With their boy and girl hushed-whispered vocals, buried in their synth pop, Letting Up Despite Great Faults did a powerful set at the Silver Lake Jubilee.
If there was a lot of shoegazing in this dreamy indie pop experience, there was also a lot of foot-tapping, and that would seem totally contradictory at first view but somehow they managed to do it with grace. The build-up in the music, filled with nervous beats, was contrasting so much with the smooth reverb of Mike Lee and Annah Fisette’s vocals, but the swirls of synth (sometimes one, sometimes two!) were linking these opposites in harmony.
The insistent beats were making Kent Zambrana, on bass, do a wild and energetic dance, and it was hard to resist taping along with the agitated thumps, which were predominantly produced by the bass over the drums played by Daniel Schmidt. At the end, several of their songs had this moment of Cure-like New-Wave outburst, with a dueling bass and guitar or even synth and guitar, but they were sort of outside of my range of possible comparisons, often building on familiar beats, then going into more synth-pop.
This is a Los Angeles band which moved to Austin,Texas, but here they were again, back to Los Angeles, for the pleasure of a crowd greatly appreciating their pretty sweet pop anthems.