Lord Huron makes luminous music, full of exotic tonalities and serene jubilations.
This new band from LA (that many have qualified of mysterious) was playing at Origami Vinyl Sunday evening, for the release party for their new 7” ‘Mighty’.
When I went to their website (http://www.lordhuron.com/ ), saw the enchanting artwork and listen to the first track posted on line ‘Mighty’, I thought it was the work of some foreign band, coming from a distant country or even planet, but the music is in fact the work of Benji Schneider, born in Michigan and now living in Los Angeles.
They started with ‘Mighty’ and the music appeared glorious, with a lot of instrumentation, optimistic voices seemingly coming from afar, African-Caribbean rhythms bathing into atmospheric sounds of ocean waves or rain, like an invitation to some tropical and paradisiacal secret place, populated like a crowded jungle.
The four of them were playing in the mezzanine of the Origami store, with two guitars and a lot of drums and percussion, which were pretty hard to observe from the lower level of the store, but the sound coming from upstairs was much more animated, and joyous than the one I could remember listening to on line. It was really great stuff, putting a smile on everyone’s face with these explosions of breezy guitars, far happier than I was expecting.
If Vampire Weekend inevitably comes regularly in the comparisons because of the latent African influences and the sunny guitars, it did not seem obvious to me at first when I listened to them live. Lord Huron does something else, closer to nature and its exotic beauty than to some urban angst.
Their name obviously comes Lake Huron where Benji spent his childhood, but the music comes from everywhere, first from Michigan where he found his inspiration, then to the exotic places like Bali, Indonesia or Mexico where he traveled before recording his first EP, ‘Into the Sun’, as if he had added layers and layers of sunny and tropical influences to his own roots.
‘I always liked those old calypso tracks from carnival tents in Trinidad, my music is pretty rooted in American folk, but those other elements add the spice’, declared Benji Schneider (who has also created the beautiful artwork for the cover of his EPs) to Paste magazine this month.
They ended up the show with ‘We went wild’, Benji Schneider moving the drums front and playing a sparse beat instead of guitar, over this piercing and calypso-like guitar loop played by the second guitarist.
Lord Huron’s infectious music is speaking to you instantaneously, and they have already ventured out of LA and played some shows in New York, but for those of you in LA, they are playing again tomorrow at La Brea Tar Pit, and if a place that displays fossilized mammoths may be very strange location to play music, there is this nature connection, and the elephants of the artwork!