The LA quartet United Ghosts is only a few months old but I have already seen this name everywhere, and when I know I could go to their release party at the Satellite on Saturday night for only $5 dollars with a reservation, it was not really a hard decision to make…
And they were actually an excellent surprise with their combination of power-choruses filled with girl-boy vocal harmonies and layered shoegazing-atmospheric soundscapes, which could go from beautiful poppy melodies to more fuzzy, slightly-krautrock-going-to-psychedelia slow burns.
They were celebrating the release of their 7-inch ‘Holes Into the Night’, and the two songs featured on it are right now the only songs you can listen to on the internet; but they said they were working on an album and, in front of three mics decorated with Christmas lights, they gave us a taste of it.
The drumbeats and guitars were bright, and the always present, catchy melodies, well served by the sweet harmonies between bassist Sha Sabi and guitarist Axel Steuerwald, were close to something stolen from the 60s at time, gliding above a big sound whose climatic developments was quite diverse, sometimes building up a thunderous and explosive soaring atmosphere, other times staying in a more contained layer.
Many songs had that wide-screen, long-road-ahead/highway-driving imagery, with slow intros, dreamy-pulsating developments and long endings, and were touching all the right spots in the brain, giving out their numerous influences (one song made me even think about the Velvet Underground) without losing any originality.
Axel Steuerwald (formerly Mere Mortals) recently formed this new band with singer-bassist Sha Sabi, guitarist Jason O and drummer Sean Burgess (who bared a sort of resemblance with a young Tom Petty) and recorded everything in his own garage-studio. An United Ghosts album is expected for 2012, and after this intense and impressive performance at the satellite, who wouldn’t ready for it?