Living in the moment
With the release of its Equal Vision Records debut, Outside We Are Fine, local modern rock band YouInSeries is taking its first steps toward national prominence.
The album, recorded with noted producer Brian McTernan (Hot Water Music, Thrice), features all the elements of the band's signature post-emo sound: soaring vocal harmonies, intricately woven lead-guitar lines, start-stop dynamics.
Watching YouInSeries' performance—and its fans' reactions—at a release party for Outside at Jillian's on Saturday, you could easily see what made Albany, New York-based Equal Vision—home to Armor for Sleep and Coheed & Cambria—sign the 3-year-old Las Vegas band.
Onstage, the quintet was a mesmerizing flurry. Lead singer Kyle Lobeck leapt from the stage to the top of his monitor cabinet and back, his black, stringy hair constantly whipping as his head twirled and body flailed. Drummer Cheyne Smith barely stayed on his throne, half-standing and bouncing while thrashing on his stripped-down, three-piece drum kit, impossibly keeping time. The rest of the band's members—guitarists Logan Lanning and Chris Davila and bassist Jacob Kirkegard—hardly ceased spinning and bouncing.
Half the audience sang along on every song. Kids—most of the fans in attendance were teens or preteens—pressed against the security barrier at the front of the stage, genuinely excited to see these five young men barely a few years older than the average audience member.
While touring the U.S. under its previous moniker, Brown Eyed Deception, the band developed a friendship with another young group, Tucson's Versus the Mirror, which had recently signed to Equal Vision.
"We played a show with Versus the Mirror," Lanning says. "Their A&R guy, Dan, gave us a card. At the time, I thought it was just because we were friends with the band, that they were just keeping us happy."
He thought wrong. Brown Eyed Deception signed with Equal Vision in November. "We had a bunch of labels interested in us," says Lanning. "But Equal Vision was the one we were focused on."
Lanning says the name change to YouInSeries was a long time coming. It comes from a paper he wrote in college, though he says it goes beyond the academic.
"The name is just a feeling that everybody has on an everyday basis," Lanning says. "I look too far forward, too far in the past. You start noticing everybody—how they act, how they talk. Nobody is embracing right now, this moment."
Old (school) is new again
Nothing against the 50 Cents of the world, but if Andreas Hale could smash a turntable over every person who conflated mainstream rap with real hip-hop, University Medical Center would be filled with head-trauma cases.
As it is, the hip-hop man about town would settle for filling the Icehouse Lounge on Friday nights with real fans, people who don't think 50 Cent is the greatest thing since sampling, who know Q Tip as a rapper and who can unravel the U.T.F.O. acronym. (Untouchable Force Organization; the legendary group was comprised of Doctor Ice, the Educated Rapper Kangol Kid and Mix Master Ice.) "Nobody in town is playing real hip-hop, the stuff I grew up on," Hale says.
So Hale did something about it. Enter Downtown Science. For the past month, he's turned a portion of the Icehouse into a house of real hip-hop.
What is real hip-hop, you ask? Distilled to its essence, it deftly mixes beats, rhymes and life. It's Chuck D, not 50 Cent. LL Cool J circa 1985, not the unimaginative He-Man he's become. It's A Tribe Called Quest, not these hip-hop crews with one marginally talented lead artist and a bunch of tagalongs. (Put to music, it's the difference between D4L's "Laffy Taffy," a puerile ode to women, and De La Soul's snarky, tongue-in-cheek "Buddy.")
Friday night's visit was a memory-lane affair for many of the folks. Most of the tunes were from hip-hop's golden era (1986-1994), including cuts from the likes of Kool Moe Dee and Big Daddy Kane. The new school (1994 to the present) represented the most: Brand Nubian, Gangstarr, A Tribe Called Quest. Hale says the old school (songs from 1979 to 1985) makes special guest appearances.
