First Look: LA Font – ‘The American Leagues’
Photo by David Greenwald
It’s a funny thing to have seen a band live more often than you’ve heard their album — a circumstance that probably applies mostly to Phish fans — but such is the case with LA Font and its brand-new The American Leagues. The band’s been hard to miss if you live on L.A.’s east side and have left your house at night over the last few months, and its debut release is a strong document of their snarly in-person take on Slanted and Enchanted-style garage indie. The highlights here are many, but it’s a welcome surprise to hear the quiet moments — especially “Lone Wolf Boys,” the band’s answer to “Range Life” — burning as hot as the scorching rockers.
Full disclosure: Bassist Greg Katz is a Rawkblog alum and the band played my photography show over the summer. I asked them to do that because they’re awesome.
LA Font – “Lone Wolf Boys”: mp3
Pay what you what for the album and stream it in full after the jump or on Bandcamp.
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Memoryhouse’s “Caregiver” begins by coming in from the static cold of The Years EP, bundling up and warming its feet against a reverberating piano and glistening lead guitar. As the song advances into distortion, it sounds like a city collapsing, but singer Denise Nouvion soars above — hope over despair. The electronic elements the band formerly toyed with are absent here, a direction Memoryhouse apparently plans on taking on its debut full length next year; as “Caregiver” shows, the act’s excellence is unchanged by arrangement options. 
Letting Up Despite Great Faults’ 2009 self-titled release plops itself down quietly between the Postal Service and the Radio Dept. Like Dntel, the band produces pleasingly Tinkertoy-simple beats, promptly submerged in Radio Dept.-like shimmering dream-pop fuzz. The songs are spotless and beautiful, polished to a bright sheen. Too bright, in fact — perhaps less confident in his voice than his laptop, frontman Michael Lee sings in a dispassionate Elliott Smith-on-Xanax whisper, and the songs lack the cartoonish punch of the Postal Service or the Radio Dept.’s unrequited angst. Letting Up Despite Great Faults has crafted the sound of surrender; it’s an admirable effort, but one can’t help wanting to hear him fight back when the bell rings for the next round.
“John Huston,” The Rest’s first single from 2011-due Seesaw, finds the post-rock-influenced band amalgamating synthesizers and further flashing lights into their soaring sound. The track’s a bit chunky as a result, but with a melody not unlike LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends,” it’s hard not to feel the anthemics raising your adrenalin.
At the time of this writing (a few weeks back, at this point–Ed.), The Tallest Man on Earth is the Hype Machine’s most-blogged artist. If you’d like to hear a folk singer who doesn’t sound like a cartoon character, however, you — and the blogosphere, which failed to alert me when this record dropped a few months ago — should look up JBM. His debut, Not Even in July, is a somber collection lead by minor-key pianos and lingering lead guitars, the kind of stuff Michigan-era Sufjan Stevens (or the still-great White Ladder-era David Gray) once did. The album’s appeal is the forest, not the trees: the beauty of the way the recording (done in a church), the soft emotion of his voice and the slow release of the gently paced arrangements ease together. It’s a collection that sinks in, not one that sticks out — there’s no Bon Iver bleating or Tallest Man yowling, or, admittedly, hooks that’ll grab you on the first listen or two. Put it on and watch the leaves change color.
