Brandon Young is the drummer for SoCal-based band Delta Spirit and he called me from a hotel room in Pittsburgh to talk about wine drinking, slow burning and the other sundry topics that arise when one is kind of a rock star. Delta Spirit is currently rounding out the tour behind their second studio LP History from Below and recently released EP The Waits Room. “The shows have been really awesome,” Young says. “We’re a little tired here and there. The bands we’re on tour with, Darker My Love and The Fling, are awesome. We’re all getting along and hanging out, trying not to drink too much and to eat healthy.”

Other impressively well-balanced insights from Young are as follow:

Where does the title History from Below come from?
[Singer] Matt [Vasquez] read A People’s History of the United States of America by Howard Zinn, who recently passed away. It’s basically the idea of the people’s opinion and the people’s voice about things as opposed to some sort of higher being. It felt like a great title for us. It just made sense for some reason.

Do you mean higher being in terms of government or a spiritual being?
It could be a collective idea of both, but think it’s mostly government. Matt was pretty fired up politically and was reading a lot of New York Times and getting pissed off at a lot of people. It’s kind of vague and just kind of out there.

Is the title reflected thematically in the music?
I guess it could pertain to maybe a few songs on the record. All in all it’s just a title. We don’t try to look into things too, too deeply. When you’re hanging out with your buddies and you guys drink a bottle of wine a piece and talk about a lot of weird stuff and you wake up in the morning and kind of go ‘wow, I don’t want anyone to hear about this,’ it’s kind of one of those ideas. We try not to look into things to deeply, and if it sounds good, it sounds good and hopefully we didn’t drink so much wine that things become cheesy or irrelevant.

Do you think the Americana label that your music gets is accurate?
There are definitely aspects of Americana or folk or whatever you want to call it, there are definitely undertones of that and specific songs that are purely that, but people think it’s hard to put us in some sort of a genre, and we think it’s hard too. There are some aspects of Americana. Our name is fucking Delta Spirit, which couldn’t be more ironic, but we’re definitely not trying to be that, although it definitely has some relevance.

What are you trying to be?
We’re trying to push each other to the next level with anything musically. Every record we make is going to be different. It’s a goal of ours to make it different from the last. We don’t want to get stuck writing the same record every time, so we just want to be a band and be allowed to bleed into other genres and have people still like it. From day one, we sat down and just started jamming and whatever song came out that we liked, we put it out. We just want to be ourselves and we don’t want to think about trying to write certain types of songs or radio singles. Whatever songs are cohesive will end up on a record.

Are there innate differences between History From Below and Ode to Sunshine? Have you progressed since the last album?
The first record was recorded for about $2,500 in our friend’s cabin. So there’s a huge difference right there because we actually had a budget on History From Below. We wanted to record History From Below a lot cleaner and a lot louder. We wanted to do it totally different. We did everything live on Ode to Sunshine. History From Below, the majority of the record was all recorded separately, and we’d never done it before. We’d always just get in a room, put up a couple mics, jam, press record and get it mastered, mixed and done. We actually spent a lot of time on this and I think it really helped us a lot musically. The next record which we’re already going to start writing when we get home, we might do it completely different. We don’t know.

Are you writing material now?
Yeah. We have a bunch of songs right now that are in the works. They’re not really road tested. We haven’t played any of them live, which is always scary to us because things change every second when we play live. Basically the process of it is that Matt and Kelly [Winrich] bring half a song, or some riffs, Jon [Jameson] the bass player and I basically try to get in there and fuck it up as much as possible and it becomes a Delta Spirit song. There’s no real specific way that we do things as far as time frame. The songs on History From Below we had already toured on for two years.

Is there a difference between the albums and your live sound?
There’s definitely a difference. We love to be super loud and aggressive and go back to our roots playing live. Making records is one of the most fun times we get to have; we get to be creative with each other. It is cool sometimes for us to have a softer record and then when people see us live they’re like, ‘holy shit, they actually turn up. I need earplugs.’ I love that aspect. To be honest, if we actually made a record the way we sound live, it would probably come off as a super hard rock band, which we don’t want to be on records.

Why?
I don’t know if we totally try to do it. On Ode to Sunshine it was recorded, I wouldn’t say lo-fi by any means, but in comparison to History From Below it definitely is. The response we got from it was so awesome. When we first started touring people were like ‘I love this record, I can actually sit down and listen to it in my house and it’s great, and then I come see you guys live and it’s three times as loud and way bigger.’ It’s a cool thing. No one wants to go to a concert and watch a band and hear the same thing that you listen to at your house. We don’t want to be that band that basically puts the CD on and just lip-synchs it.

