Author Archives: Crystal Eckstadt

Jessica Louise Dye, frontwoman for NYC surf-pop combo High Waisted, steps out with grace and poise on her new solo venture Hello Lightfoot. With her kitty meowing in the background, she sat down with us to shed some insight on her new confessional, off-shoot endeavor.

Upon moving to New York City to start her solo project, Dye realized she didn’t possess the confidence to make the record she wanted to make. Dave, one of her best friends during this time, who in a support role steadfastly pushed her to believe in herself and her talents. Forming High Waisted, Dye learned to challenge herself within the confines of a band, but after Dave’s passing in March she knew it was time to let the sun in the room and revisit some earlier, brushed-aside songs.

Referring to Hello Lightfoot as her “self-care project,” she went through the many stages of grief and says that “having something to feel inspired by is one of the only things that can really help you when it’s so hard to put the energy into yourself. Even though I did a lot of the recording on my own, having this project was a good reason to reach out to people when it came to mixing or photos. It gave me a reason not to hide, and the connection part is enormously important.”

Looking at old songs with fresh eyes was an organic process, like a living creature that grows and changes through the years of emotional experiences, Dye says. At their inception, the songs’ melody and vocals were influenced by Metric and Feist, but in this new era she finds herself drawn to other diverse, strong women such as Robyn, Lykke Li, and Billie Eilish, for inspiration.

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PHOTOS: JULIA LOFSTRAND | Twenty One Pilots, duo Tyler Joseph (vocals) and Josh Dun (drums), have been selling out venues since 2016. They are far beyond the days when Joseph’s mom would stand outside the band’s native Ohio State University gigs and ask people to come to her son’s show. The Greek Theatre, the third stop of the Los Angeles leg of their highly awaited “Takeover Tour” was no exception in numbers. Other Los Angeles stops included the legendary Troubadour, The Wiltern, and The Forum. 

A couple of weeks prior the band played a unique venue: before the start of the “Takeover Tour” Twenty One Pilots and Robolox, a virtual reality company, filmed a 20-minute set featuring the duo as avatars for an interactive VR music concert. The virtual leg of their tour received just over 13 million visitations. But back on planet Earth, specifically The Greek Theatre—and with vaccination cards or negative covid tests in hand—the crowd was clear that they were there for the real thing.

Cited by Rolling Stone magazine “as one of the hardest-to-categorize hit acts in recent memory,” there was no confusion amongst their fans as they shape-shifted their way through rap, pop-punk, reggae, and pop piano ballads with impassioned stage theatrics among their 21 song set. There were also black ski masks and rhinestone studded goggles.

During “Message Man,” Joseph dipped his hands in a bowl of his signature black warpaint, representing his insecurities, and offered them up toward the sky. Josh Dun’s drums were moved directly into the crowd for “Saturday.” During “Ride,” Joseph let the audience know it was his father’s favorite song as he crowd surfed deep into audience and ran back up to the stage to finish on piano.

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Remembering Ian Curtis, born on this day in 1956. —Ed.

As the gritty 1970s turned into the gaudy 1980s, three friends on the brink of their twenties in Ruislip, a London suburb, Dave, Ken, and Mark, were consumed by music. Home to ancient parishes, Ruislip’s steel-laden sky dims the life beneath it. Dulling the atmosphere even further was Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, otherwise known as the “Iron Lady.” Clamping down upon workers’ unions, civil unrest, and racial tensions, the class divide soared and not much since has changed. Existence is an intermix of negative and positive tensions and the most compelling music is a mirror of these forces. Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures is its ultimate reflection.

Unknown Pleasures was released on June 15, 1979. Shoulder-to-shoulder with Siouxsie and the Banshees, Joy Division are considered to be pioneers of post-punk and their music was unlike anything heard at that time. The album is a marriage of two genius individuals—lead singer Ian Curtis, author of inwardly perceptive and melancholy lyrics, and studio maven Martin Hannett behind the production console.

As drummer Stephen Morris said in a recent livestream, “Headstock Festival Presents: Moving Through Silence,” a tribute at the 40th anniversary of Ian Curtis’ death, “He’d have notebooks full of words. We’d just start playing the riff and he’d go into his MacFisheries bag and pull out a piece of paper and just start singing. At the time, everyone was starting a band, but he loved writing and poetry. He was into T.S. Eliot, and Burroughs, he was very very literate, and very creative. I met his English teacher, he’d sent me a nice email saying how much he thought Ian was very talented, even at school as a writer. If he hadn’t done music, he would have written fiction.”

