Silversun Pickups

La Rocca

Hotel Cafe - May 16, 2006

Live Review by Daniel Brody

Los Angeles’s position as a magnet for hopeful musicians looking for their big break is something of a blessing and a curse.  It’s great to have a billion concert options on any given night, running the gamut of music genres.  It’s fantastic that the most creative people in the hamlets of flyover country descend here to interact and rock out.  But good music is not going to drop in your lap.  First, you’ve gotta wade through the amateur cheeseballs who failed to get on American Idol, the preening metal dudes in West Hollywood who can’t admit the ‘80s ended, and the gorgeous male rock sluts playing watered down grungy rock and waiting to sell out at the first opportunity.  Thank heavens, then, for Dangerbird Records, a label fast becoming a filter for excellent local music.  At a showcase at the Hotel Cafe on May 15, La Rocca and the Silversun Pickups showed, in two distinct ways, the richness of a scene that many hardcore music fans in LA still probably don’t know exists.

Following the shy and seemingly debut performance by singer-songwriter Jim Fairchild (formerly of Grandaddy), La Rocca exuded charisma from the get-go.  Made up of a gang of Irish expatriates, the band channeled the “clinking glasses in a pub” vibe of old British Isles artists like The Faces and Van Morrison.  The songs had sweet, shouty background vocals full of alcoholic sentimentality, and help turn lyrics like “You know that the truth ain’t worth shit” into a toast to good health.  Nick Hanworth’s keyboard tinkles were as comfortable as an instant friend sitting on a barstool.  It all sounds perfect for any poignant situation you can name, and will no doubt soon be heard on all your favorite teenage soap operas when La Rocca’s first full length comes out in August.  Leave it to L.A. to help incubate the best Britpop band that NME hasn’t shouted about at the top of its lungs.

Where La Rocca oozed drunkenness through its music, Silversun Pickups lead singer Brian Aubert was simply drunk.  The show started a bit late, as the Pickups did not get onstage until almost midnight, after a bizarre surprise vaudevillian mini-set from La Rocca tourmate Sondre Lerche, who was apparently recording in the neighborhood.  For most of the unplugged and unannounced Pickups set, intoxication didn’t seem to matter, as the band offered still-rollicking versions of songs of the Pikul EP as well as new tunes off their first full-length, Carnavas, due out on July 11.

Between songs, Aubert launched into hilarious monologues several minutes in length about the Los Angeles music scene, the new Guns N’ Roses album, and requests for more to drink, punctuated occasionally by bassist Nikki Monninger’s apologies.  Nothing to be sorry about; Aubert was only unable to play towards the end, and he made the best of it by walking in the crowd with the microphone, making the new song they were playing into a New Wave, keyboard-driven jam.  It was all very entertaining, unpredictable, and sloppy.  By the end of it all, I was smiling almost as much as Aubert.

La Rocca and Silversun Pickups are gonna explode when they drop their albums this summer, and people who live in Silver Lakey neighborhoods across the American urban landscape will be rocking out to L.A.’s very own indie rock scene.  Although both bands have gigs all over the country, they also have upcoming gigs in our fair city—and they sound great in between sips of whiskey.