Amoeba and Converse Rubber Tracks team up once in a while to present some in-store with new and upcoming bands and on Thursday night it was LA Font’s turn, a band which is not totally new in the scene, because they are about to release their fifth (yes fifth!) recording, ‘Hangtime Vol. 1’, via Fleeting Youth Records on April 28th. At the top of this, Converse Rubber Tracks people were offering a free split 7” of LA Font and Roses, another band which will also perform at Amoeba next week.
LA Font is a quartet which sure shows a lot of energy on stage, playing strong and sophisticated indie rock songs and a sound quite hard to define: some foot-tapping pop melodies, a few layered and loud guitars, building a rock sound which seem to be borrowing from the mid 90’s scene,… they definitively had a buoyant and dynamic indie sound, which has often being qualified of power-pop. They well could be power pop, but they show more variety during the set, and some of their songs had a very punk vibe, and this is not necessarily incompatible. So I don’t know if they were born 20 years too late, you know, when Pavement was all the rage back on the Northwest coast, but it doesn’t matter, the four of them were restlessly pushing their puissant sound, with buzzing guitars and rumbling bass, while not being not afraid of dissonance in the harmonies, disillusion in the delivery tone and even a raised snarl on the frontman’s upper lip.
Plus they have a very peculiar sense of humor, Frontman Danny Bobbe said this about the new EP: ‘Hangtime’s a record about not waiting around for something to happen. It’s about putting in work, kicking it out, washing your hands and starting again. Take the best part of a lemon meringue pie (the meringue) and a Dodger Dog (the Dodgers) and that’s Hangtime Vol. 1.”
Obviously, garage rock is not dead in Los Angeles, these guys are young and they are still pursuing the dream, being extremely prolific beside playing about everywhere: they have been to SXSW twice, toured the western coast twice, the east coast once, they wrote the theme song for Vice’s ‘Entitlement’ comedy podcast, and their songs have been heard in Showtime’s ‘House of Lies,’ in the national ad campaign for the film ‘A Little Bit of Heaven’, in several MTV shows, in Steven Segall’s ‘True Justice’ series, and in the 2015 film ‘Tracers’ starring Taylor Lautner, among a few others
With propulsive guitar hooks, they have been developing their own sound, and they are still redefining the underground sound of Los Angeles, which may still be rocking in the 90’s after all.
A few pictures of the show here.
