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

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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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

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 durch, derweil Keyborderin und Violinistin Anna Bulbrook im schwarzen Paillettenkleid über die Bühne und Boxen oder sich unter das Publikum mischt. Allenfalls der schlaksige Gitarrist Steven Chen hält sich eher im Hintergrund.

TATE beginnen roh und laut – mit Stücken, die sich vielleicht als Punkrock’roll bezeichnen lassen – wenn es denn eine Einordnung braucht – der sich die Band freilich in Interviews konsequent und resolut entzieht. Wer unbedingt nach Einflüssen sucht, kann später sachte Bright Eyes, Arcade Fire, Talking Heads aus ihren Songs raushören.

Spätestens ab Happiness is overrated und Round Midnight wird aus einem Konzert eine Mischung aus Party, Muppet Show und Zirkus. Nach einer guten, intensiven Stunde, als alle, wirklich alle schon schweißgebadet sind, pressen die fünf mit ihren Zugaben von Johnny Cashs Folsom Prison Blues und einem Smith-Medley aus den Zuhörern noch mal den letzten Tropfen Schweiß heraus: Panic in the Streets of Berlin. Mikel Jollett hat seine Anzugjacke zwar immer noch nicht ausgezogen, aber seine Brille abgesetzt und es wird deutlich, dass er nicht nur ein toller Entertainer ist, sondern auch toll aussieht. Mit Wishing Well verabschieden sich die fünf supersympathischen Musiker. Einen Wunsch frei? Bald wiederkommen!

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.

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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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.

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, das klingt so schön nach Tim Hardin! – und nach getaner Arbeit, mit schmerzendem Rücken im wesentlichen nur noch Bier trinken will. Damit haben sie schon gewonnen.

Tanzbare Poesie

Aber das ist ein aus Sympathie vergebener Vorschuss, wie man ihn auch Bands geben kann, die nur Fußball im Kopf haben. Die Wahrheit liegt immer noch auf dem Plattenteller, und da ist denn zu sagen, dass The Airborne Toxic Event alles richtig gemacht haben. Sie wissen um die verführerische Kraft von Rockklischees und haben, obwohl ihre Aufmachung anderes vermuten ließ, mit dem in letzter Zeit wieder so gängigen informierten Kunststudentenrock nichts zu tun. Es ist, wie es ihre Heimatzeitung, die „Los Angeles Times“, in hoffentlich aufrichtiger Bewunderung formulierte, „Poesie, zu der man tanzen kann“.

Zu verhältnismäßig dichten Texten, die einen entschieden skeptischen, auf Desillusion zielenden Geist atmen und nicht nach dem klassischen Strophe-Refrain-Schema angeordnet sind, schnurrt die bestens geölte Maschine ab, und alles hört sich an, als würden die durchgekauten Wahrheiten hier zum ersten Mal serviert. „Wishing Well“ klingt nach dem Springsteen von „Born To Run“ und dessen Nachmachern von The Hold Steady; „Papillon“ puckert wie die schnellen Songs der hierzulande leider immer noch so gut wie unbekannten britischen Dogs; dann kommt auch schon der erste Höhepunkt: „Gasoline“ hört sich erst an wie „Roxy-Music-Imitat („Love is the Drug“), aber das täuscht. Hier übernehmen die Rabiatheit von The Jet und die betont rotzige Ättitüde der ersten Razorlight-Platte schnell das Kommando, das Tempo ist beachtlich, aber immer noch tanzbar.

Die Gitarren (neben Jollett Steven Chen) sind da, wo sie hingehören – ganz vorne –, aber Bass (Noah Harmon) und Schlagzeug (Daren Taylor) sind auch nicht zu überhören und verrichten hier wie überall kraftvoll ihre Arbeit; nur was die ohnehin kaum zu hörende Violine (Anna Bulbrook, die auch Keyboard spielt) in der Besetzung zu suchen hat, versteht man nicht so richtig. Vielleicht ist das eine Reminiszenz an Velvet Underground.

Überbewertete Fröhlichkeit

Am reizvollsten klingt die Band, wenn sie sich dem Pub- und Glamrockgestampfe hingeben, wie es die Fratellis wieder hoffähig gemacht haben; die entsprechenden Titel gehören in ihrer Entschlossenheit denn auch zu den überzeugendsten des Albums. Aber The Airborne Toxic Event liefern auch die raffinierten Synthesizer-Schwelgereien, wie sie Spätsiebziger/Frühachtziger-Attraktionen wie Blondie, Icehouse oder Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark schon im Repertoire hatten. Und die in Amerika bereits durchschlagend erfolgreiche Single „Sometime Around Midnight“ fängt mit Streichern an (Anna Bulbrook nun doch in ihrem Element), die klingen wie Mascagnis „Cavalleria Rusticana“, so dass man fast meint, Martin Scorsese, der ja auch ein Rocker ist und diese und ähnliche Klänge schon mehrmals sehr wirkungsvoll eingesetzt hat, säße an den Reglern.

Aber dann nimmt auch dieses Lied Fahrt auf, der romantische Eckensteher-Geist, die Stimmung einsamer, verregneter Abend wehen hinein, bevor dann alles, nun ganz nach Art der an sich so scheußlichen achtziger Jahre, zerbröselt wird. Ärgerlich ist nur, dass die Albumversionen uneinheitlich sind, drei gleichfalls sehr gut Bonus-Titel gibt es nur in der britischen Ausgabe.

Insgesamt ist die Musik von The Airborne Toxic Event geprägt von einer lauernden Nervosität, die wenig zutraulich erscheint. Ob es das ist, was die Band auch bei der absoluten Prominenz in Amerika so beliebt macht? Mikel Jollett hätte dafür Verständnis. Seine Hauptsorge aber ist, dass ihm nun, wo die Band so erfolgreich ist, keine Zeit mehr zum Schreiben bleibt. Im Bus herumzureisen (im August auch durch Deutschland!) und mit Freunden herumzuhängen, sei alles gut und schön, „I’m happy, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me“. Wie sagt er aber selber in einem Lied? „Happiness is Overrated“. Nichts gegen Bücher, aber ein Mann wie er muss wissen, was er zu tun hat.

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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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 Festival (July 11). The band is back in the USA in September for a fall tour.

Keeping up the pace: Airborne makes a concerted effort to avoid the usual pitfalls of the rock-star lifestyle. “We don’t do drugs, not because of some moral obligation, but because we know that drugs are usually what split up bands,” Jollett says. “And I want everyone to stay healthy.”

Literary beginnings: The band’s unusual name refers to Don DeLillo’s White Noise, a 1985 postmodernist novel about a man who faces death after a chemical mishap, dubbed the airborne toxic event.

Different vision of the future: The rootless life of a rocker wasn’t what Jollett had envisioned for himself. “I pictured myself in a house with a wife and kid, living comfortably on my novel sales,” he says. Then in one week, everything changed:His mother was diagnosed with cancer, he was diagnosed with a genetic skin disorder, his girlfriend dumped him and he quit a two-pack-a-day smoking habit. “I realized I wasn’t working on a novel, I was writing songs,” Jollett says. “So I started this band.”

Creating Airborne: Daren Taylor was the first to join. “He was a pizza delivery boy, but all drummers used to be delivery boys,” Harmon says. “(They) get a lot of practice banging on their steering wheels.” Guitarist Steven Chen and viola player Anna Bulbrook held office jobs until the band took off. “Noah was the best bass player in L.A.,” Jollett says. “He turned me down for months, but I just had to have him.”

Treading carefully in today’s economy: “We’re still a DIY band — we load our own equipment, we sleep several to a hotel room,” Jollett says. By necessity, rock stars are being forced to cut back on “private jets, big entourages and pouring Champagne on themselves,” Harmon says. “It’s not a great business model.”

