09.02.13 — “Sunshine” by Young Prisms

Young Prisms

If you only listen to one song tonight, make it “Sunshine” by Young Prisms (2012, from the album In Between).
Young Prisms is a shoegaze/dream-pop/psychedelic five-piece band from San Francisco. I didn’t know anything about them until a few hours ago while I was wandering around some of my favorite places for discovering “new to me” stuff.

They’re on Kanine Records, which is a label that I admire quite a bit. They’re often compared to a bunch of This is That Song favorites in the shoegaze-y field. They’re a coed band. Even before I listened to a single note of their music, it was pretty easy to find a bunch of things to like about this band.

As it turns out, they’ve got a pretty wild story. After they’d released a couple of singles, and just before the release of their acclaimed debut record Friends For Now in 2011, Young Prisms went on a tour of the UK and they ended up getting stranded in London’s Heathrow Airport. For seven days, they were stuck there with a weather delay. People tend to get cranky in situations like that, and one member got something other than cranky. He attacked another member of the band with a knife and a leather belt. Jason Hendardy isn’t in the band anymore and you can probably do the maths on that one. He’s now in a band named Permanent Collection. Coincidentally, his girlfriend is the mastermind behind the very brilliant This Charming Charlie website, which takes old Peanuts comics and replaces the original text of the speech bubbles with Smiths lyrics. I digress.

Upon Hendardy’s departure, the core group of Matt Allen (guitar, vocals), Stefanie Hodapp (vocals), Jordan Silbert (drums) and Giovanni Betteo (bass, vocals) added a second girl to the mix in Ashley Thomas (guitar, vocals).

I’ve listened to a bunch of their songs today, and I’ve liked everything I’ve heard. Obviously, I don’t have any longstanding relationship with tonight’s song. It’s just one of the new ones.

“Sunshine” by Young Prisms

I love the reverb-drenched coed vocals and the Slowdive-y guitar effects. It’s like those parts of the day during late spring and early autumn when the sun is low and the shadows are long. And the birds are singing. And dewdrops are dropping. And everything is okay.

You can order In Between from the Kanine Records web shop here. Scroll down a bit to the Young Prisms section of the store and select your preferred format.

07.20.13 — “Two Hundred Grand” by Sunshine

Sunshine

If you only listen to one song today, make it “Two Hundred Grand” by Sunshine (2013, from the album Sunshine).

Sunshine is an indie rock/surf-pop/shoegaze/new wave five-piece band from Vancouver. They formed in 2011 and released their eponymous debut in February of 2013. The lead of the band is Trevor Risk, and after one of his previous bands fell apart, he gathered three long-time friends from the ashes of other bands to form Sunshine. They started working together, and they later added Gillian Damborg, who is a graphic designer by day and was about to become a choir singer by night. Their bio tells the rest of that chapter of the story:

That choir never saw Gillian, and it was definitely their loss. Gillian was the missing element; the vocalist who filled out frequencies to give (Sunshine) their full sound.

I’d never heard of this band until something arrived in the mailbag the other day. The email, which came from a PR firm, was a little on the strange side, and didn’t give much of a clue about Sunshine or why I would like them. However, I’ve gotten some great mailbag stuff from that firm, so I clicked on the video link, which I’ll include at the end of the post. The video is also very strange, and takes quite a while to get into the actual music. Thankfully, I had faith in the email, and I didn’t give up on the silliness of the video. I’m still not sold on the video, to be honest. The song, however, is great.

There’s bits of California surf-punk/garage pop. Bits of Brooklyn shoegaze. And the wonderful co-ed vocal harmonies in the chorus. There’s something about the total package of this song that reminds me of something that might have been on Slumberland in the mid-1990s.

Anyway, here’s the song:
“Two Hundred Grand” by Sunshine

Other songs on this very good album have a very sunny sound. There’s one –“Shanghaied”– that’s got miles of feedback and white noise, like something from Psychocandy. I love that song a lot, too, but today we’re here for “Two Hundred Grand”.

I love that the layers of feedback and sheer noise are subtle. In the second verse, there’s lots of wailing and squalling going on, but its sort of deep in the mix. It’s still mostly about the harmonies and the melody. And there’s something about all of this that reminds me of Bleeding Rainbow.

During the extended middle eight section, there’s a bit of tuned percussion, a ringing phone, and other fun stuff. Everybody knows how much I love the tuned percussion.

After you’ve listened to the song at least twice, you can do the extra credit assignment of watching the truly bizarre video:

One of the things included in the email that I got was “…if you’re into Jesus-loving adult baby fetishists”. In fact “Jesus-loving adult baby fetishist” was part of the subject line of the email.

After all the goofy stuff that happens in the video, the payoff is at the very end, during the credits, when the cop gets a dog as his new partner. Yeah. Remember all those cop-dog buddy movies from the 80s? K-9? Turner and Hooch? This is homage to that. I love the “conversation” he has with the dog at the end.

You can buy Sunshine in digital form from the band’s bandcamp page.