do you see materialism as one of the biggest problems this generation has to overcome?
I don’t even know if it’s necessarily this generation. It’s just one of those things where”¦well, it’s hard to say. As a Christian band, we’re working for God first. I know myself, in my own personal life, it’s easy to get wrapped up in other things, whether it’s guitars or video games. I collect DVDs and stuff like that, but none of that stuff really matters in the end of it, by any perspective. It’s not important. It’s just something that’s always been important to us, and Mike [Hranica, vocals] really dove into that again lyrically.

Given what you just said, are any of the songs on the new record inspired by the current financial situation? What’s your take on that?
Reading through the lyrics, I wouldn’t say any of the songs are inspired by the financial situation. We haven’t really talked or thought about that whole business too much. I know we have one political song, but it’s a little bit different than that. It’s obviously a scary time for everybody. Even before all this crap happened, it’s been really hard to sell records, because everyone downloads, and the labels are suffering, and the bands aren’t selling as many records. Someone’s record just came out, I don’t know, Kelly Clarkson or something, and it only sold 250,000 copies the first week, which is insane that she would only do that many, where if it was three years ago, she would have done a million or something. It hasn’t really affected us, because we still have a lot of people coming to shows. We’re really lucky in that. Obviously, it sucks. Industries are crashing—the auto industry and all that stuff—and that’s not cool.

You’re headed out on the Warped Tour, and I guess it’s a nature of the beast, but there’s a lot of marketing that goes on during the tour, in the tents between the stages, does the commercial aspect of the tour bother you at all?
Not really. We’re not a punk rock band or anything. It doesn’t really matter to me, I guess. I come from a different background. I used to go to Warped Tour when it was in the new shape of things—Fall Out Boy and all those bands—and I was really into it. I was telling someone the other day that Kevin Lyman is a genius, and he’s done a really good job of keeping the tour current. He could have kept it all old punk bands just to please people and appease people, but he hasn’t really done that. He still brings back those bands every year, but he also brings in a lot of the new things. We didn’t know what to expect going into it. We thought it was either a pop-punk tour or a punk rock tour, but we went in on the first day and had a huge crowd and that happened the entire tour—the craziest shows we ever played. He does a really good job of building a broad package that still does really well.

You already mentioned that you and the members of the band have strong Christian beliefs, but many bands in the metal genre have a decidedly anti-Christian message. Did you listen to a lot of metal growing up, and why did you choose this form of expression?
Yeah, I definitely listened to a lot of metal growing up—and even more so now. I love Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Slayer, all that good stuff. Musically, I love those bands. I don’t necessarily agree with what they say, but I can appreciate the music. I think the same thing applies to us. I mean, obviously we’re a Christian band, but we’re not preaching. We’re not shoving things down people’s throats. If they do come from a metal background, and they’re really anti-Christian or whatever, I still think they can find something in the music that they like.


Also read The Devil Wears Prada at Club Retro in Orangevale on April 19

Music & Games Night : In Leaves, Owltrain & Musical Charis

Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Marilyn’s On K, Sacramento

Sometimes when bands break up and members go their separate ways to form new groups, their fans are treated to twice the amount of music. An obvious example would be The Mars Volta and Sparta rising from the ashes of At the Drive In’s breakup in 2001. Such was the case when Sacramento-based pop-rock band Self Against City imploded in late ’08, catapulting the members into two different groups that would later come to be known as Musical Charis and Owltrain. It wasn’t the nastiest of breakups, but it surely wasn’t the prettiest either. On Wednesday, March 18 the split factions of what was once Self Against City were brought together at Marilyn’s on K. Would there be fireworks?

Musical Charis took the stage first. The two core members of the group are Blake Abbey (formerly of Self Against City) and Jessie Brune (also a very prominent local singer/songwriter); throughout their set, different musicians joined them and played various instruments. After somewhat of a slow start, the band really started to pick things up when their drummer joined in on the third song, giving the audience something more to groove to.

Highlights of the set included Abbey talking a whole bunch of crap about his former bandmates in the room (awkward yet hilarious) and the performances of crowd favorites “The Life,” “Anatomy” and their set closer “Baby Blue.” All in all, it was a great musical performance that showcased the musicians’ many talents from Abbey and Brune’s beautiful vocal harmonies to their great songwriting skills. Their set surely proved to all in attendance that Musical Charis is a force to be reckoned with in the music scene today. Look for their late May release of Electra Church Bells via JMB Records.

Next up was Owltrain, who with their more typical rock-band setup (two guitars, bass, keys, drums), were able to really up the level of energy in the room, with a sound reminiscent of bands like Mute Math, Minus the Bear, Coldplay and Radiohead.

The band’s most notable feature was the incredible performance of Owltrain’s drummer, Justin Barnes. The guy was a machine, and he looked so at home behind his kit it would make any percussionist want to practice more. (Even then they still probably wouldn’t have the chops this guy does.)