Flying High: Airborne Toxic Event Builds

Momentum, World Tour

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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Flying High: Airborne Toxic Event Builds

Momentum, World Tour

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 in August 2008 on Majordomo Records, “The Airborne Toxic Event” has slowly amassed a following, topping the Top Heatseekers chart in its 40th week.

The attention still feels surreal to Jollett, who began his 20s as a budding novelist and freelancer. His writing credits include NPR, the Los Angeles Times and Filter magazine. In fact, Jollett was offered a column by NPR before Airborne formed.

But he abandoned his writing aspirations in 2006 when his mother was diagnosed with cancer and he was diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder within the same week. Realizing “I wanted to make my days count,” Jollett started writing four songs a w eek on his guitar. He soon recruited fellow Los Angelenos Steven Chen, Noah Harmon, Anna Bulbrook and Daren Taylor to form the Airborne Toxic Event.

The band—whose name is a reference to a Don DeLillo novel—quickly understood the importance of showcasing Jollett’s writing skills. The group’s original press kit consisted of the first quarter of his novel, which is about four friends all dying of different diseases. “No one really read it,” Jollett says, “but I think it made a statement.”

The album feeds off that literary prowess, incorporating various scenes from the novel. Jollett’s stark imagery is matched by an integration of compelling string arrangements. The third single “Wishing Well,” No. 35 on the Modern Rock chart, is a slow-building tale of escape buoyed by Taylor’s propulsive percussion and Bulbrook’s shimmering viola.

“Airborne” started attracting attention with the release of the dramatic first single, “Sometime Around Midnight.” The song peaked at No. 4 on Modern Rock and was named iTunes’ No. 1 alternative song of the year on its Best of 2008 list. The song is in its third week on the Adult Top 40 chart, climbing to No. 29.

The band continued to play sold-out shows before being approached by Island Records. Soon after signing the act, Island rereleased the album March 16.

“The thing about major labels is this: When you meet Satan, he’s not such a bad guy,” Jollett says. “We’re still partners with Majordomo, but Island’s been great for us. They gave us international distribution, which was important because our CD wasn’t available in a lot of European countries.”

Airborne has been honing its performance skills as the opening act for such groups as Franz Ferdinand, Silversun Pickups, the Fratellis and Kaiser Chiefs. Since then, intereset in the group has been steadily growing. “Last Call With Carson Daly” ran a special episode May 20 devoted entirely to the band, with concert footage and interviews.

Jollett sounds as surprised as anyone that the band has stumbled upon commercial appeal. “When one of our U.K. shows sold out in 20 minutes, it was insane,” he says. “These songs were written in isolation, and now they’re letting us go out and engage people. I’m grateful for that.”

Toxic Mikel’s a Borne Fighter

LA band battle on after singer loses his voice

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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Toxic Mikel’s a Borne Fighter

LA band battle on after singer loses his voice

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 know if the place is going to burn down. That’s rock ‘n’ roll, otherwise it would be like folk music with a drummer.”

Mikel had worked as a carpenter, a journalist and fiction writer, and never planned a musical career.

The turning point came when he was diagnosed, his mum found she had cancer and he and his girlfriend split.

He said: “A bunch of c**p went down but all I cared about was music.

“My mum is fine now. It was scary though.”

He still doesn’t view the band as a job. He said: “I used to be a carpenter. You come home, your back hurts, you feel you’ve earned your sup of beer and made something. That’s work.”

He can’t do carpentry these days. He said: “There’s not a whole lot of tools on the tour bus. I thought about getting some sort of table saw. We could start selling stuff—like an Airborne Toxic Chair.”

The band are set for T in the Park after two years together and their single Sometime Around Midnight is one of the best this year. Mikel is bemused by the plaudits.

He said: “I thought I wanted a second novel, maybe a wife and a child. Instead I’m living in a rock band bus with four friends traveling around. I’m happy but it just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.”

• The Happiness is Overrated EP is out tomorrow
• Airborne Toxic Event T in the Park, July 12

Borne To Do It

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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Borne To Do It

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 and he said that those things wouldn’t hurt me but other thins might now potentially kill me…” Jollett laughs at the absurdity of it all, before manically exclaiming, “I was like, ‘FUCKING SHIT!!’ This all happened in a matter of days!”

Where most people would feel emotionally pummelled by this succession of heartache and prospective death, Jollett felt compelled to pick up the guitar and utilise his emotions into the collection of intensely pulverising tracks that form TATE’s eponymous debut. “I started playing every day and I couldn’t do much else—I wanted to write this novel but everything was cloudy, then I just decided that all I’d do was play music. I spent a year locked in my apartment, the book was maybe a quarter done and I had around a hundred songs instead,” he says in his drowsy LA drawl. With the help of bandmates Steven Chen, Anna Bulbrook, Noah Harmon and Daren Taylor, The Airborne Toxic Event (aptly named after a chapter from Don DeLillo’s death-obsessed White Noise) formed and began making jovial art-pop grooves out of the misery. For some, the band’s expansive Arcade Fire orchestration and despaired vocals might suffocate with their sheer brooding ambition, but this shouldn’t put you off. Throw down your barriers, accept TATE’s earnest foreboding and cease the day—you don’t know when it might be your last.

‘The Airborne Toxic Event’ is released on Major Domo Records on February 9th.

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.

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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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.

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 would actually sit us down and go: “you guys are a great band—we just wanna change the song in the following ways.” And we were like, “No, that’s our record.” And they’re like, “Oh you guys are so funny, you gotta go spend a couple hundred thousand dollars and get a pproducer that’s gonna add all that bullshit noisy stuff that you get on a major label record and compress the fuck out of everything and change the songs so they have unnatural hooks and choruses.” So we just didn’t.’

It’s surprising that the band ever got together at all.
Firstly, because frontman and songwriting chief Jollett never wanted to be in a band in the first place, and was pursuing a promising career as a novelist and been accepted at swanky writerly retreat Yaddo. Having set aside a year to write his debut novel, he suddenly saw his muse change tack.

‘You know, you hear about old ladies who suddenly decide to become marathon runners, or somebody who decides that they are gonna grow the biggest pumpkin? People do all sorts of odd things, and the amount of time that they spend on it, they sort of distort themselves in the process. Writing’s a lot like that. You’re so committed to a task, it changes the way you think. The way you imagine the world. It seems in retrospect like: Oh yeah, that all happened and we became this rock band! Of course, that makes sense! But at the time it was completely mental. People thought I was crazy.’

That said, Jollett isn’t the least likely pop star in the band.
At least Jollett had a grounding in actually liking pop music, unlike classically trained keyboardist/viola player Anna Bulbrook, who had barely heard of this strange new ‘rock ‘n’ roll’ fad before joining TATE.

‘I realised that I didn’t wanna play in an orchestra,’ says Bulbrook. ‘It’s like being a dancer, it’s a little bit masochistic. This is too, but it involves a lot more drinking and you get to wear whatever you want. I didn’t really appreciate pop music until I saw Arcade Fire live, and then played violin for Kanye West. I had this huge paradigm shift. There’s value to this! It’s a good idea, this rock music! There’s a value in bringing people together and creating, like, a cathartic party, basically.’

They think indie’s a big old load of crap.
The band have been the subject (and occasional target) of many comparisons, from Arcade Fire to Pulp via Springsteen, and for all we know, Men Without Hats. Some critics have seen this as a sneaky tactic to net the broadest possible demographic, but the band maintain it’s the product of varied interests and a low boredom threshold. That said, they’re not going to turn away any fans.

‘Everyone wants to succeed,’ says Jollett. ‘And it’s the exact opposite in indie rock. You gotta pretend you don’t want it, you have to actually pretend that you don’t care. The thing about indie is it’s the only kind of music that defines itself in relation to other genres as being not the mainstream. And what’s funny is how incredibly rigid it is in terms of its attitudes.

