The British invasion definitively didn’t kill surf music in the mid 60s, there are too many bands reviving the genre right now, and some bands like the Allah Las even manage to combine both genres with ease and a laid back attitude.
During the second Tuesday of their free residency at the Echo, they filled the club with surfing tunes, a sort of West-Coast-60s style revisited by the use of fuzzy guitars and vocal harmonies building an interesting and hypnotic groove.
When you hear them, you first swear you have heard these songs before, as they transport you way back in time, with black and white pictures of girls in bikini slowly shaking their behinds on the beach suddenly appearing in your head, but no, these are totally original tunes which sound like classic ones, and they are damn good. Seeing all the people pressing themselves close to the stage, this band has been building up its own following quite fast.
It would be interesting to know why Miles Michaud (vocals and guitar), Pedrum Siadatian (lead guitar, but also on back up vocals), Spencer Dunham (bass), and Matt Correia (drums) chose this jihad-starter moniker (isn’t it blasphemous for muslins to use Allah in a rock band name?) but it curiously fits their abundant aaaaaaahhhs vocal harmonies in the middle of their slow-paced songs reminding me an agglomerate of 60s hits, from the surf sound of the Beach Boys, to the psychedelic one of the Animals, even going into that hippie-druggy-groovy kind of thing that people seemed to appreciate so much.
With a delicate and discreet drumming, a bass very much part of the game, and as relevant as the other guitars, they even played tunes that were only instrumentals, reinforcing the stoned-hypnotic style, building a enjoyable groove which made the girls shake their behinds, mirrors of my previous vision.
Their two last songs, ‘Catamaran’, and ‘Long Journey’ (during this one Miles and Matt switched their roles on vocals and drums) feature on their single released on Pres Records, but their set list showed how much material they already have, as I read they will start focusing on a LP soon.
Seriously, almost none of the people present at the Echo on Tuesday night, have known the 60s, what is this obsession with this decade? I don’t mean Allah Las was playing 60s music, because obviously there were here and there traces of modernity, but they were playing their psych-surf-rock revival as if nothing had happened since the 60s. May be that’s the case, what happened after the 60s anyway? Disco? David Guetta? Shit! Give me more of this beachy sound from the Allah Las guys.