The big rock boom of new hipsters Everest was on show at Amoeba in LA yesterday night and they drew a rather large crowd in the popular record store. Everest is a quintet, which was formed in 2005 by Russell Pollard.
From Sebadoh fame, to Folk Implosion credit, Pollard was half of Alaska! in the late 90’s, before going back to writing the music he really like with Everest. The story says that some of their demos made their way to Neil Young who attended their live show in a tiny venue in Park City, Utah, for the Sundance Film Festival. Then, it happened very quickly, Everest’s debut album ‘Ghost Notes’ was released on Neil Young-affiliated Vapor Records and they toured with Wilco, My Morning Jacket, Death Cab for Cutie, Minus the Bear, and Neil Young.
‘Ghost Notes’ was recorded at Elliott Smith’s former New Monkey Studio in LA (which one of Everest guitar player, Joel Graves, bought in 2004 with a friend), and ‘On Approach’, their second album, released a month ago, was mixed by Rob Schnapf (Elliott Smith, The Vines, Nine Black Alps, Powderfinger, Kevin Devine, Islands) who was also involved in Beck’s early beginning.
When all you have heard from a band is a few tracks on their myspace page, when you’re a total virgin, seeing the band live could be love at the first sound or total dislike and aversion. Or it could be something more perverse, just right in the middle: you don’t know exactly what to do with this mixture of notes, these layers of sounds you have just witnessed. No hate, no love, and that’s the worst situation because there is no passion involved, you have listened till the end, but there is not much left in your brain, the memories of the melodies are fuzzy, the echo in your ears almost gone. Everest is not bad at all, but their performance did not give me the real desire to buy their album, how do you explain this?
Yet, they produce a large and opulent sound, their songs have at time some melancholic riffs, and overall they seem to have a 1970s-influenced pop sound. With three guitars, a bass and a keyboard on some songs, they create an expansive folk-rock music, but it is their excellent drummer, Davey Latter (who has played with many Silver Lake bands like Great Northern, Earlimart, Slidell) who is a big part of their rather loud sound.
They did not play ‘Rebels in The Roses’ from their first album, one of the only songs I knew and a melancholic tune that reminds me Earlimart’s work. Rather they have experimented with the songs of ‘On approach’, their new album. Several songs are built with a relatively slow beginning followed by a loud musical explosion during which guitar and bass players turn to the drummer to jam a few minutes, a stereotyped and predictable move, but the public seemed to enjoy. Sometimes aggressive and loud, sometimes quiet and acoustic, their songs seem to be anchored in the roots of rock and roll, what is called Americana, but probably a Californian Americana.
At one point they tried (and somewhat succeeded) to make the public participate on some songs by encouraging the hand clapping, something I have never liked.
‘Let go’, the last and the only song I was able to recognize, was well received by people and could very well be a radio hit with its steady beat and its same melancholic guitar line throughout the song.
I don’t have much to say about the lyrics since the vocals were so buried in the guitars I could not understand anything, but they have been described as poetic and countrified.
Because of the soaring guitar effects, they are as closed as it gets to classic rock for 2010: no real surprise, no real disappointment, just good craftsmanship and impeccable live execution, but this is the ‘just’ that may be a problem for some.