How do you know when you’re playing a particularly great show or really connecting with an audience?
We have such great fans it almost feels that way every night, that it’s the coolest show ever. Our fans are so awesome and they really attach themselves to us and they really get us. We give it our all every night and our fans are giving it their all every night too. It’s a win-win every night to be honest with you.

Do you have a favorite city or venue to play?
Where are you based out of?

I’m in L.A.
Well L.A. is one of our favorite spots to play. It’s like our hometown. It’s always nice, minus having relatives come out. It gets a little weird.

What’s that like?
It’s just a little nerve racking having your parents come out, and I hope they don’t read this, but, especially with a bunch of dudes, you’ve been raised with this expectation of your fathers to go out and get a job or ‘are you grades good enough?’ and that kind of thing. So even though we make this a living, there’s still a boyish kind of feeling of your parents being there and not judging you by any means, but you just want to make your parents proud and you get nervous before every show. It’s the most nerve racking show, when your family is there because you want it to be the best to show them, ‘hey, you made me, and I’m doing a good job.’

When did you first feel that you were doing something successful?
Early on this band was kind of half of a joke, it was just us jamming, and we didn’t think that it was going to anywhere right away, and it didn’t go anywhere right away. We definitely have never been this crazy buzz band that got big quick. We’re still not even that big at all right now. I guess I got that feeling when we put out our first EP. That EP is kind of a half inebriated jam that we did and pressed record and it was just our demos and we said, ‘we have really cool friends who are in bigger bands who want to take us out on tour, we should put this out.’ We got such a great response from these shitty recordings. We were like, ‘whoa, people really like this. We might be able to do this for a living. We might not have to work right now and focus on our passion, which is playing music.’ That was the first really big moment for us and that was one of the first big tours we ever did was with our good friend the Cold War Kids.

Do you think blowing up really fast is somehow detrimental to a band?
It has to do with each individual motive. There are plenty of people who want to get big quick. They want a huge single. They want to make money quickly. They want to be huge. They do that, and that was their whole intention. Hopefully they know that it’s going to be the end of their career in a couple of years, probably, and people are fine with that sometimes. We’re not that way. I think there were times when we were like, ‘fuck this. We should just write some stupid single, get massive, cash in and be done, because it gets so tiring.’ It’s a lot harder to be slow burners like we are. A good friend of ours, Dr. Dog, we played a festival together a year ago and we were at the airport bar having a drink before we all flew out our separate ways. They are the best dudes and some of our absolute closest friends and [bassist] Toby [Leaman] was like ‘you know man, we’re fucking slow burners, and that’s the best way to be. It’s the shittiest way, but it’s the best way in the long run.’ He was like ‘I don’t think we could ever write a pop hit, and if we did, I don’t know what the fuck we would do with it. This is the only way we how to play music, and you guys are the same way.’

It depends on how protective you are over your music, and we are really protective over ours and protective over each other like brothers. So to cash in quick, if that was even possible for us, there’s no way it would ever happen. We have such great fans and I wouldn’t trade them in for 15-year-old girls buying a bunch of merch. I’m 28 years old; I’m over 15-year-old girls hopefully.

Hopefully, yeah. What does he mean when he says it’s the shittiest way but it’s also the best way?
It’s just the hardest way. It’s putting the grind down every tour. Bands that blow up really quick, the first tour they do they have two buses, a crew of 15 and they’re playing a fucking 5,000 capacity theater. For example in Chicago, one of the first places we played was a couple hundred capacity and it was pretty full and now we’re playing the Metro and it’s eleven or twelve hundred, and we did that over five years, which is a long time. It feels good that we worked our way up and we have fans that will stick with us. We could fire our entire team, booking agent included, and book a tour ourselves, and I know for a fact that there would be at least half of the kids would still come out because they’d heard about it and they’re loyal fans. You can’t trade that in for a bubble gum poppy cash in quick life.

Where does the southern sensibility of your band come from? You guys are all from San Diego, right?
No. We try to fuck with any kind of press about that because it’s just kind of funny. John and I grew up in San Diego; Matt grew up in Texas, I lived in Texas for three years. [Former member] Sean is no longer with us, and he was from San Diego, so the majority of our band now is all from San Diego, but we’ve all lived a lot of other places. To answer your question, I know that you’re getting at the southern Americana folky vibe, I think it’s just shit we grew up on with our parents. I was a pastor’s kid and I grew up on hymns and crazy soul music and black gospel. It was just in us to eventually play it. It’s just an undertone too. It’s a piece about us that’s definitely somewhat of an influence, but we all grew up on old Black Flag and The Adicts and old punk and Nirvana, and I think live we pull a lot of those influences out.

