Boston Calling Music Festival

Close your eyes. Okay, no wait — open them because you need to keep reading — but close them in spirit. Now pretend fun. is not a band, but an amusement park. Just replace the guitar with a log flume and the percussion with a carousel. Now imagine the crowds lining up for a ride on fun.’s sophomore record, Some Nights. The line snakes around the whole park. Maybe there are some bearded ladies on it. Maybe lots of bearded ladies. Anyway. As you get closer, you see the entrance to Some Nights is actually Nate Ruess’ head. His mouth is open wider than should be physically possible and his uvula dangles in the dark. The musical tracks harden into wooden rollercoaster tracks. You get on the car, and with a jerk, it starts to move. There’s that familiar feeling that tells you something pretty transformative is about to happen. Lights flash as you go plummeting into the darkness. The rollercoaster version of Some Nights follows the same path as the album version: colorful on the outside, deeper than you had imagined in the center, and so good it’ll make your head spin.
Want to go again?
“I had met Jack briefly once and thought he was kind of a douche,” says Nate Ruess of his first encounter with Jack Antonoff. They were 18 years old and going, separately, to punk rock shows in southern New Jersey. Nate had worked at one of the clubs since he was 16 (“It’s how I developed a sense of what really works, and what is boring.”), and Jack was in love with the whole scene--well, almost the whole scene.
“In the late 90s there was just a brilliant punk world happening in legion halls and fire houses. I was immediately taken with Nate’s voice but everything else – no.” Years later, Nate, who was the lead singer of The Format at the time and Jack, Steel Train’s front man, wound up on tour together. Impressions hadn’t changed much. “It was just like an, ‘Oh God, this guy,’ vibe from both of us right off the bat. But 24 hours into that tour, Nate and I became inseparable.”
When The Format broke up, Nate’s first call was to Jack.
Though not a “meet-cute” tale, it’s indicative of who fun. is as a band. You hear them and think, “Are they really going to pull off this sound, this arrangement, and create a moving, catchy, memorable rock song?” It’s become their signature. So long as that signature has one last element: Nate’s second call was to Andrew Dost, the force behind all the literal bells and whistles of fun. “Andrew,” says Jack, “is one of those people who see the world like a giant art project. I can’t begin to tell you how vital he is in our band.”
“My first impressions of them were both overwhelmingly positive,” says Andrew Dost, “I’ve heard they were….unsure of each other when they first met?”
fun. has not stopped living up to its name since their 2009 debut, Aim & Ignite. A year after the debut they were opening for Paramore on their headlining tour and performing at Coachella along with The Strokes and Jay-Z. Now they’ve teamed up with Janelle Monáe, a melodic collaboration on display in one of three videos for “We Are Young.” In addition, the TV series “Glee” plucked “We Are Young” and the title track off Some Nights to cover on the show, an experience that meant the world to a band that prides itself on appealing to any demographic that might feel disenfranchised or just plain odd. “None have us have ever felt like anything but outcasts our entire lives,” says Jack, “and I know that’s something that has resonated with fun. fans. They are the same people as us — kids who never fully latched onto a specific music scene because it couldn't define them.”
With a trail of accolades behind them, fun. knew they had to step up their game in an unexpected way when it came to producing their second record. “I got really got into hip-hop,” says Nate, “I mean really into it. Songs started coming to me in the middle of the night, and I would hear them with breakbeats and samples, and it all made sense… I told everyone I wanted the next record to sound like a hip-hop album, and I don’t think they were unsupportive, but they were definitely confused.” Then, a few hours before a show in Phoenix, the band snuck into a music room at Arizona State University. Nate doesn’t play any instruments, but by now Jack and Andrew have learned to “crack the code.” This time the code was for the track that would become “Some Nights.” Andrew pounded out the chords out on a piano, while Nate sang, and Jack stomped his feet and clapped as hard as he could to establish the pulse of the song. “That moment really brought us together as the band that was going to be making this album….I just had to explain how the MPC (Music Production Center) would be our new best friend.”
Jack is a whip-smart horn-rimmed glasses-wearing guitarist whose influences are Tom Waits, Jack White, and Neil Young.
Andrew counts the flugelhorn and glockenspiel among his conquered instruments. (Influences: Weezer, ELO, and Claude Debussy.)
And here they were, jumping out of their skin, listening to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and Drake in a concrete building in the middle of the desert.
“What can I say? Eventually they fell victim to Drizzy,” laughs Nate.
When pressed by their label and management for a list of potential producers, Nate consulted the albums he loved most. The name that appeared time and time again was "Jeff Bhasker.”
The legendary Grammy-winning producer for Alicia Keys and Kanye West had his hands full at the time, working with Beyoncé, and the band worried that they might not have a chance to meet him. Finally, one night late at The Bowery Hotel, Nate got his chance. Their relationship was one that fit nicely into the grand tradition of fun. “Jeff wasn’t very, shall we say, warm. He had been working on Beyoncé all day, and he really gave the vibe that he didn’t want to be meeting with me...but thank God for alcohol. We ended up hitting it off, and since I was drunk and lacking self-awareness, I decided to sing him something I had been working on. I remember singing the chorus for "We Are Young" kind of loud and out of key. That’s when I learned that Jeff does this thing when he’s excited where his eyes perk up and somehow his ears move all the way to the top of his head. He told me we had to work together.”
fun. was on their way to becoming the band that would — that could — produce Some Nights.
“Jeff left a huge imprint in our brains,” says Andrew, “and for me at least, made me realize all over again that songs are special, and that they deserve to sound unique. His palette of sounds is huge.” Or, as Jack says: “Jeff pushed the shit out of us, and he’s nothing like us. He helped us do something way bigger than what we could have done on our own."
Jeff heard the songs stripped down with just vocals, acoustic guitar and piano before the band went into the studio with him.
“Jeff has an energy, a talent, confidence, and a way of making you feel confident, like no one I've ever met, or probably will ever meet,” says Nate. “Suddenly here was a gigantic beat on top of those acoustics and pianos. Jack’s guitar solo in ‘Carry On’ was one of those magical moments. I’ve never seen anyone so in control of their tone, and for him to take the lyrics, internalize them, and redistribute it into the form of a guitar solo, is just so unbelievable, and it’s a huge testament to his passion for music.”
Lyrically, Some Nights has a uniquely impactful note — and it’s not always an upbeat one. See also: the line “I got nothing left inside my chest but it’s all alright” in “All Alright.” “I was just coming off of a darker and more introspective year,” Nate remembers, “You know, I remember being a freshman in high school and feeling like an outsider who always wanted this one girl to notice me, and I would listen to ‘El Scorcho’ by Weezer and couldn’t help but smile because there was at least one other person in the world who felt how I felt. That’s what I hope to accomplish as a lyricist. But I was having anxiety attacks about whether or not I could still write a song, let alone still wanting to make music. The only way to cope with it was to write about it.”
Some Nights earned the band six total nominations for the 55th Annual Grammy Awards, including nominations in all “Big Four” categories, marking fun. the first rock ever to achieve such a feat.
Maybe it’s Nate. Or Andrew. Or Jack. Or Jeff. Or the acoustics at Arizona State. Either way, it’s a good problem to have when you’re pointing fingers at each other, laying the blame for the magic of your new record on your band mates. Even with the “new and improved” sound, fans will never forget what it is this band wants: “Some Nights has a common theme of guilt and depression and laying everything on the table, sure, but there’s always some sort light at the end of the tunnel,” says Nate. “That’s what this album is striving for, to say something along the lines of ‘Okay, I found that light, but it’s just led me to another situation where I need to find the light again.’”
And down the tracks we go.