‘I think it’s also a class thing. We’re very much a working-class band, and indie rock is middle-class white people. And middle-class white people are generally uncomfortable with emotion. Working-class bands aren’t. We’re completely like: Fuck you, this is what we think and this is what we feel and we’re gonna have big loud backbeats and we’re gonna scream and we’re gonna jump and we’re not gonna act like we don’t care.

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.

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 ...
[Read More...]]]>

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.

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 and charismatic showmanship. Well, when his ex-girlfriends aren’t in the room, that is. Mikel looks panicked when we meet, and whispers, “The album was written about two girls, and they’re both here.” Yeah, as a former Philip Roth-obsessed fiction writer, he’s got a tendency to not hold back his songs, so his current girlfriend watches out for flying glasses while Mikel introduces us to TATE’s moustachioed, Naboo-ish drummer Daren and golden girl (not as in old, just, y’know, golden) violinist Anna. They’ve recently got back from a frankly mental 30 Shows in 30 Days UK tour, which proved to be a lesson in how classy Britain is. Highlights included playing on AstroTurf in a marquee in Hayle, being paid in food in Fife (Daren: “Dude, weird Scottish pies!”) and playing to one shaven-headed man with his trousers undone in Hull (Mikel: “He was staring at Anna. I was figuring out how to aim my guitar at his head if he touched her”).

Mikel remembers how the US election changed how they were welcomed around the country. “I was walking in Camden the morning after and people were high-fiving me. Like, ‘You finally did something right!’” You could say (if you wanted) that Obama’s transforming of America’s image is being reflected in the way Mikel is trying to change the image of LA. As he introduces us to local legends The Movies, he insists, “Where we live has nothing to do with the Hollywood industry.” Certainly, in contrast to most hipster scenes, everyone is incredibly friendly.

So why in fuck’s name, the following night are we—NME!—not watching the band in Spaceland, but instead sat cross-legged on the living room floor of a family home as TATE play acoustically to a crowd of 40-something suburbanites? Well, despite turning down major label deals in favour of tiny indie Majordomo, the band still have to occasionally suck the hugely powerful cocks of US radio stations, and as they’re currently going crazy for aching single ‘Sometime Around Midnight’, the band are returning a favour by playing a competition winner’s house. Trouble is, the winner is slightly older than anticipated. On the plus side, he’s got in about $80,000-worth of booze, which helps the bewildered band immeasurably. As they play next to ashes of the old family dog on the hearth (the winner earlier explained “he’s with us still”), Mikel diffuses the awkwardness of the situation by telling the stories behind the songs, chatting to the little kids and even stroking the new dog. The band pull it off because: 1) They can really play and 2) They look hot. Imagine The Strokes sexing up Arcade Fire and you’ve got TATE.

Helping in the hot stakes are handsome devil lead guitarist Steven and jazz degree-owning former construction worker Noah, who looks similar enough to Russell Brand that all he did in the UK was disappoint people. “They were like, ‘Hey, Russell, how’s… oh.’” After the show, they’re at the bar on the back porch fielding the questions of ‘cougars’, US slang for desperate housewives. Being a literary type and a rock star, Mikel is prime cougar prey, but he escapes to grab NME and explain his ability to tell how many drinks his bandmates have had by the way they start a sentence: “Like: ‘OK, this is what it’s about…’ is two drinks. ‘You know what your problems is…’ is four and later there’s, “You’re the type of guy who…’” He then insists NME try on one of his “badass” rings, but since we’re a puny Englisihman only his little-finger ring will fit any of ours. Mikel thinks we look like “the type of guy who carries a switchblade”. In fact we look like ET on a darts team.

Anna tells us that being a classically trained violinist meant she’d barely heard any popular music until two years ago, and has had to toughen up being on the road with a bunch of rock boys. “I find I now make unhealthily close friendships with girls who I meet in bars. Like, ‘Nice to meet you, shall we get our nails done?’”

Daren then drags NME off for a smoke behind the winner’s garage. Daren talks with the hip oldies until a smirking French painter comes over and asks if he can paint the band naked. He goes into detail over the poses. Word gets back to the rest of the band about this, then one of them spots a hot tub and everyone gets The Fear: maybe these people are swingers! Time to leave.

The next day, NME joins the band in their van for a six-hour drive across California from LA to San Jose. Since America is really big, the task of alerting the country to their presence is a daunting one. Still, TATE have a secret weapon: a cowboy. Yes, their guitar tech and driver is a proper cowboy. As in, comes from Texas, is built like Jack Palance, wears boots, leather and a Stetson all in brown (Steven: “So you don’t know if he’s a good cowboy or a bad cowboy”). Mikel hints that with this many big mouths in the group—and they are loud—the cowboy is a useful guy when they get in trouble.

Mikel sits in the back with us as we drive across the California farmlands, passing through both driving snow and beating sun. He tells us his theory that Elliott Smith’s 2003 death in LA caused Silver Lake to bond so closely.

“Everyone knew him, or knew someone who did. It was such a terrible tragedy and somehow it created this sense of community in his wake.” Death, as both a bitch and a great motivator, is the key to understanding where TATE are coming from. A couple of years ago, Mikel managed to win a place at the revered literary retreat Yaddo (previous attendees include Philip Roth and Truman Capote), but then received news which made him stop his fiction and begin writing songs. Inside of a week he learned his mother had cancer and that he had an autoimmune disease which led to chronic skin problems, Mikel recalls the pull towards forming a band in the wake of this.

“My mom getting sick, me getting sick and my dad was already sick, there was a sense that there was only so much time. There’s always things you want to do, but suddenly, it was, ‘Fuck, I really don’t have long to do it.’ I suddenly felt motivated to go, ‘You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to write songs, drink whisky with my friends, play some shows, sing these songs and I’m going to talk to people and engage them, and I want us all to be there, and I don’t want anyone to die…’ it was that kind of feeling: let’s just bring everyone close.”

At the show in San Jose that night, Mikel’s need for connectivity shines through. With his sleeves rolled up, he tells his stories, gees up the crowd and really is uncannily like The Boss. Behind him, Anna looks like she should be in MGMT, Daren in 13th Floor Elevators, Steven in Muse and Noah in Motörhead. They’re a weird mix, but you can’t take your eyes off them, and songs such as the punky ‘Gasoline’ and the Pogues-ish ‘Missy’ provoke the nerds of Silicon Valley into crazed human contact.

The US is sure to fall for their rabble-rousing anthems and, appealingly for us Brits, they love Pulp and are silly pissheads. Much later that night, Mikel decides to play a few songs on the hotel piano at his whiskey’s suggestion. When the bar manager asks him to stop, Mikel says, “Do you really want to be the type of guy that stops the piano player?” Ten minutes later, five police cars arrive. Surrounded by officers, Mikel defends himself by saying, “I was just playing C. Who doesn’t like C? C. (ding) C. (ding) C. (ding)…”

The Airborne Toxic Event, then: loveable life-savers who are not quite succeeding in showing LA to be sane.

The Airborne Toxic Event

Death, sex and getting dumped shape anthemic US indie rockers.

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 ...
[Read More...]]]>

The Airborne Toxic Event

Death, sex and getting dumped shape anthemic US indie rockers.

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 letter on his band’s website. “You get negative and positive press but they didn’t have their facts right. They thought we were from the Sunset Strip. [they're from Los Feliz, Los Angeles] and the guy criticised the songs for having a rhyme structure. You know who else does that? Bob Dylan.”

THE NEXT MOVE: Jollett says the band’s self-titled debut is autobiographical but with his life now on an even keel what about the difficult second album? “I’m a writer, so our songs can be stories,” he says, “but there’s one about my brother kicking heroin.” Clearly Jollett hasn’t run out of drama just yet.