Matt, himself, who’s the soul of our band as far as the writing goes, he’s a folk writer. He writes stories. It’s in him to write stories. He can talk to anybody for hours. He’s got some of the weirdest facts. If he wanted to, be he could be a traveling hobo story teller on a guitar with a harmonica and a bottle of rye whiskey on his hip. He is the real deal. It’s in him to write stories. That’s what a lot of folk music is, telling stories, and I think it’s why we get pinned that way because Matt our singer is a storyteller and that’s how he writes a lot of his music.

There’s a line from your press releases that reads “We lose nearly everything before we’re done, before we’ve been finished off or written to a stop. We’re wrecked to the point that we need saints and saviors because there’s no doing it on our own. There’s no human being that can get us through these ruts. It must be out of body.” What does that mean to you?

The only thing I could maybe answer is that at some point have searched, or are searching. We’re a band that doesn’t think that we know it all, and we’re continually searching for a lot of meanings in a lot of different places in our lives, and just life in general. We are kind of wanderers for sure.

Wanderers how?
In our own personal beliefs about things and the existence of anything spiritual in life. All of us feel very differently on the subject, but we’re all collectively respectful. By wanderers I mean that we’re always continuously looking for what’s out there and being smart about it and researching and not just putting things down because that’s what someone else believes, which I think is a terrible thing this world has come to, just pointing a finger. We try to get across the idea of going out and being aware and not just doing nothing. You should be in tune with what’s going on in the world, in tune politically, in tune with any kind of spiritual aspect if that’s what you’re searching for. Go out and find it. Don’t have anyone tell you what to do. Don’t be a follower. Make your own decisions. That’s one thing I for sure believe is a collective thought in all of our minds.

Is there anything innately Californian, or southern Californian about your sound? Maybe. It’s funny because people have asked that question before and commented that they think we sound like an east coast band, and I don’t even know what that means.

It’s hard to put anybody in a genre now. It’s all kind of annoying. There are so many genres out there. Back in the ’50s and ’60s you had jazz, classical rock and roll, blues and R&B. We’ve progressed into all these crazy different types of music, which is great, so there are going to be genres that have to be made and titled. As far as southern California sound goes, the only southern California type thing we’ve done is our song “Golden State.” We love California. We love it to death. There have been talks of moving, but honestly we love our spot in Long Beach right now. It’s so great, and it’s the culture we grew up in. Surfers and lots of white boy reggae.

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Delta Spirit plays The Fillmore in San Francisco on December 7 at 7PM and at The Music Box in Los Angeles on December 8 at 8PM.

In the late ’60s, The Band holed up in a house named Big Pink in West Saugerties, in upstate New York. Fresh off of backing Dylan’s infamous 1966 tour (as The Hawks), the group rented a house in upstate New York and wrote the music that became their debut album, the aptly titled Music from Big Pink. Dylan later joined the group after a serious motorcycle accident and they recorded a series of widely bootlegged demos which later became The Basement Tapes.

Below is the first footage I’ve ever seen of The Band actually playing in the now mystified house. Looking pretty young, the group rips through a very loose ‘King Harvest’. A live version of ‘Long Black Veil’ is tacked on to the end of the video for bonus fun.

The National released a video for an alternate version of “Terrible Love”, part of an expanded edition of 2010’s High Violet, set for a November 22nd release on 4AD.

The video, directed by frontman Matt Berringer’s brother Tom, features tons of behind-the-scenes footage from their 2010 tour, including their European festival stops and their performance at a Madison, WI rally for President Obama (including security pat-downs by Secret Service).

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The Flaming Lips frontman used his own blood to create a new poster.

Seriously.

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Deerhunter’s latest full-length effort, Halcyon Digest, is a softer album with less rockers than you’d expect. Does that mean you shouldn’t check it out? No, but it does mean that Microcastle still crushes it in my book.

Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy produced legendary Mavis Staples’ new album, You Are Not Alone. The title track is an especially beautiful showcase of Tweedy’s songwriting abilities and the two recently teamed up to perform it on the Colbert Report.