The Shins are an American indie rock band founded and fronted by vocalist and multiinstrumentalist, James Mercer. The Shins were formed in Albuquerque, New Mexico, but are now based in Portland, Oregon. The Shins began in 1996 as a side project for singer/songwriter James Mercer, whose primary band was Flake Music in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Mercer formed Flake Music in 1992 with Neal Langford on guitar, Phil Higgs and then Marty Crandall on bass, and Jesse Sandoval on drums. During the next 5 years Flake Music released several singles, a full-length album, and began touring largely due to the help of other bands like Modest Mouse.
In 1996, Mercer began writing what would eventually become The Shins' first record. Flake Music came to an end around this time leaving Mercer with an opportunity to record, "Nature Bears A Vacuum" a 7" EP released by Omnibus Records. For their earliest shows, The Shins performed as a duo with Mercer recruiting Sandoval to play drums. "Nature Bears A Vacuum" was released with no expectations of expanding the band's following beyond Albuquerque. However, the single generated enough attention that Mercer felt it necessary to assemble a full band. Crandall was brought into the fold on keyboards, and Dave Hernandez (frontman of local punk legends Scared of Chaka, which had played dozens of shows with Flake Music) was given bass duties.
At a San Francisco performance with Modest Mouse in 2000, Sub Pop's Jonathan Poneman asked The Shins to contribute a single to the label's Single of the Month Club, which eventually became an offer to release The Shins' 2001 single, "New Slang", and their debut album, "Oh, Inverted World". The group spent the rest of the year touring. The release of singles such as "Know Your Onion!" and "The Past and Pending" kept The Shins' success going into 2002, cementing "Oh, Inverted World" as one of the definitive indie-rock albums of the early '00s and The Shins as one of the genre's leading younger bands. It received critical acclaim for its lyrically deft and jangly pop sound. The song "One By One All Day" was featured in the 2003 film A Guy Thing, starring Jason Lee. Two other songs from this album, ("Caring Is Creepy" and "New Slang") were featured prominently on the soundtrack for the 2004 film Garden State, starring and directed by Zach Braff, exposing the music of The Shins to a much wider audience.[2] Their music was also featured in the television series The OC, the film The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie and they performed on an episode of Gilmore Girls. Oh, Inverted World appeared at #71 on Pitchfork Media's Top 100 Albums of 2000–2004.
The band relocated from Albuquerque to Portland, OR in 2001. Mercer, Sandoval and Crandall made the move. Neal Langford decided to leave the band, staying in Albuquerque so he could continue with another of his passions, professional hot air ballooning. Dave Hernandez (at this point living in nearby Seattle) rejoined The Shins in 2003 playing guitar and bass. The band began tracking new material in Mercer's basement that summer. In an effort to balance the homerecording method used on Oh, Inverted World with a studio finish, producer Phil Ek (Built To Spill, Modest Mouse) was brought in to mix and produce the album. Chutes Too Narrow was released by Sub Pop in the fall of 2003 to much fanfare in indie music circles, featuring even more multi-layered lyrics, as well as a musical approach that explored new genres, song structures, and levels of production fidelity. In 2006, the band helped to curate an edition of the British All Tomorrow's Parties festival. Nonstop touring of everywhere from Australia to Norway, as well as the US countless times over contributed to pushing sales past 500,000 worldwide, exceeding everyone's expectations, including the band's. Chutes Too Narrow appeared at #47 on Pitchfork Media's Top 100 Albums of 2000–2004.An enhanced single release in 2004 included a live version of "New Slang" recorded with Iron and Wine, a studio mix of "Fighting in a Sack," a multimedia tack of "So Says I," and a cover of the Marc Bolan song "Baby Boomerang". The Shins have also recorded a cover of "We Will Become Silhouettes" by The Postal Service, which was released on that group's 2003 single "Such Great Heights". On May 9, 2005, the video for "Pink Bullets" (directed by Adam Bizanski), was one of the first videos to demonstrate iTunes music store's new capability to sell videos. In a Pitchfork Media interview, Mercer announced that Eric Johnson of fellow Sub Pop band Fruit Bats had joined the Shins.
The band's third album, Wincing the Night Away, was recorded in Portland during 2006 by a largely solo Mercer, but with the production assistance of Joe Chiccarelli.[6] It was released on January 23, 2007 and debuted at number 2 on the Billboard 200 album chart with 118,000 copies sold in its first week, the highest sales week and chart position an album released solely on Sub Pop has ever achieved. The album was leaked to the Internet on October 20, 2006 and was available for pre-order on iTunes, with an extra track.[citation needed] It was nominated for a 2008 Grammy award in the category of Best Alternative Music Album. In 2007 the band did a Take-Away show acoustic video session shot by Vincent Moon, and recorded a version of "Little Boxes" for the Showtime series Weeds.[citation needed] On November 27, 2007, the group was featured on a Darfur charity album released by Waxploitation.
On January 24, 2008, "The Past and Pending" was played at the funeral of Heath Ledger.After a year as this lineup, during which half the songs on debut album "Oh, Inverted World" (including "New Slang") were penned, Hernandez moved to New York City. Neal Langford was selected as his replacement, and it was this lineup that saw the group embark on a tour with Modest Mouse.
On June 20, 2008, the band announced that their three record Sub Pop contract had been fulfilled and that the next Shins' record would be released on James Mercer's own label, Aural Apothecary.
On July 26th, 2011, the band announced via Facebook that they would soon release news about upcoming shows and new music.
On August 1, 2011 Pitchfork reported that The Shins would be releasing an album in 2012 on Mercer's Aural Apothecary Label, via Columbia Records. The Shins also announced additional tour dates for their North American tour. The new band backing Mercer on this tour include singer/songwriter Richard Swift, Modest Mouse drummer Joe Plummer, Yuuki Matthews of Crystal Skulls and Jessica Dobson. On December 14th, they announced on their website that their upcoming album would be titled Port of Morrow and would be released March 2012. They revealed the cover art for the album as well, designed by Jacob Escobedo. They also released their first track form the new album "Simple Song" on January 9th

