| The indie publicity machine has seen fit to crown Silversun Pickups the next big thing. They’re touring in support of their well-received full-length Carnavas. Critics are falling all over themselves to anoint them the second coming of the Smashing Pumpkins. Their music has turned up in a Volkswagen commercial. All this would scream "hype band" if the band’s track record didn’t violently argue the opposite. Hell, for the first five years as a group, they didn’t even have merch.
"We were accidentally pinned as the band that was anti-commercialism," says guitarist-vocalist Brian Aubert. "We never made a mission statement to say that we were never going to have shirts and stuff, but in Los Angeles we were that band. If you are sick of commercialism then go see this band, ’cause they don’t have anything."
And that laissez-faire attitude extended to the band’s musical output as well. It’s one thing to be a band without T-shirts, but it’s another to play for five years and not even have a record.
"We were just hanging out and playing. We didn’t really make a big stink about it," says Aubert. "We just wanted to have fun in the practice space and hang out with each other…. We didn’t really have songs or anything, but we were playing shows. We didn’t have lyrics and I was hardly singing."
In fact, it wasn’t until the band dropped the Pikul EP this spring that many outside the Silver Lake district of L.A had even heard the band. Even so, they were already being groomed. In the same issue of Spin magazine that My Chemical Romance topped the reader’s poll, Silver Lake was profiled as the new hotbed of music in North America. The Spin writer, convinced he was breaking the next Montreal or Portland, chatted up such bands as Earlimart, Midnight Movies and Silversun Pickups like they were going to change the future of rock ’n’ roll. As flattering as it was, Aubert says many from the Silver Lake scene read it with a cocked eyebrow.
"It was almost like a time capsule," he says. "In the same respect people were jazzed about it, but… it’s kind of like an echo. There was more of a scene a couple years ago. And then that echo and article came out and it seemed kind of funny to read about it when it wasn’t exactly at this point. It was almost like you let something go and it came back to you years later."
That’s not to say that the story didn’t cover some worthwhile bands, but if the article had been as prescient as it tried to be, Silversun Pickups would have been the focus instead of a footnote. With a keen handle on guitar distortion, a knack for explosive choruses and a secret love of Krautrock giants like Neu and Can, Silversun Pickups have distilled their influences into something greater. Both Pikul and Carnavas are filled to bursting with post-teen angst anthems and hook-heavy driving tunes – the latter obviously being the appeal to Volkswagen’s ad agency.
Even though the music is great, when a band with an anti-commercialism label gets a sweet licensing deal, it’s not hard to imagine the cries of sell-out. Aubert says that was a concern, but in the end, the bottom line won out. The debate ended when the band realized that four seconds from one song could finance their music habit for quite some time.
"I think it’s pretty well known that bands need to make as much money as they can because labels are so crazy and people are trying to screw bands out of so much stuff," says Aubert.
"I saw the ad and I thought, are you kidding me? These people are crazy. How much money do these people have. It’s mind-blowing. And then we thought, no one is going to know it’s us and everybody knew it was us. We are getting e-mails constantly."
Still, hype-machine praise and sell-out backlash have more to do with the business of show and nothing to do with the music. As cliché as it sounds (and Aubert easily sells this attitude), Silversun Pickups are all about the music.
"I don’t think about that stuff," he says. "We just play and we do what we do and if it didn’t work out there is nothing we can do about it. We couldn’t change it. That is the way we sound when we play together."
EVERY SILVER LAKE HAS A SILVER LINING
The top seven bands from Silver Lake according to Brian Aubert of Silversun Pickups:
1. Spin Darkly My Love
2. 400 Blows
3. Cold War Kids
4. Irving
5. Earlimart
6. Sailing
7. Midnight Movies |
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