Der Tagesspiegel – Kultur: Pop
The Airborne Toxic Event: Schweißtreibend
Im Frannz Club begeisterte die kalifornische Band mit punkigem Rock’n’ Roll und presste den letzten Tropfen Schweiß aus den Zuhörern
By Patricia Wolf
August 26, 2009
Sie kommen aus Los Feliz – einem Stadtteil von LA. Los Feliz ist spanisch und heißt „die Glücklichen“. Und sie machen definitiv glücklich. Die rund 300 Leute, die sich an diesem schwül-heißen Sommerabend im Frannz Club eingefunden haben, um The Airborne Toxic Event zu hören, sind schon hin und weg, als das Quintett die Bühne betritt. Bei gefühlten 45 Grad im Club zerschmilzt ganz schnell jegliche Ehrfurcht vor der vermeintlichen Intellektualität der Band, die ihren Namen einem Roman des amerikanischen Schriftstellers Don DeLillo entlehnt hat.
Zu unterschiedlich sind die fünf Typen, als dass sich die Band auf einen Begriff reduzieren ließe. Sie haben von allem etwas – schon rein äußerlich. Sänger Mikel Jollet gibt in Anzug, Krawatte und mit großer Brille den Elvis Costello, während Drummer Daren Taylor mit seinem Schnäuzer an Freddie Mercury erinnert und zuletzt mit freiem Oberkörper auf sein Instrument eindrischt, dass man Angst hat, es könnte entzwei brechen. Bassist Noah Harmon geht als klassischer Westcoast-Surfer-Boy …
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Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (F.A.Z.) – CD der Woche (CD of the Week)
Und wenn ich ein Tischler wäre?
Nennt es Pubrock, nennt es Postpunk: Die kalifornische Band The Airborne Toxic Event macht Poesie, zu der man tanzen kann, traditionsgesättigt und mit Riffs an der richtigen Stelle.
By Edo Reents
July 10, 2009
Photo Credit: Autumn de Wilde
Wenn man diese Platte flüchtig anspielt, dann möchte man abwinken: schon wieder eine dieser Postpunk-Bands, deren Mitglieder mehr Zeit vor dem Spiegel verbringen als mit dem Stimmen ihrer Instrumente. Selbst wenn sie es täten – die Instrumente funktionieren, und am Äußeren ist, wie oben zu sehen, auch nichts auszusetzen. Das unbetitelte Debüt gehört zu den schmissigsten, bündigsten Rockplatten der vergangenen Jahre, voller guter Einfälle, reizvoller Akkordwechsel und gefälliger Melodien, wie sie auf die LP-Distanz nur ganz wenige Band hinbekommen.
Die Strokes und die Kooks, die Fratellis und die Thermals, Razorlight und wie die Mucker alle heißen, müssen sich jedenfalls warm anziehen. Und wenn man dann noch hört, dass der Sänger, Rhythmusgitarrist und Hauptsongschreiber Mikel Jollett eigentlich Tischler von Beruf ist – „I used to be a carpenter“, sagt er, …
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USA Today – Life
On the verge: Airborne Toxic Event flies high,
stays grounded
Checking off the to-do list: The Airborne Toxic Event has gotten a lot accomplished in the past year. The L.A.-based indie rock quintet’s self-titled album, released in August, has passed 100,000 in sales. Hit single Sometime Around Midnight peaked at No. 4 on USA TODAY’s modern rock airplay chart and is at No. 30 on the hot AC. In March, the band signed with major label Island Def Jam. And on a radio show that month, U2′s Adam Clayton name-checked Sometime Around Midnight as a favorite song of his. “Check that off our list of things to do,” says lead singer/frontman Mikel Jollett, 35. “Now I just have to write a novel and father a child.”
Paying dues: “Journalists have asked us how we feel about our ‘meteoric rise,’ ” says bassist Noah Harmon, 27. “There’s been nothing meteoric about it. We’ve played 300 shows in eight months.” The group will perform at Milwaukee’s Summerfest (Sunday) before kicking off its world tour at Dublin’s Oxegen …
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Billboard – Music: Happening Now
Flying High: Airborne Toxic Event Builds
Momentum, World Tour
By Jason Lipshutz
June 27, 2009
Photo Credit: Autumn de Wilde
The trouble with fronting a constantly touring rock outfit is that it leaves little time to finish a novel. That’s what Mikel Jollett singer/guitarist of the Airborne Toxic Event, came to realize as the momentum behind his band’s self-titled debut album stalled his prose output.
“I want to finish it, but I keep going on tour,” he says. “I like writing at home late at night, when I’ve just finished reading a good book. It’s hard to write on a bus: it’s a whole other lifestyle.”
Jollett probably won’t finish his novel anytime soon. The Los ANgeles group has announced an 11-country world tour beginning June 28 at Summerfest in Milwaukee. The band’s itinerary includes stops in Europe, Asia and Australia with a North American fall tour kicking off Sept. 17 at the Fox Theatre in Pomona, Calif.
