The LA music scene is definitively crowded with talented bands, every day there is a new one I didn’t know anything about, that shows up somewhere in Silver Lake or Echo Park. If some of them aren't gonna revolutionize pop-rock-punk music, I am often impressed by how many great bands there are here.
Ok, this does not really apply for Papa because they are originally from Brooklyn, but they are now living here, in LA. With bright vocals sung by the drummer, heartfelt melodies (yes, they have fantastic and catchy melodies) which evoke the 60s,and explosive drum-guitar-keyboard choruses, they have audibly engulfed a lot of influences, as their songs sound completely familiar at the second you hear them. It is indeed a strange phenomenon, difficult to analyze but most of their songs seemed as much as pleasant because familiar than original and fresh.
Darren Weiss, Danny Presant and Sean O’Brien (and there was a fourth guy named Alex, who arrived a bit late to play keyboard) were up in the Origami loft on Sunday night to play a few of their songs of their recent release, a 7″ single ‘I Am The Lion King’/’Halloween To Me’, and one of them advertised it as coming with free delights made by his mom.
Their uplifting music was actually quite eclectic giving a large part to drums and keyboard, confounding genres and periods, from the 60s, to some more modern dance beats, to more muscular pop-rock territories with piano notes elevating above the rest of the music, and this could have made you think about many things at the same time. Modest Mouse? May be, but there was even a few riffs in one song that made me think about Muse??? Anyway, it was catchy and there were even a little of guitar shredding and drum destruction that nevertheless could not surpass the bright melodies