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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.
The band lived to play, and play they
did, at numerous dates at many of the most important
L.A. clubs. 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.
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