Thundering, stellar electronic... magnetic, glacial vocals...whip-smart, womanly, lyrical wit... jokes as good as 'The Valley of The Lolls'...

Marina and The Diamonds second album, 'Electra Heart', is not so much a creative leap forward, more an Olympian pole-vault over the bar of talented-newcomer into the global amphitheatre of a cultivated Classic. Two years on from her top 5 debut 'The Family Jewels' (300,000 copies sold), the self-styled avant-garde "D.I.Y artist" has detonated her own experimental past and landed feet first in the future with 'Electra Heart', a stunningly ambitious, seamless, cohesive and confident sonic pulsar spinning between electro-pop euphoria and come-down melancholia. The album is produced by a cache of old school and A-List producers: Dr Luke (Katy Perry) and Liam Howe (Sneaker Pimps) but mostly (9 out of 12 songs) Greg Kurstin (Lily Allen, Kylie) and Rick Nowels (Madonna, Stevie Nicks, Lykke Li). A hook-packed stunner with the sonic ambition of a one-woman Depeche Mode, her onetime theatrical vocals now effortlessly soar between spectral, commanding and towering power-pop, finding her vocal identity in an album about a loss of it.

"I wanted to challenge myself, I have consciously done everything I set out not to, originally" says Marina. "Sing about Love. Work in the world of American Pop. Co-write. It was a really enjoyable period in my life. The music has energy and aggression and my vocals are much more controlled and detached... It's lyrically quite bitter, but comically so. I love black humour".