Every toxic cloud has a silver lining

After a ‘week from hell’ in which his life fell apart, music was the best medicine for Mikel Jollett. He tells Dave Simpson about the Airborne Toxic Event’s euphoric sound of recovery

January 23, 2009

Photo Credit: Martin Godwin

Mikel Jollett suffers from autoimmune disorder, a genetic condition that can affect sufferers in all sorts of strange ways. They can be struck down with terrible illnesses, or lose all their body hair. However, the condition is easily manageable with a healthy lifestyle. Doctors recommend plenty of sleep, fruit and vegetables and a stress-free environment. What they do not recommend is that sufferers form a rock band, never mind one that has undertaken a touring schedule that would be stressful at the best of times, which promises little sleep, and would probably make it difficult to get your five portions a day.

Jollett is singer-guitarist with the Airborne Toxic Event, an LA quintet, with whom we catch up in Leeds, before gig 15 of their “30 ...
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Every toxic cloud has a silver lining

After a ‘week from hell’ in which his life fell apart, music was the best medicine for Mikel Jollett. He tells Dave Simpson about the Airborne Toxic Event’s euphoric sound of recovery

January 23, 2009

Photo Credit: Martin Godwin

Mikel Jollett suffers from autoimmune disorder, a genetic condition that can affect sufferers in all sorts of strange ways. They can be struck down with terrible illnesses, or lose all their body hair. However, the condition is easily manageable with a healthy lifestyle. Doctors recommend plenty of sleep, fruit and vegetables and a stress-free environment. What they do not recommend is that sufferers form a rock band, never mind one that has undertaken a touring schedule that would be stressful at the best of times, which promises little sleep, and would probably make it difficult to get your five portions a day.

Jollett is singer-guitarist with the Airborne Toxic Event, an LA quintet, with whom we catch up in Leeds, before gig 15 of their “30 gigs in 30 nights” tour, taking in some of the UK’s least promising rock’n'roll citadels – Aldershot! Hayle! Barrow! – without so much as a day off. Last night it was Yeovil. “The kids were moshing,” says Jollett, nursing a perhaps not medicinal whisky. “They really appreciated it,” says violinist and keyboardist Anna Bulbrook. “They treated us like specimens.” The Airborne Toxic Event might as well have been Coldplay in Barrow, where they made the local paper’s front page.

This is surely one of the more difficult routes to world domination, but the band say they wouldn’t have it any other way. “We’re a live band,” insists Jollett. “We’re not gig snobs. We’ll play anywhere.” They’ve been hitting the boards hard since they formed two years ago, notching up five gigs inside their first three days – one of them at a hardcore punk festival, where they were the only non-punk band on the bill. Some of the locations visited may not be for the faint-hearted, but this approach has served them well. They even had 200 people at their first show, luring them in by a combination of mailing out MP3s and good old family connections. “We have a lot of cousins,” says Bulbrook. Since then, their literary, widescreen rock has been picked up by MTV, the sublime single Sometime Around Midnight is the iTunes alternative song of the year, and has now also been playlisted by Radio 1. For Jollett – an Anglophile – this is an ambition fulfilled. He grew up listening to early Bowie, the Cure, the Stone Roses, Orange Juice and Josef K – all of whom have left their DNA on the Airborne Toxic Event’s urgent sound.

Jollett prefers British bands because they deliberately write songs rather than arrive at them through jams, and he is thus probably one of very few American singers who can find nirvana in a tent in Cornwall. “I thought: We’re on an indie label. We’re 5,000 miles from home, our record isn’t even out yet and people love us.” Which may pacify his doctors. However, Jollett is adamant that playing the songs live is nowhere near as stressful as the process of writing them, which began in late 2005 in what the band refer to as The Week From Hell.

At the time, the frontman was a struggling freelance journalist who’d taken time out to write a novel in the hope of salvaging his career. Then his mother visited the doctor – who found some “suspicious stuff”. She was rushed into emergency surgery for pancreatic cancer. Jollett and the family “camped out” at the hospital for a week, while he also coped with the stress of stopping smoking. “Prior to that I’d been a two-packs-a-day smoker,” he explains. “But your mother getting cancer is scary.”

With his mother’s life hanging in the balance and Jollett’s nicotine-starved nerves rattling, his long-standing girlfriend chose that moment to end the relationship. “It had been coming,” says Jollett. “It wasn’t, ‘Your mum has cancer, I’m dumping you.’” But he does admit the incident put his life into sharp perspective. Meanwhile, he was also becoming ill.

The first thing he noticed were spots all over his face. Then he got pneumonia. Then vitiligo. “I suddenly lost half the hair on my head. I lost my beard. I didn’t have to shave. I even lost an eyebrow! Weird shit like that! I was convinced I was going to look like Moby.” For three weeks, he didn’t do anything. “I was very sick, very depressed. And then one day I got up and played guitar.”

With his mother in recovery – minus part of her pancreas, which the doctors removed – Jollett found that playing guitar for hours a day made him feel better. He’d been unable to write the novel because for him writing and smoking had been inseparable. But he found himself able to jot down short ideas. After several months, he had a eureka moment, realising he didn’t have a novel, but 40 or 50 songs.

“Charles Bukowski used to say it was a battle between you and your typewriter,” says Jollett. “I was that kind of writer. But I realised I had this ability to write songs that I never knew existed.”

In a surge of the same almost giddy euphoria that drives his music, Jollett recruited musicians quickly, finding Bulbrook – a “recovering” classical violinist – in a bar at closing time. “If I had a nickel for every dude that’s said, ‘I wanna tell you about my band …’” she sniggers. “But I heard the stuff and it was better than most bands I’d heard. Plus, there was something about the lyrics.”

Jollett admires Leonard Cohen and Morrissey, and draws inspiration from novelists, too (the band’s name is taken from Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise), but his words are untamed, sounding as if they were literally pouring out.

“Did you see the [Spike Jonze] film Adaptation?” he asks. “There’s a scene where this guy is kinda crazy, but his wife divorces him after a car accident. He doesn’t understand why, but this friend says, ‘Because she could.’ Because her parents had died in that accident. There’s a point where you just think, ‘Fuck it.’ I didn’t care if my credit went to shit, or my gas was cut off. I just wanted to write music.”

Jollett suggests that the disease is responsible for one of his most affecting lyrical traits – the lack of ego in his songs. He’s not afraid to look, as he puts it, “like an idiot”. In Sometime Around Midnight, people stare at him in the street, and not in a good way. He describes the song as “boy meets girl, gets really wasted in a bar, girl’s there with another boy, boy ends up walking alone”. It’s about his former girlfriend. “I think she joked about being my muse. I don’t think she realised it was real.”

Not everyone thinks Jollet’s writing is real. In September, the Airborne Toxic Event were involved in a curious spat with the influential Pitchforkmedia website, which gave their album 1.6/10 in a poisonous review and accused them of being chancers, conceived to satisfy LA’s “worst” desires for a “flagship upstart indie band”. Bizarrely, though, the reviewer described the album as “lyrically moody, musically sumptuous, and dramatic”, but then suggested they were cynically combining Arcade Fire, Bright Eyes and the Strokes – accusing the band of making a great record that sounds a like other great records.

The Airborne Toxic Event shot back in an open letter, praising the reviewer’s other work but criticising Pitchfork’s “preconceptions” about LA and its criticism of bands that do not match a certain indie rock aesthetic. “Pitchfork has slagged many, many bands we admire (Dr Dog, the Flaming Lips, Silversun Pickups, Cold War Kids, Black Kids, Bright Eyes [ironic, no?] just to name a few),” they wrote, “so now we’re among them. Great.”

The spat had the effect of drawing attention to and boosting the “oddly flattered” band, with dozens of web posters applauding them for standing up to indie snobbery “bullcrap” and pointing out that the rumpus would entice casual listeners into hearing what the fuss was about.

