I had heard so many good things about The Lonely Wild, but it was my first time seeing them live at the Bootleg on Monday night, and I was certainly not disappointed by their bombastic-spaghetti-western-turned-indie-music, with harmonizing vocals bursting in the middle of soothing melodies.
There definitively was some cowboy wide-screen vision in the songs of the Los Angeles quintet, a little bit like Calexico does it sometimes, and it may be a cliché to use the name of that famous Canadian band in a review these days, but the best I could say is that their music was a sort of Arcade-Fire-meets-Ennio-Morricone, with female-male harmonies that reminded me the duo Kaiser Cartel, especially on the song ‘Dead End’.
Take the last song they performed, ‘Right Side of the Road’, you will hear this scampering horse behind a super catchy melody, a cinematic tune if there is one, just like the other Technicolor dream of ‘Poor Fools’, and its galloping hoard of sliding guitars. There also was this nice Mexican trumpet addition on some songs like ‘Hail’, a moody tune with sweet harmonies, that would periodically burst into these little power-chord-tempests.
They have only released a five-song EP but on Monday night they played more than this, nine songs if I read the set list correctly, and a song ‘Bankrupt, that they announced as a new one, turned into an explosive bluesy-country. But all of them sounded quite eclectic, with different tonalities, with even some bright African-sounding chords at the beginning of their opening one, ‘Out of My Mind’, or a few sliding-surfing guitars on other of their toe-tapping numbers.
The five of them, Andrew Carroll (guitar, lead vocals), Ryan Ross (keys, bass, trumpet), Jessi Williams (vocals, percussion, keys,, Andrew Schneider (guitar, percussion), and Edward Cerecedes (drums, percussion) were participating to the singing at some points, which was certainly reinforcing the grandiose of these epic choruses.
And between these wild-west scenarios, they also surprised everyone with their very enjoyable westernized take on Depeche Mode’ s ‘Personal Jesus’, which somewhat ended up to be a mash-up with Pink Floyd’s ‘Money’!