'Electra Heart' is a thematic riot, a British Eccentric, 21st Century concept caper where the album title represents a series of female archetypes, not so much an alter-ego as a beautifully-constructed prism, through which Marina projects a series of meticulously-realised female characters as a foil for telling her story, the one about mismatched lovers.
"'Electra Heart' is an Ode to dysfunctional love," she explains. "I based the project around character types commonly found in love stories, film and theatre. I guess it was a way of dealing with the embarrassment that, for the first time in my life, I got 'played'. Rejection is a universally embarrassing topic and Electra Heart is my response to that, creating character types to enable me to express personal experiences I would never confess in real life. Weakness and defeat in love are things I don't particularly want talk about, so I guess I've written a whole album about it. Whatever an artist does not want to admit, that is what the artist writes about. It's a very frank album but hopefully funny too"

The songs, mostly recorded in L.A in 2011, were written on-the-road through America in 2010, teased into life on Marina's £100 keyboard or sung into her lap-top in the back of her tour-bus bedroom, "watching the corn fields flying by and making sense of the message that American culture employs; that you can be anyone and do anything, go anywhere and lose yourself- start afresh and forget whatever the truth is". The song titles tell the story -- from throbbing first single 'Primadonna' to the robo-pop of 'Bubblegum Bitch' to the haughty spoken-word soliloquies of 'Homewrecker' -- a fantasy roll-call of "fairly vengeful characters". These are inspired by her love for American Pop culture's artifice, "I am attracted to emptiness, to the fake in us. Aside from love, perception and deception are central themes in "Electra Heart", that's why I changed my hair- because the archetypal star is always blonde". She says " I used to think of the female superstars, Marilyn, Madonna, Britney Spears, and wonder if they would have had the same career paths if they had been brunettes" and her uncharacteristic behaviour in a brief but life-altering relationship, where she changed herself to comply with a boy's ideals to win his heart. "The type of girl who maintains a level of artifice and illusion in order to hold his intrigue. I am nothing like that. I was sad to pretend I was someone else all the time".

Hence the many faces of 'Electra Heart' and her revolving door persona. It's also a visual project, with vast, camp and cerebral touchstones as befits her analytical brain: "Cindy Sherman, Jenny Holzer, Dolly Parton, Chuck Pahlaniuk, Madonna, Jayne Mansfield's Pink Palace, Valley of the Dolls, Pierre Et Gilles, Britney Spears, Love... Boys... Fear." She's also created a website, 'The: Archetypes', featuring images of 'Electra Heart' split into four character-type categories: "The Homewrecker", "Su-Barbie-A", "Teen Idles" and "Stars & Queens". All fabulous hair, kitschy 50's costumes and a pun-tastic way with a caption, from "Miss Shellfish Beach 1985" and "Mother's Ruined" to "VALLEY OF THE LOLS."

Welsh by birth, kaleidoscopic by nature, Marina Diamandis is a serial college drop-out who once dressed up as a boy to audition for a reggae boy-band, hoping to amuse the record label into signing her. After further failed auditions (girl bands, musicals), in a fit of ambitious pique, she taught herself piano and created Marina and The Diamonds in 2005 (it's just her, the Diamonds are the audience). She was a MySpace generation D.I.Y powerhouse who hand-made and sold her own CDs to Rough Trade until being signed to Warner Music Group's '679 Recordings' in 2008. Acclaimed overnight as an intriguing, confrontational and theatrical amalgam of Kate Bush and PJ Harvey, she was nominated in 2010 for both the Brits Critic's Choice Award and the BBC Sound of 2010. She looks back on her early years, now, with some ambivalence. "I experimented with my voice a lot, I was young, amateurish and ambitious" she decides. "I feel different now. My voice is far more controlled and my writing style has matured. For me, it's a real, coherent step-up. I would love to one day be a great artist."

2012, then, sees her reach her potential as an outstanding British song-writing talent and dazzling pop performer, an uncompromising spirit and pop-art intellectual who singlehandedly fashions the ideas for her art-work, videos, website content and striking live performances. In 2012 she embarks on both a UK headline tour and as support to the mighty Coldplay, jet-packed onto the mainstream stage on their colossal European Stadium Tour, at the band's personal request. The concept of 'Electra Heart', meanwhile, below its multi-fold messages, is deceptively simple. "It just about love" she concludes. "Every one of us relates to love songs. To being hurt. But I wanted to chronicle it in a raw and truthful way, almost make a (visual) gimmick out of the thing I feared most. Everything else is just based around my love for photography, sharp humour and a fascination with transient identities. If you are who you are, then why do you change around certain people? Why do we spend our entire lives trying to become ourselves, when we are born as no one else? I always want to try and cement who I am. But I never can. That's why I write songs"
She also, incidentally, enjoys a curious neurological condition called synaesthesia which means associating musical notes, numbers and days of the week with colour. So what colour is Tuesday?

"Tuesday is green," she assures, as befits a proper pop star.

TRACK BY TRACK

'Bubblegum Bitch': Frenetic synth-pop bedlam from 1981 meets 1997. "It's late 90s Britney charm, turned inside out."

'Primadonna': Smell the waft of poppers across the festival field as a throbbing, fuchsia cloud thunders over your head. "Channelling the archetype of The Star, asking for adoration."

'Lies': A haunting, melancholic treatise on emotional disappointment. "You only ever touch me in the dark, only if we're drinking, can you see my spark" she sings, exquisitely. "Trying to tell yourself a lover is right for you when you know he is nothing but."

'Homewrecker': Spoken-word ice-queen theatrics befitting the Pet Shop Boys, featuring the line: "Girls and their cars and their gourmet vomit." "It's about the power of an image: Looking sweet whilst secretly being a total bitch and getting away with it!"

'Starring Role': Ethereal, fragile rumination on living outside reality. "And you don't want to live in reality. That's why you're an artist. You're on the run."