Two weeks later in Sheffield, it’s Jollett’s turn to not know what’s real as he takes the stage and announces: “Welcome to night 26 of our 30 shows in 30 nights and we have no fucking idea where we are.” It’s a more ragged performance than their high-octane pop gig in Leeds – but it’s again impossible to ignore the force of Jollett’s drive – even if you can’t help worrying what all this could do to his body.

“I never wanted to look cool,” he declares – and sounds convincing. “I realised I couldn’t be a rock star, because I looked like some weird freak. So I decided I’d better mean it.” Jollett – a trooper to the last – says he would “unquestioningly” play 30 gigs in 30 nights again. Guitarist Steven Chen – who admits he’s not been sober the entire tour and looks, like the rest of the band, as if the tour bus just ran over him – is not so sure. “Next time, we’re taking it easy. Ten shows in 15 days.”

• Sometime Around Midnight is released on 26 January, with the band’s self-titled album following on 2 February. The Airborne Toxic Event play Uncle Alberts, Middlesbrough, tonight, then tour.

Heartbreak makes Airborne Toxic Event iTunes

Fave

Indie band the Airborne Toxic Event shocked the music industry when major LA radio stations began playing the song “Sometime Around Midnight,” which the band had hastily recorded and distributed via MP3. Now the song, which describes the heartbreak of running into an ex, has been named the top Alternative Song of 2008 by iTunes. We spoke to singer Mikel Jollett.

The iTunes thing is nice, but . . . “Music is three or four minutes of art where you tell a story and have a melody. The idea of ranking it the way you would the NBA is a little silly. But it was really flattering.”

Events depicted in “Sometime Around Midnight” are true. “That whole thing happened. That was a few months after we had broken up. I got up the next morning, shook off the hangover, and started writing. I didn’t leave the house for three days. I just walked around in my boxers with the acoustic guitar, working out the arrangements, and I emerged with it three days later.

“Your blood boiling, your stomach in ...
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Heartbreak makes Airborne Toxic Event iTunes

Fave

Indie band the Airborne Toxic Event shocked the music industry when major LA radio stations began playing the song “Sometime Around Midnight,” which the band had hastily recorded and distributed via MP3. Now the song, which describes the heartbreak of running into an ex, has been named the top Alternative Song of 2008 by iTunes. We spoke to singer Mikel Jollett.

The iTunes thing is nice, but . . . “Music is three or four minutes of art where you tell a story and have a melody. The idea of ranking it the way you would the NBA is a little silly. But it was really flattering.”

Events depicted in “Sometime Around Midnight” are true. “That whole thing happened. That was a few months after we had broken up. I got up the next morning, shook off the hangover, and started writing. I didn’t leave the house for three days. I just walked around in my boxers with the acoustic guitar, working out the arrangements, and I emerged with it three days later.

“Your blood boiling, your stomach in ropes” is not a clinical diagnosis. “There’s not a lot of metaphor going on there. That’s just what the night was.”

Everybody hurts. “It’s a fairly universal thing. There are love songs and breakup songs, but not a lot of songs about anxiety and jealousy. I get people from 14-year-old girls to 50-year-old men going, ‘Man, that song got to me.’ ”

My success sandwich. “The next day [after radio stations started playing it], my phone started ringing at 9 a.m., and I didn’t get off the phone for three weeks. Every label, manager and p.r. person called. We were really, really broke, so we were just letting them take us to lunch. We’d ask if we could get an extra sandwich for the road, because my gas had been turned off for nine months at that point, and I had $12 in my bank account.”

Rising rockers take novel approach

The Airborne Toxic Event rose to notoriety in near-record time: Hometown station KROQ began spinning the L.A. band’s first single, “Sometime Around Midnight,” in January, three weeks after the unsigned quintet finished recording it at a friend’s house.

But frontman Mikel Jollett, 34, and guitarist Steven Chen, 30, of the band— which plays the Blank Club on Wednesday — put in years of struggle first. In the literary world, not the musical one.

After Chen graduated from the University of California-Berkeley in 2000, a mutual friend suggested he speak to Jollett, a 1996 Stanford alum, for advice on making it as a writer in San Francisco. At the time, Jollett didn’t even know Chen played guitar, and Jollett “had no ambition to be a musician, none whatsoever.

“I wanted to be a writer. And then this whole music thing just happened. It’s a little absurd.”

In 2006, after years of scuffling, Jollett finally was getting somewhere. He had secured an agent for his in-progress debut novel and been invited to the prestigious Yaddo artist colony in upstate New York, following in the footsteps ...
[Read More...]]]>
Go to article

Rising rockers take novel approach

The Airborne Toxic Event rose to notoriety in near-record time: Hometown station KROQ began spinning the L.A. band’s first single, “Sometime Around Midnight,” in January, three weeks after the unsigned quintet finished recording it at a friend’s house.

But frontman Mikel Jollett, 34, and guitarist Steven Chen, 30, of the band— which plays the Blank Club on Wednesday — put in years of struggle first. In the literary world, not the musical one.

After Chen graduated from the University of California-Berkeley in 2000, a mutual friend suggested he speak to Jollett, a 1996 Stanford alum, for advice on making it as a writer in San Francisco. At the time, Jollett didn’t even know Chen played guitar, and Jollett “had no ambition to be a musician, none whatsoever.

“I wanted to be a writer. And then this whole music thing just happened. It’s a little absurd.”

In 2006, after years of scuffling, Jollett finally was getting somewhere. He had secured an agent for his in-progress debut novel and been invited to the prestigious Yaddo artist colony in upstate New York, following in the footsteps of such luminaries as Saul Bellow and William Carlos Williams.

But as he embarked on the final push to finish his novel in his L.A. apartment, Jollett received a devastating flurry of bad news: the end of a relationship, a cancer diagnosis for his mother and a diagnosis of a genetic autoimmune syndrome for himself.

Jollett responded by singing and playing guitar for hours, every day. He had toyed with writing songs as a young man, but this experience was entirely different.

“When you’re young and you write songs, you either go into melodrama, or there’s a certain posturing that goes on because you want to look a certain way,” he says. “I just suddenly didn’t care about any of that, and I would write what actually felt real to me.”

For months and months, he poured out his heart in song to an audience of one: his neighbor’s cat.

“When I looked up a year later, I’d written maybe 100 songs and maybe 10 pages of the book,” he says. “So I was like, ‘Well, I guess this is what I want to do.’ ”

To the shock of his family and friends, he declined the invitation to Yaddo, put the novel on hold and — with new drummer friend Daren Taylor — went about launching a band, named after a term in Don DeLillo’s novel “White Noise.” They invited Chen to add a few keyboard parts and ended up with a lead guitarist. Jazz-trained bassist Noah Harmon and keyboardist, violinist and violist Anna Bulbrook completed the lineup.

Neither Jollett nor Chen had much experience. Jollett had played a little garage rock with some Foothill College students while he was at Stanford University. Chen’s public musical résumé consisted of two gigs with a San Francisco band in which everyone else spoke Italian.

So when KROQ got behind the band, and record label reps started flocking to its residency at L.A.’s Spaceland nightclub, it was all uncharted territory.

“That was a really cool and weird experience,” Chen says. “You kind of decide at some point you’re not going to try to get into the head space of how weird everything is, because everything’s just weird after a certain point.”

Not surprisingly, there was a backlash. When the band’s eponymous CD came out in August, Pitchfork Media, the online arbiter of indie-rock hipness, gave it a scathing 1.6-out-of-10 review, dismissing it as a calculated effort to target its readers’ wallets by using tricks stolen from Bright Eyes and the Arcade Fire.

