Silversun Pickups
- Esurance Main Stage
- September 13
- 08:45 PM
In the brutally cold world of Big Rock Biz, there’s something very comforting about just knowing that a band like L.A.’s Silversun Pickups exists. That feeling derives from the group’s searingly sumptuous music, sure, but it has a lot to do with knowing their rather humble origins and super-admirable raison d’etre.
Silversun Pickups, you see, rather than being just another fiercely determined young band willing to claw and scrap their way to the top of the rock heap, genuinely appear to be far more like a gang of real, true friends who happened, quite fortuitously, to meet as a result of their mutual love of – shock horror! – music, and who seem to enjoy each other’s company as much as they like playing their own brand of ravishing rock noise.
And in fact, guitarist-singer Brian Aubert, bass player Nikki Monninger, drummer Christopher Guanlao and keyboardist Joe Lester are bona fide pals who’d played together or in mutual friends’ bands when they finally settled on a Silversun lineup and began playing shows at local clubs, which further broadened their innately formidable playing chops and established loving loyalties among a growing crop of seekers and sinners.
Silversun’s initial forays into live performance weren’t exactly stunning achievements in stage artistry, according to Aubert. “In the beginning, we were just trying to figure out what we wanted to do, didn’t even know if this was what we wanted to do. But we were playing clubs while we were learning – and I was learning to be a frontman all of a sudden.”
“But after a little while we started honing in on where things were going and what we liked and didn’t like,” says Aubert. “It was like trial by fire, playing on stage all the time. It was scary, but you learn fast that way.”
Their initially haphazard performances didn’t phase their growing core of devotees, who seemed to easily grasp the inner grace of Aubert’s plaintively savage songs about the whys and wherefores of love lost and found, wrecked loyalties and fear of genetically inherited failure genes. These fans didn’t mind that the band’s otherwise wickedly pretty tunes’ delivery was a bit rough-edged, or that Aubert was initially painfully shy in front of a mike; it was obvious that Aubert and co’s. desire knew no bounds.
The band lived to play, and play they did, at numerous dates at many of the most important L.A. clubs, which found their stage sets growing more confidently not cocky but in greater command of their playing prowess. Aubert’s guitar was a rapidly developing feral beast of tight chipchop splendor and near-Hendrixian fuzzy howl in songs that seemed to reference the spare, driving cool of Neu while injecting a barely constrained glee – something like youthful romance, in the more tormented My Bloody Valentine way – into great walls of shredding white noise and a big throbbing rhythm section. The interplay of Aubert’s guitar with Lester’s spidery/splintery keyboards on songs like “Three Seed” made their combined effect resemble an enormous shiny machine being launched into the farthest reaches of the solar system.
Ex-Pine Marten keyboardist Lester was an important addition to the band, says Aubert, “because a) he was family – we didn’t want anybody we didn’t know, like take out an ad in L.A. Weekly: ‘Must not wear cowboy hats.’ Joe is like having a guy who’s not a keyboard keyboard player—not a scientist, but like an orchestrator. He does things that really trip out the guitar, like sample it and make sounds that you can’t really tell what it is.” “Or we’ll use our voices with something from Joe, as just a sonic element,” says Monninger.
Guanlao adds, “People come up to us and they’ll be like, ‘Dude, how’d you do that sound on the guitar?’ or ‘How’d you do that sound on the keyboard?’ and it’s like, ‘No, the guitar player wasn’t doing that, neither was the keyboardist.’”
Yet Silversun’s secret weapons are the achingly potent melodies of their songs, which poke their lovely, shy heads out and ultimately proclaim their power in rare shades of melancholic ardor. While so many bands oft-claim supreme melody as the underpinning of their noise, with the Pickups it can claim moral superiority: Silversun radiates palpably great melodies that – the real test – simply won’t leave you alone no matter how you try to shoo them away.
That melodic/toughness no doubt encouraged Dangerbird Records to sign Silversun Pickups for an EP, called Pikul (pronounced pie-kul), a six-song set crammed with polished versions of many live favorites such as the growlingly ethereal “Kissing Families” and ”.All the Go Inbetweens.” These songs sealed in the love among Silversun Pickups’ L.A. fans and critics, and their subsequent mounting acclaim led the band to undertake an increasingly heavy touring schedule, which found them playing alongside Brendan Benson, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Dead Meadow and Two Gallants, and they returned home to record, Carnavas, their full-length debut for Dangerbird (July 25, 2006).