'The State Of Dreaming': 'Hounds Of Love'-era Kate Bush and a contemplation of the famous Marilyn Monroe quote: "I just want to be wonderful." "Fantasy protects us"

'Power And Control': Cinematic, Teutonic, Depeche Mode/Killers-sized electro colossus, written and recorded at dawn on ferry to Finland. "About the tactics of power-games in love"

'Living Dead': Pummeling synth-pop paean to regret. "The feeling that you have not lived your life to the full."

'Teen Idle': "Story of my suicidal cheerleader youth! This song was like my last hurrah of adolescence"

'Valley Of The Dolls': Brooding, elegant, gothic search through loss of identity. "About emptiness, a void that you can't fill with relationships."

'Hypocrates': Breezy, beautiful, guitar-pop melodies, perhaps Gwen Stefani fronting Crowded House. "Saying 'let me be who I am'."

'Fear And Loathing': Epic, Trent Reznor-esque, doom-pop reverie on multiple inner personalities. "About seeing the good in people, making a fresh start and cutting yourself free of old ideals"

For many bands, making music is all about the routine of recording an annual album, or being able to tour in progressively bigger venues. Not Matt and Kim. “Our goal is to make music we want to hear,” says Matt Johnson, who co-founded the band with Kim Schifino. “When it comes time to make a new album, I’m just so excited, since I know we have all these ideas and I just want to get them out there.” As for the band’s extra-emphatic live shows, which these days happen in large venues, he explains, “We’ve always just really enjoyed playing music, and things have kept growing.”

Matt and Kim’s enthusiasm comes across loud and clear on the band’s new album, Lightning, its most diverse and developed to date. From the relentless drive of “Now” to the dance-fueled beat of “Let’s Go” to the more contemplative “Ten Dollars I Found,” Lightning is the strongest distillation yet of Matt and Kim’s unique sound: a spunky hybrid of indelible songs, an emphatic beat and almost tangible energy, mixed with the duo’s influence of listening nonstop to Top 40 Hip-Hop and pop-punk.

To make the album, Matt and Kim spent six months working in their home studio in Brooklyn, producing the record themselves. Lightning is a touch more minimal than their earlier work – with layers taken away, instead of added, enabling its intense performances and memorable tunes to really come to the forefront. “What’s made the songs on this album really strong is we’ve been able to pull a lot off – to not have so much going on – and still have a strong song,” Kim explains.

“It’s easier to make a song with a lot going on,” Matt adds. “It feels very safe. It’s like putting on a lot of clothes: you feel all covered up so no one can judge just one aspect of it, but when you try to break it down to be as simple as can be, you’re really baring it all. When you can see clearly what’s going on, those are the times that the songs are easiest to connect to.”

Connecting with their audience is certainly a key focus for Matt and Kim. The indie dance duo’s live shows – which are legendary for constant, in-your-face exuberance – feel more like vibrant, sweaty loft parties than traditional concerts, for both audiences and the band. “I think we’ve managed to continue to make them feel intimate,” says Matt. “When we first started playing venues instead of playing on the floor at parties, we tried hard to keep the vibe of ‘we’re all doing this together and having a wild time’ going. The show is not just the two of us: it’s the 3002 of us, or however big the venue is.” Or, as in the words of Rolling Stone: “Matt and Kim’s reputation as a live act precedes them – and justifiably so. Simply put, they are a two-person dynamo, frantic, tightly wound, and full of good cheer. Their performances are as physical as they are musical. . . . For sheer adrenaline-per-second, no other band comes close.”

The band started in 2004, essentially by accident when Matt and Kim were art students at the prestigious Pratt Institute, where they studied film and illustration, respectively. When Kim wanted to learn to play drums and Matt (who’d been in bands before) was getting his head around a new keyboard, the band was born. Since then, they have earned a Gold Record for the upbeat, stick-in-your-head track “Daylight,” played festivals like Coachella, Lollapalooza, and Bonnaroo, along with international festivals like V (U.K), Pukkelpop (Belgium), Fuji (Japan), Big Day Out (Australia), Primavera (Spain), Oya (Norway), SWU (Brazil), as well as hundreds of shows. They have won 3 MTV awards: a Breakthrough Video Music Award and mtvU Best Video Woodie Award for “Lessons Learned”, as well as a 2011 award for Best Live Band. Lightning is the band’s fourth album, following Sidewalks, Grand, and their self-titled debut.

Matt and Kim have always been inspired by Brooklyn’s general urban din as well as the area’s artists, yet Matt points out, “I don’t think a place can define a person. We simply write songs about us and our life so that’s why where we live comes up.”

Indeed, there’s something universal about a song with a beat that grabs you, with a great melody, played by a band that simply loves to play music. And that, in Williamsburg and way beyond, is the key to the universal appeal of Matt and Kim.

By now, the peripatetic trail etched out by Portugal. The Man is well documented. The band’s nomadic path snakes down the Cascades, starting first in Wasilla, Alaska (yes, the very same city whose identity has been hijacked by a certain celebrity politician, one who we shall not mention again here), and then eventually settling in amongst the puddles and monochromatic haze of Portland, Oregon. There were Iditarod-racing parents, wooden cabins tucked deep in the woods, and the sort of upbringing that skews the very notion of convention. But let us end that chapter of Portugal. The Man’s lore and move forward.
That is the Portugal. The Man of then, In The Mountain In The Cloud is the Portugal. The Man of now.
In The Mountain In The Cloud marks Portugal. The Man’s sixth full-length in as many years also marks the band’s debut for Atlantic Records. Carrying forth the momentum triggered by their unexpected rise in 2006, and their FM airwave success of “People Say” (from 2009’s The Satanic Satanist), In The Mountain In The Cloud continues the pattern of an album per calendar year, a feat made all the more staggering when you consider the band’s fervent devotion to the open road, logging over 800 shows—performing everywhere from freight elevators to a mesmerizing set at Bonnaroo—since their inception. In The Mountain In The Cloud marks the first recording by the band to accurately harness their onstage energy; it’s a recording that places Portugal. The Man’s devout work ethic and singular vision on full display.
While the lineup of John Gourley, Zachary Scott Carothers, Jason Sechrist, and Ryan Neighbors are firmly dedicated to the rock and roll scripture—record, tour, repeat as necessary—Portugal. The Man still remain unsettled on the outskirts of any set genres. With untethered roots, the band offers an audible adaptability, one unlike anything offered by their peers, that allows their music to form over a gradual incubation process. Songs are birthed and then organically evolve over the course of the band’s seemingly endless slate of tour dates, along with the sliver of downtime they allow themselves.
“That’s one thing that we do on tour, we jam and it gives us a good feel for what we can do,” says Gourley, who often pens Portugal. The Man’s songs in a isolated setting; his parent’s home in Willow, Alaska. “Even if I’m writing a song by myself, it’s constantly written around what the band does and around the things that they like.” He continues, “I’ve been really into trying to structure songs properly, it was something that I was really scared of doing in the beginning. I think it’s just playing in a band, you come across chord progressions that you know you’ve heard a million times, so you end up getting into this really bad habit of making these really weird, obscure structures and being a little bit too obscure with melody.”
That isn’t an issue with the dynamic “Got It All (This Can't Be Living Now)” or the sprawling vision of “Sleep Forever,” the ambitious closing number to In The Mountain In The Cloud. The texturally rich “Sleep Forever” softly builds around the tender refrain of Gourley as he makes a morbid confession (“As I finally meet my end I won't be scared, I won't defend the things I've done”) before building to a fevered pitch and unfurling in a swirling mass of backing vocals. The spacious “You Carried Us (All You See)” and bouncy “Senseless” seamlessly expand on the foundation laid by the band’s previous work, yet the coruscate radiation of the slinking “Head Is a Flame (Cool With It),” or the muted political overtones of opener “So American” (where Gourley explains, “There’s a madness in us all”), offer a glimpse of a band naturally progressing in real time.
“We trust each other,” explains Gourley. “They trust me when it comes to the editing of the song, and I trust them when it comes to just writing their parts. Nobody’s trained in music, we just go and play the things that we play and basically just do what we do.”
Arduously recorded over a nomadic stretch of 2010, In The Mountain In The Cloud was captured on tape in El Paso, New York, San Diego, Los Angeles, and finally Seattle. At the helm was producer John Hill (Santigold), along with co-production assistance courtesy of Gourley and the band’s longtime collaborator Casey Bates. “It was a really intense recording process,” says Gourley. Hill’s experience and anomalous point of view meshed with the band’s vision for the album. “I really love that Santigold record,” explains Gourley. “John really helped in the band be the band… he pushed us to do what we wanted.” Following that, the album was placed in the loving hands of Andy Wallace (Nirvana, Jeff Buckley) for mixing.
Portugal. The Man’s insatiable need to create extends far from the recorded product itself, as the band has a detailed hand in their painstakingly assembled artwork—courtesy of The Fantastic The, a collective teaming of Gourley and longtime art director Austin Sellers—unique stage backdrops, merchandise, and just about all other façades of an image that they lovingly control. But much like art, control can be relative, and in the past the band has happily offered the raw artwork files from The Satanic Satanist to fans; asking them to reinterpret and recreate the album’s sprawling artistic vision, and thus continuing a long open dialogue between Portugal. The Man and their followers.
And of course there is the issue we can’t ignore here, that of a band with a unique and hardwired DIY pedigree signing to Atlantic Records. While our punk rock muscle memory might be trained to react vehemently against bands that are seduced into putting ink to page on a major label contract, keep in mind that the Portugal. The Man and Atlantic Records relationship was the result of a long, mutually respectful courtship. While their new label has a well-documented history of famed recordings left in its wake, it was Atlantic’s artist development that brought the band into the fold. As Gourley explained in a gushing open letter to the band’s fiercely loyal flock, “We are people. We are people that happen to love music, we happen to live, eat, sleep, think and love within this bubble of music.” He continues, “Don’t expect to hear from our mouths things like paying our dues, or working towards this moment. No mention of eating poorly or sleeping on hardwood floors. That is what we do for music. We did not go through all that because we thought one day we would hit our payday, we did it because we love what we do. This will not change… It is who we are.”

Cults is an indie pop duo from New York City, best known for their first single, “Go Outside,” which was named Best New Music by Pitchfork. According to Pitchfork, “‘Go Outside’ has the innocent and balmy feel that brings to mind Swedish indie pop, with a tinkling glockenspiel cutting through humidity, an appealingly lazy bassline and joyous sing-along vocals.” Released as a limited-edition 7" on bright yellow vinyl, the single (b/w "Most Wanted") sold out at the pre-order stage.