“I love the Arcade Fire, but I don’t think we sound anything like them,” Jollett says. “I think we’re way darker, more like the Jesus and Mary Chain with a string section. That’s what I was going for.”

Though Jollett and Chen were new to the music game, both knew a thing or two about rock journalism. The band responded to the negative review by posting “An Open Letter to Pitchfork Media,” in which the members praised the critic’s tenacity and commitment while calmly rebutting his assumptions about the band.

“We felt that it was important not to let them have the last say,” Chen says.

“Sometime Around Midnight” — a moody epic about seeing an ex at a nightclub — continues to open doors for the band. This month the song was named iTunes’ alternative song of the year.

But the band isn’t resting on its laurels. It just finished a grueling round of 30 shows in 30 days in the United Kingdom. And when the Airborne Toxic Event gets on stage, as it will for the KCNL “Channel 104.9″ holiday show Wednesday at the Blank Club, members of the band give it their all.

“The idea of staring at your feet while you play chords and wear your checkered shirt — that whole idea is stupid,” Jollett says. “We’re very much a rock ‘n’ roll band, and we scream and jump and sweat.”

After years of grappling with prose in solitude, Chen says he is learning to appreciate the rock life. “There’s something more communal in the experience of playing a live show,” he says. “You’re bringing everyone else along with you.”

Jollett hopes he’ll have a chance to wrap up his novel — about terminally ill young adults living life to the fullest (“it’s supposed to be funny,” he says) — before the band’s second CD comes out.

“It’d be cool to finish the record and have a few months before the release to really just disappear and work on the book, but I don’t know,” he says. “I’m new to this whole thing.”

New Music Radar – The Airborne Toxic Event

When death haunts you, your music really starts to matter

September 13, 2008

Photo Credit: Pamela Littky

“My whole life I was invincible like everyone else,” says Mikel Jollett, singer with L.A.’s The Airborne Toxic Event, fingering the patches of his scalp. “You’re the talented one, the smart one, the cute one, and then suddenly it’s like, ‘Hey, you’re gonna lose all your hair and your face is gonna turn white and you’ll die. Oh and so’s your mom.’”

At the start of 2006 Mikel was diagnosed with a genetic over-active immune system which could cut 20 years from his life. The next day his mum rang to tell him she had cancer. The day after that he split up with his long-term girlfriend. The day after that he quit his job to dedicate his life to writing the Great American Novel.

One month later, finding his intense personal gushings better suited to rock than fiction, he picked up a guitar and poured his brittle heart and battered soul into ...
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New Music Radar – The Airborne Toxic Event

When death haunts you, your music really starts to matter

Photo Credit: Pamela Littky

“My whole life I was invincible like everyone else,” says Mikel Jollett, singer with L.A.’s The Airborne Toxic Event, fingering the patches of his scalp. “You’re the talented one, the smart one, the cute one, and then suddenly it’s like, ‘Hey, you’re gonna lose all your hair and your face is gonna turn white and you’ll die. Oh and so’s your mom.’”

At the start of 2006 Mikel was diagnosed with a genetic over-active immune system which could cut 20 years from his life. The next day his mum rang to tell him she had cancer. The day after that he split up with his long-term girlfriend. The day after that he quit his job to dedicate his life to writing the Great American Novel.

One month later, finding his intense personal gushings better suited to rock than fiction, he picked up a guitar and poured his brittle heart and battered soul into hundreds of tracks. “All I did was make music. The feeling wasn’t that I had so much more to say but that I had so much less time to say it.”

The result, the band’s home-recorded debut, is a record where the expanse of ambition of Arcade Fire and MGMT gets a hypodermic of The Clash’s wild, gnashing stem cells. Within months their album went Top 20 in the iTunes Rock Chart on the back of their brilliantly unpredictable Silverlake scene shows.

“The idea of punk rock is that you’re gonna go to a show, and some fucking shit is gonna go down,” Mikel says. “You might get in a fight, the cops might show up, the place might get burnt down, you might meet a girl and get laid, but whatever it is, the music is visceral and engaging. You’ve only got so long to live, so it’s vital. Let’s scream and stomp our way through our worst fears and greatest desires and let’s everybody shed a tear and say, ‘Fuck man, that was amazing.’”

The Airborne Toxic Event: art for heart’s sake.

NEED TO KNOW
What: Psychamerica with a punk punch
For fans of: Modest Mouse, Arcade Fire, MGMT, Band of Horses
Live:: UK dates TBC
Download: A free Airborne Toxic Event song from NME.COM/NEWMUSIC/RADAR

Breaking Out – The Airborne Toxic Event

West Coast upstarts rewrite indie rock with passionate flair

By Mikael Wood September 2008

Photo Credit: Clark Hsiao and Jessica Haye

According to Airborne Toxic Event frontman Mikel Jollett, Pavement ruined indie rock. “Don’t get me wrong,” he cautions, munching a salad with guitarist Steven Chen at an eatery up the street from Jollett’s apartment in Los Angeles’ Los Feliz neighborhood. “Pavement are one of my favorite bands of all time. But there’s a difference between looking like you’re not trying hard as an artistic decision in response to pop music and actually not trying hard.

The Airborne Toxic Event try really, really hard: On their self-titled debut, the quintet—including bassist Noah Harmon, drummer Daren Taylor, and Anna Bulbrook on violin and keyboard—combine Joshua Tree guitar theatrics with danceable new-wave grooves while Jollett mirrors the music’s dark chamber-punk drone witih earnest tales of downtrodden folk seeking contact in a disconnected age. Catch Airborne live and you’ll likely see a ...
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Breaking Out – The Airborne Toxic Event

West Coast upstarts rewrite indie rock with passionate flair

By Mikael Wood
September 2008

Photo Credit: Clark Hsiao and Jessica Haye

According to Airborne Toxic Event frontman Mikel Jollett, Pavement ruined indie rock. “Don’t get me wrong,” he cautions, munching a salad with guitarist Steven Chen at an eatery up the street from Jollett’s apartment in Los Angeles’ Los Feliz neighborhood. “Pavement are one of my favorite bands of all time. But there’s a difference between looking like you’re not trying hard as an artistic decision in response to pop music and actually not trying hard.

The Airborne Toxic Event try really, really hard: On their self-titled debut, the quintet—including bassist Noah Harmon, drummer Daren Taylor, and Anna Bulbrook on violin and keyboard—combine Joshua Tree guitar theatrics with danceable new-wave grooves while Jollett mirrors the music’s dark chamber-punk drone witih earnest tales of downtrodden folk seeking contact in a disconnected age. Catch Airborne live and you’ll likely see a mix of stomping, hollering and/or crying—both onstage and off.

Jollett, 34, formed the band after a series of medical revelations sidetracked him from writing a novel: First his mom was diagnosed with cancer, then he learned he had two autoimmune disorders (alopecia areata and vitiligo). The group spent 2007 recording songs, and Jollett blanketed blogs with MP3s. Earlier this year, while the band was doing a five-week residency at tastemaking club Spaceland, L.A.’s influential modern-rock station KROQ added their “Sometime Around Midnight” to its regular rotation.

“Of the thousands of submissions we get from local bands, it’s rare I’ll bring one into our weekly music meeting,” says KROQ music director Lisa Worden. “With Airborne, I thought the song could hold its own against everything we play.”

An old-fashioned bidding war ensued—Jollett claims one major spent $7,000 on food and drink wooing the group—before they signed with Majordomo, a new L.A. label that released the latest from veteran indie rockers Earlimart. Now Airborne will spend the fall on tour. For Jollett, it’s about time. “When I was writing this stuff, I’d be like, ‘Why am I not playing a show right now?’” he says. “Even if it’s only for my neighbor’s cats.”

FAST FACTS:

In addition to writing fiction—his short story “The Crack” is in the June issue of McSweeney’s—Jollett has been a music critic for NPR and the Los Angeles Times.