With a background in chemistry, Hannett understood science but was fascinated by sound. Unknown Pleasures was his great experiment with the latest technology—the first AMS Digital Delay Machine. His control was legendary, drummer Stephen Morris made to play every drum separately on some tracks—an insane process that created the atmospheric space the album is known for. By isolating each member in the studio and also mixing the album himself, Hannett was able to craft Joy Division’s sound and style—the subsequent output a masterpiece that is just as avant-garde now as it was then.

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PHOTO: KEVIN W. CONDON | A classically trained pianist since the age of four and a teenage punk rocker, Bailey Cooke is creating music under the moniker of GOLDEN. Landing on Tunecore’s “21 Women to Watch in 2021” list, the creation of her brand of bedroom pop is an organic process with all songs written, performed, engineered, and produced by Cooke alone.

Everything from the her recordings to her music videos are created in her Brooklyn apartment, but this wasn’t always the case for Cooke. In the early stages of GOLDEN, she wasn’t well versed in the “brotools,” her word for more technical recording equipment—you know the stuff the dudes go to school for. Creating demos on her voice memo app, she’d plug her analog drum machine through her Echoplex into a bass amp and her voice into a guitar amp, and with said equipment she’d drag all 250lbs of it and her 100lb self in an Uber just to play a live show.

The weight has lifted since learning to engineer and produce her own songs, a path she never set out upon. “Like most emerging artists I was on the search for the perfect producer, and really by sheer luck I fell in with the crew of engineers at Electric Lady Studios,” she says. Through a friend Cooke was introduced to Grammy award-winning recording and mix engineer Phil Joly, a major collaborator with The Strokes, Courtney Barnett, Violent Femmes, Lana Del Rey, Common, and many more.

On off days, Joly would let her hook up her gear in Studio D at Electric Lady, nudging her to learn more. “I think it’s a dangerous spot to be in—needing someone else to figure out how your music should sound or finish your song. It’s sorta similar to expecting someone to read your mind,” she says.

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PHOTO: KELSEY HART | Deap Vally is known for their raw, high energy, and liberated rock. Lindsey Troy (guitar, vocals) and Julie Edwards (drums, vocals) have consistently brought unladylike rock ‘n’ roll realness to the stage.

Their sophomore album Femejism (2016), produced by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Nick Zinner, engaged with a more post-punk garage rock sound after their hard blues-rock debut album Sistrionix (2012). Last year saw the release of Deap Lips, a collaborative project between Deap Vally and Wayne Coyne and Steven Drozd of The Flaming Lips. Deap Lips is the first in a series of Deap Vally releases to follow later on this year.

The just released “Digital Dream” EP is a subtle transition to organic collaboration with different artists and friends. Whether it be a mutual fan encounter at a restaurant or bonding over a bonfire at Brody Dalle and Josh Homme’s house, each artist had met Deap Vally’s members during chance encounters over the years. Rather than limit themselves to their customary guitar and drums arrangement, they added whatever instrument a track called for in whatever genre or mood was spontaneously occurring.

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PHOTO: ALEXANDER THOMPSON | The current diversion into isolation has silenced the hustle of many emerging artists, but not for multi-instrumentalist Dräger—he’s been artistically thriving. Holed up in his apartment with his girlfriend and taking notes on “how the desperation affects us all,” he wrote and recorded 30 songs in 2020. At the recommendation of his publishing company, Bankrobber/ Rough Trade, the songs turned into a full LP, Goths à la Discothèque, set to be released this April on Trash Casual Records, followed by a vinyl release.

Dräger, a Brooklyn based experimental artist, is the superimposed sleek persona of Spencer Drager—writing, recording, producing, mixing and mastering his own music, much like Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker’s single vision driven production. “Dräger allows me to go where I want to go in the moment,” he explains, “I just hate living in a box.” A formidable undertaking done right, Dräger’s lucid dreamworld is a synthpop exploration of the snares of our self-absorbed and anxious digital world.

“The Villain You Need,” the first single off of Goths à la Discothèque, an album he says that is “not super dark but it’s not purely in the bliss of dance. There are a lot of brooding moments and some political moments, but it’s all easy to keep a party going and most importantly, there’s just a lot of attitude while still maintaining vulnerability.” Alluring and introspective, his music is for those who find value in irony but still want to let loose.

