Admiral Radley is Aaron Espinoza, Ariana Murray from Earlimart and Jason Lytle, Aaron Burtch from Grandaddy, and they were playing a free show yesterday in the ‘Also I like to rock’ series night at the Hammer museum. It was sure an appropriate location for the band, since the Hammer is precisely where they came up with their name after an unexpected meeting with an intriguing man who introduced himself as Admiral Radley,… at least this is what they say on their website! Oh I thought it was some sort of missed anagram with their names!
They played most of the songs from their self-titled album in front of a large crowd.
If you’re familiar with both bands and like what they do, you will have to make absolutely no efforts to enter into their musical world, it’s in total continuity with what Earlimart and Grandaddy have done and the harmonies will remind you the best of both. No real surprise so, but who need some when the music is already good as it is?
Aaron Espinoza took the central position on guitar, and sometimes bass, but he did not seem to act as if he was the front man of the band, showing all the time a lot of complicity with Jason Lytle who was on guitar and keyboard, and Ariana who was mostly on keyboard and on bass for certain songs, whereas Aaron Burtch was playing drums in the back of the stage. They all share the center of the stage at one point, each of them singing the lead vocals on some songs (except of course Burtch).
‘Ghosts of Syllables’ with which they opened the show, sounds like a direct escape from Earlimart’s album ‘Treble & Tremble’, with its nostalgic melody and its breezing ‘haaa haaa haaaaaaa’ in the chorus, they even talked about everybody having a broken heart, ‘a broken thing falling apart’, a recurrent theme in Treble.
They continued with ‘I Heart California’, a dysfunctional love affair with California, which was apparently written by Jason in his van outside the studio about 10 minutes before being recorded!
They did rock out hard with some fast songs such as ‘Sunburn Kids’, and funny lyrics, ‘Kids gettin’ sunburns no matter what the people say’.
If Aaron and Jason seem to share the singing and the songwriting, ‘The Thread’, a sad and slow waltz, was sung by Ariana alone with keyboard and minimal guitar, bass and drums, a very pleasant surprise between songs essentially performed by male voices.
‘GNDN’ or ‘I Left U Cuz I Luft U’, sung by Jason Lytle, were atmospheric, spacey songs which have the capacity to leave you with a nostalgic feeling, asking for more.
They also played the heavy and desperately addictive song, as its subject, ‘Everytime I’m With You’, a song they said they did not plan to do, and which figures on the posthumously released Sparkelhorse’s album ‘Dark night of the Soul’.
Here is the set list:
Ghosts of Syllables
I Heart California
GNDN
Ending of Me
The Thread
Sunburn Kids
Chingas in the West
I Left U Cuz I Luft U
Everytime I’m With You
Red Curbs
Long time friendship, undisputable skills, and not an ounce of pretentious intentions composed a perfect recipe for the fusion music of these two bands, which will release their album on July 13th. Go buy it! But meanwhile, you can always listen to the full album here: