Do you want flowers in your hair and feel happy? Because you may be done with all the depressive music that you have listened to lately, and you want these sweet carefree pop harmonies, the ones you used to listen to in the late 60’s, early 70’s.
The LA trio Silver Phial will just bring all this to you, with their psychedelic retro folk-pop sound and vocal harmonies that will transport you a few decades back in time.
When I was listening to them for the first time on Friday night, I kept thinking, the Byrds? the Mamas and the Papas? The Carpenters? May be a little bit of all the above, as their beautiful and sensible harmonies definitively would fit in the same category. And they could not be clearer about their influences, their band name is obviously an homage to the Gene Clark’s song ‘From a silver phial’, and they cover an Emitt Rhodes’s song ‘The Better Side of Life’ as well as the classic Carly Simon’s ‘Nobody does it better’.
They were playing at the Tribal café, a very cool place I did not know in Echo Park, in the middle of Filipinotown, where people were enjoying all kind of good organic food and fresh-squeezed juices, while a wonderful odor coming from the kitchen kept distracting me from the music.
The song ‘Ohio’ had this 70’s vibe, with bright guitars, soft drums and uplifting chorus sung by powerful female-male vocal harmonies; just like ‘Aeronautique’ with voices even more aerial that wanted to take to the sky like the song lyrics say, a song that could work a little bit like a restrained companion of the ‘Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In’, but releasing this kind of free-spirited feeling.
Cheryl Caddick, while drumming all along, had a voice which captured this nostalgic atmosphere reminding me that music can be this good and happy at the same time, whereas Patrick Cleary and Scott Bassman (this cannot be his real name!) were following her on guitar and bass, as she was inevitably the power source of the trio.
Cheryl did not have flowers in her hair, but she had peacock feather earrings. With a psychedelic pop sound and a song called ‘Seasons of love’, they may be as close to the originals as you would expect.