Barnes may have been the standout member of the group, but that doesn’t mean the other members didn’t shine as well. Jeffery LaTour, who played primarily guitar and some keys but sang backup vocals as well, made great use of his effects pedals and looped samples. He also was singing through what I later learned was some type of old telephone, rigged up as a microphone, which served as a very unique, lo-fi filter for his soaring voice. Jack Matranga, the group’s lead singer who also switched between guitar and bass, played some rather technical parts on bass and guitar while maintaining his breath and pitch control quite well. Finally, Danny Cocke, who mostly played bass but wound up with a guitar in his hands for a few songs, rounded out their sound perfectly with his effortless playing. The biggest crowd pleasers were “Harmony Cannons,” “Green Key,” and the set closer, “1984,” which included an incredible buildup at the end where sounds were layered upon one another until it came to an abrupt end, leaving the crowd mesmerized.

Rounding out the night was In Leaves, a brand new band to hit the Sacramento scene. Considering this was only their second performance as a full band, In Leaves was quite impressive and loud—very loud. With their amps set to 11, In Leaves proceeded to make everyone in the room’s ears bleed, but in a good way. In between songs, lead singer JJ Dunlap’s voice sounded destroyed, but during the songs he was great, proving how much of a trooper he really is. The band really started to shine when Dunlap dropped his guitar (not literally) and became more of an energetic frontman with his long shaggy hair in his face, a hole in his jeans and tambourine in hand as he furiously danced around the stage. His vocal style is similar to that of Caleb Followill of the popular band Kings of Leon—so watch out KWOD, you might be spinning In Leaves soon.

At the end of their very rockin’ set, In Leaves walked off stage with the microphone swinging from the rafters and feedback from the bass amp permeating through the room. The sound guy had a “WTF?” look on his face and everyone else was making sure they weren’t deaf. Hearing is overrated anyways.

Luckily, the only fireworks all night were of the musical variety, Abbey’s comments notwithstanding. Breaking up can be hard to do.

What’s More American Than Apple Pie?

Sacramento-based Izabella is set to have their CD release party for their third album, Drugs and Apple Pie, at Marilyn’s On K April 11, 2009. Politically inspired, the album is a product of the election, and a reflection of the supposed positive change that some feel has yet to materialize in the fledgling Obama administration. Now playing keys for Izabella, Jeff Coleman spent last campaign season as a deputy field director for Obama in New Mexico.

“The album is a comment on the bullshit we’ve all been through the last eight years,” lead guitarist Sean Lehe said from a thrift store in Provost, Utah, where he shopped for a Mad Hatter costume for the Alice in Wonderland-themed gig they had in Boise the next night. This is their third album in just more than two years, a “reflection of a young band trying to pull it together in today’s day and age,” Lehe said.

Drugs and Apple Pie comes from the lyrics in the second song on the album, “Bittersweets,” and though the album has political undertones, there is plenty of the band’s specialty—jam rock fused with funk, reggae, bluegrass and jazz. Or, “Norcal rock,” as Lehe described it.

While four of the group’s members claim Sacramento as home, another is from Chicago and the other from San Luis Obispo. “The six of us have a lot of history together,” Lehe said. “We sort of coalesced out of a number of different bands.”

And their musical style reflects that. At shows, they’ll cover the Beatles, Dylan, 2Pac and Ginuwine. They’re influenced by what Lehe calls “pop music from the last 40 years” such as Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Led Zeppelin, Phish and the Grateful Dead.

To pull the album together, Izabella spent two weeks in early February recording in Cotati at Prairie Sun Studio. There, the six-piece found their “natural element,” and they worked with producer and engineer Oz Fritz, who’s worked with greats like Tom Waits, Iggy Pop, The Ramones, Herbie Hancock and countless other musicians.

“Everything was really green in Cotati,” Lehe said, explaining the band’s name, Izabella, “represents the feminine energy of creation—not to sound like a dorky-ass hippie.”

Feminine energy of creation? Izabella is also the name of a Jimi Hendrix song, but these guys are some dorky-ass hippies, and they know it. “Yeah, we don’t mind tie-dyes, and we like to watch girls’ hips when they hula-hoop,” Lehe said.

When they finished in Cotati, the band hopped in the Portabella, a 40-foot 1988 MCI Bus, for their tour of the West. They’ve meandered down the coastline and through the Rocky Mountains, playing Denver for St. Patty’s Day and then Boise. Their tour will take them to Sparks, Nev., then on to Chico and finally to Sacramento for the release of Drugs and Apple Pie, where Seattle’s Flowmotion will open for them. The band is confident Drugs and Apple Pie will bring success.

“We’re dropping one of the hottest records a Sac band has dropped,” Lehe said. “And I’ve lived in Sac a long time, so I can say that with confidence.”