He has mentioned Roy Orbison, Echo & the Bunnymen, John Cale, Julian Cope, Hendrix and the Velvet Underground as his numerous influences, and listening to his first full length album ‘Fairy Tales Forgotten’ released in 2010, on their bandcamp site, makes you understand only some of what he is talking about, because if Orbison was an influence, the lightness and the bright harmonies have been quite replaced by darkness and heavy pain.
The sound is dark and borderline scary, the voice is strong, impressively soulful and compared to Scott Walker’s in about every blog mentioning the band,… but talking about Roxy Music, I would also hear a Bryan Ferry who has finally come to the dark side,… there is indeed some weird scary stuff in a track like ‘The Captain’ (that you can download for free). Some songs transpire uneasiness and anxiety, with sometimes romantic accents like in the song title, ‘Fairy Tales Forgotten’, or a rare moody toughness like in ‘Nothing is wasted’, but the sound is powerful, even very often grandiose, stormy, and noir cinematic, if I dare.
Beside John Carpenter, Joe A (J. Explosive) plays drums, Jeff Phillips is on bass, Matt Eddy is on keyboards, and they have a few upcoming shows in LA in March (the 11th at Showcave, the 14th at the Silverlake lounge), that I’m planning to catch!
And a last funny thing about his name: he has never wanted to change his name, but his grandfather just did that a few decades ago, changing the family name from… Zimmerman to Carpenter.
http://johncarpenter.bandcamp.com/album/fairy-tales-forgotten