The Bowery Presents

The Bowery Ballroom upcoming shows

We Were Promised Jetpacks
official website
myspace
Following closely in the footsteps of The Twilight Sad and Frightened Rabbit, We Were Promised Jetpacks are yet another hugely talented young scottish band added to the FatCat roster. The 4-piece came to our attention when listening to some of the friends on the Frightened Rabbit Myspace page. Though recent months has seen the band tour the UK with their aforementioned friends, the four preceding years have consisted of local gigs in and around Glasgow and Edinburgh, allowing WWPJ to find their sound and hone their live performance.

Assembled in Edinburgh as high school friends in 2003, their first ever gig saw them winning their school's battle of the bands competition. Proceeding shows were after school performances around the city of Edinburgh which were well attended and fuelled the band with a hunger and ambition. If the nascent WWPJ aural template embraced light-footed compositions – few effects pedals, traditional song structures, clear-cut guitars - succeeding years have seen WWPJ soar aural heights and mine emotional depths in every sense: the band you will encounter now are a cacophonous tour de force: louder, wilder, avidly literate; fiercely melodic, yet eagerly restrained. Lyrics and vocal melodies come courtesy of Adam Thompson, everything else arises from the full group; Adam Thompson (Guitar/Vocals), Michael Palmer (Guitar), Sean Smith (Bass) and Darren Lackie (Drums).

Before even releasing a single, WWPJ have laid claim to some recent successes which bode well for the future of the band. A well recorded three-track demo was circulated and managed to pick up a KEXP track of the day over the pond, and plays on national stations in the UK were popping up on XFM, BBC and Q radio. Before the announcement of WWPJ signing to FatCat Records, a strong hint was sitting on the shelves across the UK in the form of inclusion on a recent FatCat sampler, mounted onto Plan B magazine.

A tour through September 2008 as main support for Frightened Rabbit garnered some great reviews for WWPJ. This being their first jaunt into England, healthy crowds arrived early on each evening due to the huge buzz in Scotland now filtering down south of the border. You could loosely pin some reference points onto WWPJ; the vocals reminiscent of Morrisy or Paul Banks (Interpol), clever guitar interplay similar to something you’d hear on a Billy Mahonie track, dynamically you could compare them to Mogwai, and generally Futureheads/Hot Club De Paris/Postcard/Fire Engine are all good markers.

With an album scheduled for May 2009, and singles around this, the forthcoming year of releases and touring is set to be a busy one for We Were Promised Jetpacks.
Bad Veins
official website
myspace
In late Fall 2008, Benjamin Davis and Sebastien Schultz of Bad Veins posted an entry on their blog titled “Best of Times, Worst of Times.”
The pre-Thanksgiving update brought good news. Their debut full-length was finally complete. It also detailed setbacks such as the theft of their faithful late 90’s Dodge Caravan during the Cincinnati blackout brought on by Hurricane Ike. As happy as they might have been about the record, they were still sad to see their companion gone. After all, their journey from 4-song demo to finished album was long, and the vehicle had been one of the few things they believed they could take for granted.

That trip began two years earlier with Davis at home playing around with orchestral arrangements in his attic. In little time some serious compositions began to materialize, and after playing one solo show, he quickly realized he needed something else to make the songs translate live. Enter Schultz, a French born but American raised drummer that had just seen his own band call it quits. Bad Veins, along with their unofficial third member Irene (a 1973 Pioneer reel to reel recorder responsible for playing back the lush background mixes), were now ready to hit the stage.

Word spread quickly out of Cincinnati; only a few weeks after their first practice they were playing a Gothamist showcase in New York, and their 4-song demo had a handful of labels expressing interest. A few months later they were one of the inaugural signings to RCRDLBL, and had released a “7 via New York’s Dovecote Records. At their first CMJ

(2007) they drew praise from the festival itself, and were nominated the “Break Out Artist” that year after wowing audiences at multiple gigs. “My personal favorite part of being in Bad Veins,” explains Davis, is coming in to a venue unknown to an indifferent crowd and a rude sound guy. “If we play our cards right, those people won’t blink our entire set, and that sound guy who didn’t care to even ask me my name will be blitzing me with questions about how two nerds made that happen.”

After a steady string of accomplishments that would make most any band proud, Bad Veins were riding high and were anxious to work on recording their debut full-length. Even though they’d earned many fans in the industry and the press, more time passed without a serious label deal materializing. Davis and Schultz began to realize that in a cash-strapped industry, they might have to take matters into their own hands. With bills to pay and other real life concerns at home however, it was unclear just how they’d finance the recording process on their own.

The task seemed daunting. But as Schultz notes, one of the things he and Davis have taken away from their experiences thus far is a need for endurance. As Schultz explains “it is important to remember that the only difference between those who ‘make it’ in music and those who don’t is endurance. So we keep going and going and hoping that some sort of success is just around the next bend.”

On April Fools Day 2008, another bright spot emerged as Davis received a phone call that anyone would be hard pressed to believe. Bad Veins had apparently been selected to receive the first ever Target Music Maker Award at an event in conjunction with the Tribecca Film Festival’s “Breaking The Band” showcase. It was a $10,000 grant for which they were hand picked by the influential music supervisor Alexandra Patsavas, founder of Chop Shop Music Supervision, responsible for the music behind “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Gossip Girl,”

“Roswell,” and many other critically acclaimed films and TV shows known for their sound-tracks. With the grant from the Music Maker award, and a couple of other sync licensing deals that materialized in the following months, Bad Veins found they had the resources needed to go through with recording and producing the album on their own.

The duo quickly got to work, and spent the summer crisscrossing the nation. They tracked orchestral arrangements and overdubs at home in Cincinnati, and Piano parts were recorded in a church in Covington, KY. In Richmond, VA, they spent late nights putting down drums, vocals, and a bit of everything else at Black Iris studios. When it came time to mix the record they did much of the work at the West Coast Black Iris location in Los Angeles.

On the record Bad Veins looked to find a balance between the sound of their original lo-fi demos, and the quality they were capable of achieving in the studio. The lush melodies flow over catchy guitar riffs, swelling ballads, and upbeat rhythms. For many of the lyrics Davis drew upon his own emotional struggles with feelings of isolation. He cites a particular line from the song “This Ending,”

which states ‘you’re not alone / but it’s hard to tell / cause everybody else hides so well.” Reflecting, he explains, “I tend to isolate myself and feel alone, even if I’m not.”

With final product in hand, Davis and Schultz are proud of what they’ve been able to accomplish on their own. “Knowing that despite the mundane day to day, we’re working towards something bigger,” has been a highlight explains Schultz. The next challenge at hand for Bad Veins is how and potentially with whom to release their debut. One thing is certain however. Seeing as they’ve come this far on their own, it doesn’t appear they’ll be quitting any time soon.
American Express — Are you a card member?

© 2010