Edward Scissorhands. The board game Operation. Sonic Youth. Claudia Schiffer? Plastic monkeys! These are among the pop-culture artifacts that appear in the epilepsy-inducing slideshow video for “Hurricane,” the first single from MS MR. Until recently shrouded in anonymity, the atmospheric indie-pop duo from New York City has proven universally intriguing, earning breathless attention from Pitchfork, Forbes, and Perez Hilton alike.

In the trip-hoppy “Hurricane,” smoky-voiced Lizzy Plapinger sings, “Welcome to the inner workings of my mind/So dark and foul I can’t disguise,” while a push-and-pull of echoey strings and staccato percussion (courtesy of the producer stylings of Ms Mr other half Max Hershenow) envelop her voice. Technically, the song, which hit No. 1 on Hype Machine, is about Hurricane Irene, which careened towards Gotham last year. The video? Not so much.

“I see something different every time I watch it,” concedes Max. “The video is sort of a cross section of the images we've collected on Tumblr, which we essentially use as an ongoing mood board.” If there’s one philosophy driving MS MR (pronounced “miss mister”) —dabblers in chaos theory who’re as goofy as they are thoughtful—it’s media-theorist Marshall McLuhan’s famous observation that the medium is the message. MS MR are so committed to that sentiment they handpicked each “Hurricane” image themselves.

“We’re interested in exploring the nature of mixed media and collage,” says Lizzy, “and how music transcends all these various platforms.” Chief among them: MS MR’s lively—if thoroughly mystifying—Tumblr page, which they unprecedentedly used to debut their second EP, the critically acclaimed Candy Bar Creep Show, song-by-song. (Their first release, Ghost City USA, was a self-released collection of demos.)

The EP, which sets the foundation for MS MR’s still-untitled album (out early next spring), references everything from ’80s to’90s pop, doo-wop to country. That kitchen-sink aesthetic won the attention of vintage-sound wiz Tom Elmhirst (Adele, Amy Winehouse), who mixed and did some additional production on it at the legendary Electric Lady Studios. “Tom helped us more fully realize the album as we imagined it” says Max. “He responds to music more emotionally and viscerally than anyone I’ve ever met. It was the perfect match.”

The aural Jenga that is MS MR was born of Lizzy and Max’s vast inspirations. “We both listen to a lot of different music from all different genres and time periods,” says Max. “So we like to approach each song as its own project and experiment with combining unexpected elements.”

It’s a stroke of serendipity that Lizzy and Max are even making music together. They may giggle uncontrollably and complete each other’s thoughts, but these Vassar alums never really knew each other during college. Lizzy was a media-studies major, releasing records under her burgeoning imprint Neon Gold. (She’s gone on to release records by artists such as Passion Pit and Ellie Goulding.) Max was an urban-studies major with a concentration in modern dance, and started composing music for his choreographies. They met fleetingly through friends. But really connected after they graduated, when Lizzy needed an unbiased sounding board for her secret project, and Max was looking for new artists to collaborate with.

“There was sort of an element of Internet dating to it,” Max says, laughing. “Throw caution to the wind! Send someone an email, hope for the best.” He liked what he heard, which only terrified Lizzy more. “I was nervous because I had never sung in front of anyone before, so when he told me he was interested I actually put it off for a few months.”

They finally connected three months later in December 2010. To find their footing as collaborators, they recorded a sweeping cover of Patrick Wolf’s “Time of My Life” in Max’s closet-turned-studio. Curious to see where else the music could take them, they decided to give it another go and try their hand at some original material. This led to the swelling, mercurial tune we know now as “Bones." "It's quite a personal song and definitely set a tone for the band," says Lizzy. “In person, we're quite upbeat and bubbly, but the music is a much more honest space and outlet for us."

Only now, it’s become public. MS MR finally unveiled their live personae in March with a rocked-out gig at Brooklyn’s respected Glasslands Gallery. "I think people maybe expected two people on stage with a laptop, but we were adamant from the beginning that we would never do that!" says Lizzy. "We wanted the live show to do the recoded tracks justice," continues Max, "so we perform as a band to give it the lushness and energy we aim for while recording." Since their Glasslands show, they’ve moved on to bigger venues while touring with Marina and the Diamonds, an outing they affectionately refer to as their "training-wheels tour.”

“Really,” continues Max, “this whole experience has been about discovering undiscovered parts of ourselves."

Even in the urban wilds of Brooklyn, there may be no one else like Jean-Philip Grobler, otherwise known as St. Lucia.

Originally from Johannesberg, South Africa, Jean grew up performing with the Drakensberg Boys Choir School. When the choir wasn’t traveling—St. Lucia toured Japan, Australia, Europe, the US and more—they stayed in an enclave tucked in the South African mountains, learning everything from Bach and minimalist opera to African War Songs and Celine Dion.

A young musician could hardly find better training, but as a young teenager, he started to feel that he’d had his fill of classical music, and it felt like an epiphany when he discovered the music of Radiohead. “In South Africa, we used to be quite limited in what we were exposed to in terms of experimental music, and so hearing OK Computer for the first time was like experiencing a completely new Universe. I think it was also my own little form of rebellion against the rigidity of choir life’, he laughs. Eventually, he left the creative “small pond” of South Africa for England, where he spent three years studying music in Liverpool.

