The San Francisco band Birds & Batteries did a very short set on Friday night at Origami Vinyl in Los Angeles, but they are excused as they had a show scheduled the same night in San Diego.
It was quite difficult to get an idea of their experimental pop in just 4 songs, since it seemed too diverse to determine right away what this band was about.
Mike Sempert, on vocals, with a low, nasal and cavernous voice, was playing a fuzzy keyboard, ornate with electric blue Christmas garlands. He switched to guitar for the last song, while the rest of the band consisted of Brian Michelson on drums, Jill Heinke on bass, and Christopher Walsh on guitar.
Listening again to them on line made me hear the country side of their music, something I had not really paid attention to when watching them live, but which turn their songs into some kind of synth-country-pop, and their album an exploration of many aspects of this new and original fusion.
On ‘A million people’ from their new album ‘Panorama’, Sempert sounds almost too much like Tom Petty, and the country rock part is at its fullest, whereas on the song ‘Panorama’ the buzzing electronic sound, happy and ascending, arrives in explosive little waves of weird and chaotic sounds; it’s almost hard to believe these two songs come from the same band.
There are warm tunes like ‘Strange kind of mirror’, which, live, was producing nice harmonies over sliding guitars and happy bouncing beats, probably the catchiest song they played.
They have already released 2 previous full-length album (‘Up To No Good’ in 2009, and ‘I will never sleep again’ in 2007), and there is much more than what I could describe on their third and eclectic one 2010 ‘Panorama’. Their short set certainly could not cover the vast landscape of influences they seem to have.