The band’s name comes from Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise, a reference lost on most. “People think we’re an Orange County punk band,” Jollett says.

Airborne Toxic Event and the tale of beauty and

the bleak

Leader Mikel Jollett turns dark life experiences into unexpectedly uplifting songs. A wider audience is discovering this L.A. band.

August 9, 2008

Photo Credit: Stefano Paltera / For The Times

MIKEL JOLLETT, lead singer of the fast-breaking local band the Airborne Toxic Event, is aware of his reputation for darkness. He’s earned it through songs such as “Happiness Is Overrated,” a harder-rocking take on the Smiths, or the gloomy breakup song “Sometime Around Midnight.”

Even the band’s jauntiest number, the Franz Ferdinand-flavored “Does This Mean You’re Moving On?,” has lines like “I’ll bet your friends all hate me now.”

He’s heard enough. “I keep getting stuff about, ‘These songs are about these terrible things that happened,’ ” said Jollett, 34, sitting outside the Alcove, near his home in Los Feliz. “But I don’t know if my life is any darker than anyone else’s. I really just think that there’s something about catharsis, and taking some of your worst ...
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Airborne Toxic Event and the tale of beauty and

the bleak

Leader Mikel Jollett turns dark life experiences into unexpectedly uplifting songs. A wider audience is discovering this L.A. band.

August 9, 2008

Photo Credit: Stefano Paltera / For The Times

MIKEL JOLLETT, lead singer of the fast-breaking local band the Airborne Toxic Event, is aware of his reputation for darkness. He’s earned it through songs such as “Happiness Is Overrated,” a harder-rocking take on the Smiths, or the gloomy breakup song “Sometime Around Midnight.”

Even the band’s jauntiest number, the Franz Ferdinand-flavored “Does This Mean You’re Moving On?,” has lines like “I’ll bet your friends all hate me now.”

He’s heard enough. “I keep getting stuff about, ‘These songs are about these terrible things that happened,’ ” said Jollett, 34, sitting outside the Alcove, near his home in Los Feliz. “But I don’t know if my life is any darker than anyone else’s. I really just think that there’s something about catharsis, and taking some of your worst moments and trying to find the beauty in them. There’s almost a defiance in that.”

Of course, there was a time, not long ago, when things really were bad: Serious fans of the Silver Lake-area scene know the legend of the band’s genesis, how Jollett, a guy who’d lived in monastic isolation in the high desert for the sake of writing a novel, saw his mom diagnosed with cancer, came down with the rare malady autoimmune syndrome — and broke up with his girlfriend.

He discusses it now with the kind of breeziness that comes from being bored by its retelling. “And then when my mom got sick, I got sick — my dad’s terminally ill — I think I just, like, snapped. One day I picked up a guitar and started playing, and then it was eight hours a day for a year.”

And from that the band, whose debut album came out this week, was born.

“There’s this line in ‘This Side of Paradise,’ ” Jollett says of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s largely autobiographical first novel. “Fitzgerald is talking to his mentor, who says, ‘The only difference between leading a scholastic life — where you write it down — and a non-scholastic life is that if you lead a scholastic life you leave a record.’

“Or in our case, make a record,” he adds — as bandmate Noah Harmon offers an imaginary rimshot.

You’d never guess

Sprawled out on the restaurant’s patio, the members of the Airborne Toxic Event look like they might belong not only to separate bands, but to warring musical genres.

Bassist Harmon, with his long hair and multiple necklaces, looks like he’s trying to bring back late-’60s sitar-strumming psychedelia. Lank, disheveled guitarist Steven Chen could be an Asian version of Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore. Drummer Daren Taylor, in his black garb and medieval goatee, could be a goth with Tolkienesque leanings.

Musically they’re equally all over the place: Anna Bulbrook was raised performing classical music and plays viola and violin in the band when she’s not shaking a tambourine. Harmon has a jazz degree from CalArts and loves the elaborate works of Charles Mingus.

That the band coheres at all, on the level of sound, is remarkable. That may be because Jollett is a song guy more than anything. “I like songs, songwriters,” he says, launching into a description of the exquisitely jaded lyrics to Leonard Cohen’s “Chelsea Hotel.”

While Harmon is, reportedly, a riff-producing machine — three of the album’s songs were built around riffs he dreamed up — Jollett tries to make each song distinct and to give each a beginning, middle and end.

But the band’s secret weapon may be Chen’s guitar, which recalls the chime of Pavement and Echo & the Bunnymen. Chen admires the sharp, single-note minimalism of some ’80s bands and describes his aesthetic in art, clothing and music: “I always loved it when you take something really clean and proper sounding,” he said, “and dirty it up a little bit.”

Live — they played a sold-out show at the El Rey on Thursday — or on the band’s powerful MySpace videos, you see what he means.

From the moment Jollett picked up his guitar in 2006, things began moving quite fast.

The band’s demo — recorded in his apartment soon after recruiting the group’s other four members — became a hit on MySpace with the help of an enthusiastic Rolling Stone write-up. Before long the band — which has toured the United Kingdom and held monthlong residencies at Echo and Spaceland — landed the song “Sometime Around Midnight” in rotation at KROQ-FM (106.7).

The group had no label, no manager, no publicist and a baffling moniker (from a bureaucratic term in Don DeLillo’s 1985 comic novel “White Noise”). But when the song showed up on KROQ, industry types started sniffing around.

“The phone just started ringing off the hook,” said Jol- lett, whose work as a writer included occasional pop music stories for The Times. “And every single cliché about the record industry is true. People offering you drugs, telling you how famous they can make you, how much you need them in order for it to happen, how if you don’t do X, Y and Z it’s not gonna happen.”

They ended up, with their record already recorded at a friend’s Eagle Rock studio, going with Majordomo, an L.A. indie that includes Earlimart on its roster.

“It’s kind of a myth that you need a big studio and all that stuff now,” said Harmon. “Technology is such that you can get some really amazing sounds. Our studio wasn’t exactly what you’d call a home studio, but it was in a home.”

Adds Jollett: “It takes away one of the barriers to recording stuff. Suddenly you have all these artists who would never have an audience, who have an audience. People say the record industry is crumbling. . . . It’s not! Indie rock is thriving.”

Not what he’d expected

Things seem to be coming together for the band — it’s now in rotation on five rock stations in L.A. and has appeared on Conan O’Brien’s show. As it moves from the often insular world of indie fandom into the rock mainstream, Airborne could make even the considerable success of Silversun Pickups look minor. But Jollett still jokes about his life’s sudden crises and his almost involuntary switch to music.

“Right now I should have my second novel and a 1-year-old kid,” he says. “Instead I’m playing at seedy clubs with these jokers.”

Happiness, it seems, is in the eye of the beholder.

“It’s really absurd sometimes,” he says. “When we’re playing, all that stuff goes away, it feels completely natural. This is what I was meant to do.”

scott.timberg@latimes.com

Occasionally you get lucky and stumble across a band at the very moment they ignite the engines and blast off into the heavens.

Such a band right now is Los Feliz’s The Airborne Toxic Event, a wired and ballistic cross between The Arcade Fire, Coldplay, The Walkmen and a black-hearted Clash. A lanky Russell Brand-a-like plays bass (sometimes with a violin bow), a girl in a dress like a straight jacket throws padded-room shapes at the violin, tambourine and keyboard and the music just gets louder and richer until it makes Paris Hilton look like a mute wallflower and practically bursts at the seams and spills its steaming guts across the stage during the monumental set closer that hasn’t even made the finished album in the US.

TATE had clearly been building their local fanbase for some years and last night felt like the joyous culmination of all that hard work as 800 adoring Toxicites grabbed one of the ...
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Rock Gets Literary

Given that its name comes from Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise, it’s no surprise that The Airborne Toxic Event infuses its catchy rock with literary references. But its songs have heart, too: Singer Mikel Jollett (a former music reviewer for NPR) launched the band in 2006 as a way of dealing with personal hardship, so it’s no surprise that his songs connect on a visceral level.