St. Lucia’s journey thus far ended—as many do—in New York City, where he started working on the tracks that would turn into his debut EP, to be released in the spring. The St. Lucia EP will mark the first full-length release on Neon Gold Records, the formerly singles-only label that first released Passion Pit, Ellie Goulding and The Naked & Famous.

The atmospheric quality of St. Lucia’s electronic pop is powerful, with the musician’s global travels and history of exotic hideaways effortlessly passed onto the audience through his dreamy, shimmering synths, and multi-layered arrangements. The listener is transfixed and transported into some collective memory of childhood summer.

St. Lucia was born out of a moment in early 2010 when Jean-Philip looked to the past for inspiration. Growing frustrated with a rock project that was starting to feel forced, he delved back into the music that had first inspired him: early Madonna, Fleetwood Mac, Peter Gabriel and other songs from his youth. ‘I became obsessed with a certain wave of nostalgic pop music, mainly from the 80’s, that to me represents some of the best pop music ever made. The music from that era has this unabashed, completely over-the-top quality to it, and that seemed fresh to me.’ He also rediscovered African music. ‘Growing up in South Africa, African music was always there, and so it was easy to ignore. But after being away from home for a few years, I began to discover just how amazing it actually is.’

Setting up shop in a small Williamsburg studio, Jean began to record and experiment, and eventually these new influences began to surface in his music. After a year of hibernation, Jean began to open the lid on his new project.“I’d show some stuff to my friends and I could see that they didn’t quite get it,” he says. He soon began to get in contact with people, with the idea of setting up a live band. Teaming up with his friend Nick and girlfriend Patricia—now St. Lucia’s drummer and keyboard players respectively—, the three of them “decided to play the demo’s for people in a context where we wouldn’t say anything about it. We’d just play it.”

It was then that the music got the attention of the Knocks, and St. Lucia was soon signed to HeavyRoc Music. His first single, “The Old House is Gone,” was released in spring 2011, fueling online intrigue. After two explosive shows at CMJ, the hype escalated to match. Neon Gold described St. Lucia as a “well-traveled mysterioso... physically incapable of producing anything less than extraordinary.” Bloggers posted St. Lucia’s second single, “All Eyes On You,” accompanied by proclamations: “This is an anthem,” or, “Beware, your hand will get tired from having to push replay over and over.”

“All Eyes On You,” like the rest of the St. Lucia EP, distills the best qualities of eighties pop—drawing out melodic bravado and euphoric energy and discarding any trace of the saccharine or heavy—and adds arresting, fresh elements of contrast. The EP is luminous and hazy, a tropical electronic dream. It has a notable, singular effect on the audience. “In a way that’s been my ambition, to give people a feeling similar to what the music from my youth gives me.” says St. Lucia.

He certainly delivers. “All Eyes On You” conjures up unlikely juxtapositions: an ecstatic nostalgia, a melancholy radiance, a mix of personal immediacy and the wanton urge to get lost in a crowd.

As an artist, St. Lucia has played into this element of anonymity. He has remained mysterious until this point, allowing a few facts about his unusual background to guide the response to his music. He’s starting to lift the veil: “As an artist, you always have lingering doubts. Are people going to get this? Are they going to think it’s cheesy?”

Ultimately, he sets these concerns aside. “What’s of real value to me is just sitting in the studio, working,” he says. “Or that moment when I’m walking along the street and hear something in my head, and let that idea work itself into an arrangement and then see that come to fruition.’

“Of course, it makes you feel good when your stuff starts taking off,” he adds. “It’s nice that people are writing about it, and that bigger things are coming in terms of remixes and record companies. But really, all I ever want to be doing is making music.”

Boston, Massachusetts funk-punk group Bad Rabbits combine the swagger of 1990’s R&B with the intensity of its hardcore punk roots to create a truly unique and body-moving hybrid sound that is entirely its own. Don’t let the falsetto vocals, timeless chops and choreographed steps fool you – Bad Rabbits explode on stage and create an atmosphere that is at once dangerous and danceable.

Following some good years tearing up local venues and college radio in previous incarnations, Bad Rabbits officially hit the scene in 2009 with its free-for-download Stick Up Kids EP off the band’s web site, garnering attention from hip hop heads, hipsters and hardcore loyalists alike before signing a deal with street wear retailer Karmaloop a year later. National tours with Mike Posner, Travie McCoy, Far East Movement and Foxy Shazam soon followed before Bad Rabbits caught the ear of “New Jack Swing” creator Teddy Riley. Widely heralded as the original rump-shaker as well as hit-maker for Michael Jackson, Bobby Brown and Lady Gaga to name just a few, Riley brought the band into the studio to begin production on the group’s forthcoming debut LP due next year.

Bad Rabbits are the American Dream. The collective first-generation descendants of Indian, Argentinean, Ghanaian and Israeli lineage with a single son of liberty are your tired, hungry and poor invading this nation with a unique hybrid sound that has garnered attention from hip hop heads, hipsters and hardcore loyalists alike. Fuck immigration reform – if the pitiful pilgrims running this country had any taste in music at all, Bad Rabbits would be the gang breaking down borders and barriers from coast to coast and album to album.