Anyone else like Department of Eagles over Grizzly Bear? Yeah, I know it’s practically splitting hairs, but whenever I listen to DoE tunes I can’t help but find myself saying – “damn, why didn’t they take this energy to Grizzly Bear?” No matter where you net out, fans of both groups should enjoy Department of Eagles: Archives 2003-2006, full of previously unreleased tracks.

Let’s face it, young love in modern America is shit. It’s a toxic brew of naïve experimentation and nasty societal biases that can determine whether someone ends up a bitter curmudgeon or a happy-go-lucky rainbow-puker. Not to mention the worst part, that there’s no easy out- you’re either in the game or getting dinged by flying wreckage in the stands. So, as all things paradoxically personal and widely relatable tend to be, early relationships and their aftermath are abundant in all sorts of art, particularly music.

Looking at The Thermals‘ earlier work, they wouldn’t exactly be pegged as one of those heart-on-sleeve bunches that endlessly wrestle each other for rights to the medium’s low-hanging fruit. Fuckin A and (the far superior) The Body, The Blood, The Machine skewered Bush-era politics and the religious right, respectively, and though they described relationships in their lyrics, these were but easy-to-catch vessels that heavier political messages were buried in.

So what’s a furious band to do when it’s all out of figureheads to bash? TBTBTM’s 2007 follow-up, Now We Can See, and now Personal Life, give an all-too-clear answer: musically keep the rage, but lyrically pander to the widest common denominator.

To their credit, the group has never sounded better on record — frontman Hutch Harris’ yelp has settled into a more attractive croon, his guitar lines still slithering pop-rock bliss (try not to head-bang along with single “I Don’t Believe You”), Kathy Foster’s songwriting prominence on the record has helped bring her thunderous bass-chug to new heights, and new drummer Westin Glass brings a consistent percussive creativity that the group has been struggling to find for years, single-handedly giving classic punk anthems like “Not Like Any Other Feeling” the extra punch they need to keep intriguing. With all this compositional energy pulsing within the album, it’s no surprise that they’ve never sounded more like an actual band.

The problem here is that the importance of song and the message have been terminally reversed, the crunchy chords and catchy anthems delivering lyrically-empty ear candy on a silver platter. This may not necessarily be a bad thing for the artists, since if the band keep heading down this road of bigger hooks, reasonably clever lover’s rhymes and jangly crowd-pleasers they’re bound to hit commercial big time. Still, from a listener’s perspective, the journey sure doesn’t help Personal Life’s staying power. This ain’t no rebellion; for better or worse, it’s just a rocking slice of modern life.

[3.5/5.0]

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To be honest, Philip Selway never seemed too comfortable in the drummer’s seat. His live technique is close to trance-like it’s so off-putting, with his bright bald head aimed straight into the audience’s eyes while his arms thwack at seemingly memorized kit positions. He hits the parts superbly, does the solos, occasionally brings a fill, but he just never managed to cultivate a presence on par with, well, any other given member of his main-band-which-shall-not-be-named. So where Yorke’s The Eraser and Jonny Greenwood’s soundtracks don’t fall far from the transceiver-craniumed tree, it’s no surprise that the Selway solo outing, Familial, is more able to successfully distance itself from his larger project’s near-mythic narrative.

This isn’t a full-blown revolution, but a pleasant change of pace. Electronically tinged bedroom guitar ballads are the order of the day, with Selway’s crackling near-whisper fitting neatly together with his impressive acoustic picking (he’s called this album the result of “bedroom noodling”, and the practice shows). Initially, this style gives chills, nowhere more so than the first few tracks. “By Some Miracle” starts the show off superbly with its faraway female accompaniment and singalong chorus, followed immediately by the dubstep-like production and neurotic lyricism found on “Beyond Reason”.

In a manner eerily similar to his other bandmate’s proper solo outing (we’re not letting you down for The Eraser, Thom), it’s not long after those initial excited minutes that Selway’s limitations rear their ugly heads. There’s only so much he can do on these songs with a single acoustic tone, and his voice, as nice as it is, refuses to show any sort of emotional range beyond “airily whimsical”, and when it does, as on the wannabe-anthem “The Ties That Bind Us”, it becomes obvious why he keeps it caged. Thankfully the heartfelt musings on family living and adult responsibility just beneath the songwriter facade keep the record from dipping into complete irrelevance. Still, it’s a near-damning injustice that a profile such as Selway, finally given full reign over a private project, can’t be anything more than a charm.

[3.0/5.0]

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