Monthly Archives: March 2011

New Bon Iver LP

Singer-songwriter Bon Iver has recently kept himself busy, but he has finally put out some news about his new album, which is scheduled to come out sometime in June. In an article with Rolling Stone, he talked about how he forgot how to write songs and had to relearn everything he knew for the new, yet-to-be-titled album. However, he feels he has adapted, and things will be much different than his first LP, For Emma, Forever Ago. You can read the article from Rolling Stone here.

Arctic Monkeys and The Vaccines Tour

The Vaccines will be supporting Arctic Monkeys in a North American tour starting on May 17. The Vaccines have recently just released their first studio album, What Did You Expect From The Vaccines?, on March 14. Arctic Monkeys will be releasing their fourth studio album, Suck It And See, on June 6. Read more for the tour dates.

5/17 Washington, DC 930 Club
5/18 Philadelphia, PA Knitting Factory
5/19 Boston, MA House Of Blues
5/21 Toronto, ON Kool Haus
5/22 Montreal, QC L’Olympia
5/24 New York, NY Summer Stage
5/26 Detroit, MI Clutch Cargoes
5/27 Milwaukee, WI The Rave
5/28 Minneapolis, MN First Ave
5/30 Denver, CO The Ogden Theatre
5/31 Salt Lake City, UT In The Venue
6/3 Los Angeles, CA Hollywood Palladium

Interview: Surrogate

I just recently had an interview with Daniel, from the band Surrogate. They talked about releasing the new Diamonds and Pearls EP, fun concert stories, the band’s future, and more. Check out the interview below.

LitS: First of all, how are you guys doing?

Surrogate: Good; busy. When we’re not doing this whole band thing, we all work, go to school, some of us are married and have families. All that real life stuff. So there’s definitely not a lot of down time.

LitS: How did you guys all meet?

Surrogate: We all live in Chico, which is a small college town in Northern California, and we basically knew each other from just being in bands and playing shows together over the years. Chris Keene and Jordan used to play in a band called Number One Gun, and when that band parted ways, they started working on some music together and started playing around Chico with Daniel Martin on keys and a couple of our other friends, Trevor, who was also in Number One Gun on bass, and Chris Armstrong who was in a band called Sherwood on guitar. This was 2006 or so. When Trevor had to split to go out on tour with another band, I took over on bass, in the early part of 2007, a couple months before Love is For the Rich came out. Michael took over for Chris A. right before the next record, Popular Mechanics came out in 2009 and we’ve all been playing together ever since.

LitS: What genre would you guys consider yourselves to be and what bands influences your music?

Surrogate: I tend to tell people that Surrogate is a melodic indie pop band, which is something of a cop out, the usual platitudes. But it gets the point across. You can’t really say that youre an “indie” band anymore, because that really doesn’t mean anything. And “indie rock” at least to old folks like me sort of recalls bands like Fugazi or The Dismemberment Plan or bands that were more on the loud side. So melodic indie pop seems to work, at least in so far as it lets people know that we’re definitely not yelling, or playing crazy riffs, but we’re not Ke$ha or some overly tuned radio garbage.

We all have pretty disparate tastes in music, but the Surrogate sound, at least as much as you can call it a general “sound” would definitely seem to fit pretty squarely in that pantheon of post-shoegaze bands like Pedro the Lion, Starflyer 59, Rogue Wave or even Death Cab for Cutie. We’re all constantly trying to dig new music, though, so it’s sort of a constant evolution. Continue reading →