The trek follows the ongoing success of Airborne’s first album, which has sold 110,000 copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan. After its release …
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Sunday Mail – The Big Ticket with Avril Cadden
Toxic Mikel’s a Borne Fighter
LA band battle on after singer loses his voice
By Avril Cadden
June 7, 2009
Photo Credit: Kristy Sparow
When Airborne Toxic Event frontman Mikel Jollett’s voice was ravaged by disease, he would have been forgiven for quitting music.
Instead he and his band simply reworked their songs to suit—and they’ve never looked back.
Mikel said: “Autoimmune disease attacked the nerve that controls my vocal cords, so one is partially paralysed.
“It takes about six months to a year for that to heal so that we had to lower all the keys and redo everything.
“I’d usually just scream through the set but I have to lower everything and sing.
“It’s really just a way of getting sympathy. I figure if I tell everyone they’ll let me get up and sing.”
MIkel and bandmates Steven Chen (guitar), Noah Harmon (bass), Anna Bulbrook (strings) and Daren Taylor (drums) are based in Los Angeles.
At Glasgow’s QMU in March, fans even tried to get on stage. Mikel said: “It was almost a riot. That was great. We like that.
“We want that sense you don’t …
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The Fly – Profile
Borne To Do It
By Harriet Gibsone
February 2009
Ask most musicians what aspirations they have for their band and they’ll share grand desires for Almost Famous-esque success and seminal accomplishments. But not for The Airborne Toxic Event’s Mikel Jollett, as he solemnly reveals his wishes to The Fly: “I hope nobody gets sick. I hope nobody catches a horrid disease. I hope nobody gets in a car wreck. If somebody goes to a bar, I hope they get back home safe. I only worry about keeping everyone together.” His fretfulness isn’t surprising when you hear the emotional carnage the frontman has battled, though, and, after a few minutes on the phone to Jollett, The Fly realises his ominous approach to life was instrumental in the formation of the band. “I’d taken a year off to write a book [about, umm, 4 friends who must confront their terminal illnesses] and then my mum got cancer,” Mikel explains in his reposeful lilt. “I’d been dating this girl for a long time and we broke up. Then I went and saw a doctor and he told me I had Vitiligo and Alopecia …
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Time Out London – On The Up
On The Up
Self-publishing, self-financing indie outfit TATE bring their literary-minded indie-punk-folk-klezmer-whatever to the 100 Club on Monday.
By Eddy Lawrence
January 29 – February 4, 2009
They’re actually already… well up.
We have to admit, it’s a bit rich giving them an On The Up, given that their EP came out more than a year ago and they’ve already played two tours of the UK. But now is when it’s already played two tours of the UK. But now is when it’s already starting to happen for TATE. Radio has picked up on ‘Sometime Around Midnight’, the lead single from their forthcoming debut LP, with a vengeance. Not bad for a band who are still, technically speaking, unsigned.
‘In the States now, we’re at No 8,’ boggles frontperson Mikel Jollett. ‘We’re the only indie rock band in the chart. We don’t understand it, because it’s a song that has no chorus, that’s just a story about a bad night. It’s very sad, and there’s no little thing you can bop your head to. There’s like two choruses on the whole album. When we first finished it, we were courted by all these major labels, and they …
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NME – Feature
Way Out West Coast
Bitter exes, desperate housewives and dead dog’s ashes won’t stop LA troubadours The Airborne Toxic Event spreading their love. Martin Robinson joins their crazy Californian road trip.
By Martin Robinson
January 24, 2009
Photo Credit: Andy Willsher
Bill Hicks called it “turd city”, Woody Allen said its only cultural advantage is “being able to turn right at a red light”, and Larry David fans will know Los Angeles as plastic and preening to the point of insanity. Imagine our surprise, then, to find in the suburb of Silver Lake, a warm-blooded indie scene bubbling dirtily underneath the shiny Hollywood machine. The Spaceland club is the meeting point for the city’s struggling artists, writers and especially musicians; its tin foil-clad stage has raised the likes of Cold War Kids and Silversun Pickups, but tonight NME has come to meet its most promising band yet—The Airborne Toxic Event.
Named after a section of Don DeLillo’s masterpiece novel White Noise, the band are centred around Mikel Jollett, a man very much in the Springsteen mould of raw feeling, anthems …
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Q Magazine – Incoming: New to Q
The Airborne Toxic Event
Death, sex and getting dumped shape anthemic US indie rockers.
By Mic Wright
March 2009
Photo Credit: Nick Wilson
WHO? Epic indie rockers founded by former journalist and up-and-coming novelist Mikel Jollett after the worst week of his life. During seven days in March 2006, Jollett’s mother was diagnosed with cancer, he learnt he was suffering from a potentially life-threatening autoimmune disease, and his long-term girlfriend left him. He says, “I just didn’t care anymore. I thought, maybe I’ll pay my rent, maybe I won’t, but what I am going to do is start a fucking rock band.”
DOOM BUT NO GLOOM: Jollett’s tales of death, depression and being dumped might suggest melancholy music, but the band write strangely uplifting songs that range from the dark tale of a late-night cuckolding, “Sometime Around Midnight,” to “Gasoline,” a sparky rocker Jollett introduces onstage as a “hymn to teenage sex.”
DON’T TURN THE OTHER CHEEK: A brutal critique from the Pitchfork website led Jollett to issue a long and carefully argued response in the form of an open …
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