“The Villain You Need,” is in stores now.

Often compared to Stevie Nicks, and as flattering as that sounds, it’s a comparison I don’t find apt. Yes, Lissie’s voice is haunting and spiritual like our favorite Gold Dust High Priestess, but it’s the sheer power of her voice, a commanding instrument of its own, that makes her incomparable.

“I don’t think I’ve ever felt like a resident of one genre of music,” Lissie tells me when I ask her what music has inspired her. “When I was in high school, and especially getting my driver’s license with that freedom—my dad had a Dodge Dakota pickup truck—I would cruise around and roll my windows down and listen. I was listening to mainstream country, gangster rap. I was listening to classic rock: Janis Joplin, Fleetwood Mac, Jefferson Airplane. I really was hungry for all of it. I loved Sheryl Crow, Sarah McLachlan, Fiona Apple, Liz Phair, and I loved Metallica.”

Lissie’s eclectic and diverse taste in music is well represented on her own albums as well as in her choice of covers. And Lissie loves her covers. “Thank You to the Flowers” is her third covers EP to date. As I talked with her on the phone to get to the hows and whys for this new collection of songs, she told me, “I’ve always done a lot of covers. I try to do it with a lot of reverence and respect, hopefully, for the artists who shared these amazing songs that help us all get through life’s twists and turns. And for me, the pandemic, and just everything—it was the politics, and the pain and cruelty. It was just such a heavy, heavy summer.”

Her first two cover EPs, “Cryin to You” (2014) and “Covered up in Flowers” (2012), honored the likes of Metallica, Danzig, Kid Cudi, Joe South, and Lady Gaga—songs that her voice brought entirely new life to. “The Black Album, I was cryin in my bedroom because Danny asked my best friend to homecoming instead of me or whatever… laying on my bed and listening to “Nothing Else Matters” crying, like oh poor me.”

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During this period of historic uncertainty, the fight for the survival of our independent record stores is directly mirrored by the dark stages of our local independent theatres, clubs, and performance spaces which have been shuttered due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s been cited as well that 90% of these concert venues may never, ever return.

Enter the National Independent Venue Association (NIVA) whose #SaveOurStages campaign has provided a spotlight on this perilous predicament with a unique mission to “preserve and nurture the ecosystem of independent live music venues and promoters throughout the United States.” Without help from Congress the predictions are indeed quite dire and TVD encourages you support the S. 3814/H.R. 7481, the RESTART Act, by telling your legislators to save independent music venues via the form that can be filled out and forwarded right here.

This week and next we’ll be turning our own spotlight onto previous live concert coverage as a reminder of the need to preserve the vitality of live music venues across the country—and indeed across the globe—and while we’re at it to celebrate the work of the fine photographers and writers at TVD who are all itching to get back into the pit. 

PHOTOS: JULIA LOFSTRAND | Alvvays is an indie dream pop band based in Toronto and fronted by the enigmatic Molly Rankin. I wasn’t too familiar with Alvvays’ music prior to the show, however Antisocialist and Alvvays, their two recorded albums to date, have produced a substantial amount of catchy music with an even stronger live presence.

In an interview with She Shreds magazine, Rankin said that for both albums she had listened to a lot of The B-52’s, Dolly Mixture, Felt, and The Cocteau Twins—the combination morphing into something familiar yet uniquely their own. Rankin’s voice is airy, the vocals are substantive, and for me, the band feels like an amalgam of post-punk and pop. It’s hard to capture how good this band is live and they definitely won me over. It’s no small accomplishment to keep a crowd engaged before the band they came to see, but Alvvays stood on their own here, and by doing so really set the stage.

By the time the band changeover was finished, every empty seat was filled at the Greek Theater, the smaller sister venue to the The Hollywood Bowl which is nestled inside Griffith park. It’s a venue within a forest—a respite from the chaos of the city and a beloved summer venue among Los Angelians.

This was my fifth time seeing The National here in Los Angeles and I am not alone in frequency—I heard one guy say this was his 57th National show. This band has a cult following much like the traveling fans of Phish and Dave Matthews Band, and despite forming in Cincinnati this show felt like a homecoming for them. I am not sure if it was the intimacy of the venue or the giant spruce trees looming around us, or the unusual amount of time that lead singer Matt Berninger spent in the crowd, but it was apparent that we all felt connected and the vibe was just right.

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