When the DJ plays two cuts from Nas' new-school classic Illmatic, a few in the mostly sedate crowd get up and bob their heads. There were no problems with energy two weeks ago when more than 400 came to check out Kanye West protégé Lupe Fiasco, a new-schooler with old-school soul. Verbal E, the vocalist for Vegas' most successful hip-hop export, The Chapter, hopes the crowds continue to get bigger.
"I really hope this catches on," Hale says. "We need this in Las Vegas."
Licked at the tanks
Feel like crying every time you dole out $60 to gas up your SUV? Imagine how Las Vegas native Mike Damron, frontman for I Can Lick Any Sonofabitch in the House, felt when rising gas prices forced the Portland-based band to scrap an entire West Coast tour recently.
"It was heartbreaking," Damron laments via telephone this week. "We've never had to cancel a tour in the five years we've been doing this. But we crunched the numbers and went back looking for more money, a little extra guaranteed, and no dice. It just wasn't gonna happen. We'd have lost our asses, drained our bank accounts and been totally screwed."
Among eight cancelled gigs were two slated for Las Vegas last Saturday: a Zia Record Exchange in-store and the group's first scheduled performance at Celebrity. "We've never done an in-store in Vegas before, so that was a chance to break new ground," Damron says. "And [Celebrity] was a very important show. There's a high changeover for rock venues in Vegas, and for a band on our level it's nice to have a new place we can actually play."
I Can Lick Any Sonofabitch travels in a 15-passenger Dodge van. Gas was going for around $3.20 a gallon in Portland when the band called off the tour, and 40-60 cents more in parts of California. "That I-5 corridor would have killed us," Damron says.
"We were touring when we invaded Afghanistan and when the Iraqi war started, and we were driving a little school bus that got, like, 11 miles to the gallon, but we still made money on tours," he says. "But we didn't see this coming. It's unbelievable how quickly it got this ridiculous. And it ain't goin' down. It's never goin' back down."
Damron says the band will look to book "tighter tours," with more shows packed closer together to cut down on driving distances. The group might also look to rock 'n' roll's past for a possible future solution.
"We're talking about doing an old Motown revue-style package tour with some of our brother bands," Damron explains. "Three bands, roll together in two vans, share the same backline, share the costs all the way across the board, and we roll like how Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper used to do it."
Flaspar flap update
Fans of local dance-punk outfit Flaspar surely were disappointed by recent news that the band is moving to Portland. Those fans might be crushed by the latest from the Flaspar camp: Singer and keyboardist Keil Corcoran has officially quit.
According to founder and guitarist Cody Brant, the reasons Corcoran gave to the Weekly two weeks ago for his hesitation to move to Portland didn't match up with the reasons he gave the rest of the band (Brant declined to elaborate). After a discussion about it, Corcoran decided to quit.
"We're still going to go on," Brant says, "and we can manage without Keil."
The remaining trio is leaving Las Vegas on June 26. Brant adds that if the band plays another show before departing, it would write new music for the gig. "It would probably sound different," he says.
Introducing: Sub Rosa
Nick Faiella has come a long way since his days as singer-guitarist for the McCarthys. He's gone from that band's juvenile, Blink 182-style pop-punk to the heartfelt emo of One More Weekend to the layered hard rock of his latest band, Sub Rosa. Along with former McCarthys guitarist Matt Ward and former One More Weekend drummer Pete Kraynak, Faiella made his Vegas homecoming on May 31 with Sub Rosa's first local performance, at the Rainbow Bar & Grill.
Playing to a modest but enthusiastic crowd, Sub Rosa showed off the music they've developed in their new LA home, a mix of the earnest themes of One More Weekend with a more varied, atmospheric sound. It isn't as commercial as One More Weekend, which built up a sizable local following, but it wouldn't sound out of place on Area 108. The band's half-hour set was occasionally rough (Adam Lewis from Fenix TX filled in on bass) but promising.
Sub Rosa's next local performance is June 28 at Celebrity.