The Airborne Toxic Event’s self-titled full-length debut has earned the band comparisons to Modest Mouse, Arcade Fire and Interpol, among others. Complementing Jollett’s dry vocals with surf-friendly rock, the group has made more than a few “Bands to Watch” lists, both before and since the release of its debut.

Heavy Turbulence

VANCOUVER — Let me tell you about this song. It starts softly, the sweet sound of violin and viola, then it swirls and swells. The words are all true, an unflinching rendering of emotional pain.

It plays out at a bar in Los Angeles, some time around midnight. There is a woman you are definitely not over. She comes to say hello. The scent of her perfume sends your head spinning.

“All of these memories come rushing like feral waves to your mind: of the curl of your bodies like two perfect circles entwined. And you feel hopeless and homeless and lost in the haze of the wine.”

And then she leaves with someone you don’t know.

“She makes sure you saw her. She looks right at you and bolts.”

And then you fall into a delirium of drunkenness.

And, then, if you are Mikel Jollett, you go home, hole up in your apartment for three days and write a powerful song called Sometime Around Midnight – a song so alluring that L.A.’s KROQ, the ...
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Heavy Turbulence

VANCOUVER — Let me tell you about this song. It starts softly, the sweet sound of violin and viola, then it swirls and swells. The words are all true, an unflinching rendering of emotional pain.

It plays out at a bar in Los Angeles, some time around midnight. There is a woman you are definitely not over. She comes to say hello. The scent of her perfume sends your head spinning.

“All of these memories come rushing like feral waves to your mind: of the curl of your bodies like two perfect circles entwined. And you feel hopeless and homeless and lost in the haze of the wine.”

And then she leaves with someone you don’t know.

“She makes sure you saw her. She looks right at you and bolts.”

And then you fall into a delirium of drunkenness.

And, then, if you are Mikel Jollett, you go home, hole up in your apartment for three days and write a powerful song called Sometime Around Midnight – a song so alluring that L.A.’s KROQ, the biggest rock radio station in the United States, adds it to regular rotation, even though your band has no manager, no publicist and no label. It is the first time in several years KROQ has done this for an unsigned band.

The band is Airborne Toxic Event, named for the dangerous cloud that hangs over Jack Gladney after a rail-car accident in Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise. Like a chemical spill, the band emerged suddenly.

In March, 2006, Jollett, who was writing a novel and working occasionally as a music journalist, was whipped by a quartet of blows. In a single week, his mother was diagnosed with cancer; he was diagnosed with autoimmune disease (which makes his skin blotchy and, when he is stressed, his hair fall out); he broke up with a long-time girlfriend (not the woman from the song); and he got pneumonia.

Jollett quit his two-pack-a-day cigarette addiction and played the guitar obsessively, drinking and writing. The new words, he realized, were not parts of his novel in progress but the lyrics to rock songs.

“I felt this real, just suddenly, I felt all this music in me I just didn’t feel before,” said Jollett, 34. “Suddenly, everything sounded like a song.”

He paired up with a drummer and discovered that he wasn’t a half-shabby singer (he had been in a band before, but never took the mike). Three more players were soon recruited. Jollett wrote a hundred songs and the group spent the next year self-recording its 10-track debut. Along the way, it performed in the United States and the United Kingdom, earning notice in the blogosphere; Rolling Stone eventually dubbed it one of the best unknown bands on MySpace.

And, then, in January, 2008, an unmastered MP3 of Sometime Around Midnight became a hit on KROQ, less than one month after it was recorded. Majordomo, an upstart L.A. indie label, put out the band’s self-titled debut in August.

“It wasn’t dogmatic, like, ‘We’re an indie rock band,’ ” Jollett said. “If any major had come along and said, ‘Hey, we’ll give you $10-million and put out your record exactly as it is,’ we’d have been like, ‘Sweet!’ But that didn’t happen.”

Airborne’s lack of major-label backing has not held the band back. Sometime Around Midnight opened at No. 34 on the Billboard modern-rock chart and is steady at No. 35 in its third week. In late April, the band played on Carson Daly’s show and in early August hit the Conan O’Brien stage. Their 2008 festival tour has included South by Southwest in Austin, Tex., Pemberton in British Columbia and now the Virgin Festival in Toronto. Reviews have been mostly positive and some times more so: The Boston Herald called the record the best debut of the year. Daily Variety said the disc is hard to distinguish from “dime-a-dozen alt rockers,” though the L.A. publication did concede Sometime is amazing.

The truth is somewhere in between. It is a good first record: At times, the music sounds generic, but the lyrics are magical gems of storytelling.

While the band has garnered a slew of comparisons, such as Franz Ferdinand and Arcade Fire, the closest players in terms of cathartic literary tales are Austin’s Okkervil River.

Jollett calls the 10 songs a carefully ordered series of “pits and valleys and revelations.”

The literal telling of tough tales – every story on the record is as it happened, not just Sometime – was in part inspired by Vladimir Nabokov and Philip Roth, whose works Jollett read while holed up in a desert ranch working on The Great Novel.

“These guys, so much about what they do is about trying to find some beauty in some of the darker moments,” Jollett said.

“I don’t know if you’ve ever read Sabbath’s Theater by Philip Roth. He finds a way to make pissing on his ex-lovers’ grave this super-romantic image. That takes some serious mental gymnastics. …

“You go through this stuff and you write about it. Some people had given me some good advice: ‘Just use it. Just write about [it]. Don’t be afraid of it. Be unflinching.’ ”

After all, you never know when an eyebrow will fall off. Jollett’s vitiligo (splotchy skin from loss of pigments) and alopecia areata (hair loss) linger – even if they only attack, as he says, his vanity.

“I’m always thinking in my head, when we’re playing, ‘Don’t try and look cool, don’t try and look cool, just try and show people how weird you are.’ Because that’s when people get it. Morrissey used to talk about how he’d sing to someone in the back of the room. I’m always doing that; I’m always trying to sing to someone in the back of the room.”

Airborne Toxic Event plays the Virgin Festival in Toronto on Saturday. (http://www.virginfestival.ca/toronto).

Backstage Pass: The Airborne Toxic Event cover

Pemberton

In the space of one week in 2006, Mikel Jollett was diagnosed with a genetic autoimmune disease, his mother was diagnosed with cancer, he and his longtime girlfriend split, and he quit a two-pack-a-day cigarette habit cold turkey.

After a month of moping around his apartment, Jollett, who until then had been working on a novel, decided to pursue his career as a musician. So he pulled himself together and set out to create the Airborne Toxic Event.

“I was in a haze, feeling knocked down, and one day, I decided to start playing my guitar,” Jollett says. “And I realized that music is all I want to do.” Over the course of several months, Jollett, 35, recruited the group’s other four members through friends of friends, meeting keyboardist Anna Bulbrook at a taco stand after a night of bar-hopping.

The Los Angeles-based band hails from all over the musical spectrum, from punk (drummer Daren Taylor) to classical (Bulbrook). The result of their ...
[Read More...]]]>
Go here for the article and 10-part video blog

Backstage Pass: The Airborne Toxic Event cover

Pemberton

In the space of one week in 2006, Mikel Jollett was diagnosed with a genetic autoimmune disease, his mother was diagnosed with cancer, he and his longtime girlfriend split, and he quit a two-pack-a-day cigarette habit cold turkey.

After a month of moping around his apartment, Jollett, who until then had been working on a novel, decided to pursue his career as a musician. So he pulled himself together and set out to create the Airborne Toxic Event.

“I was in a haze, feeling knocked down, and one day, I decided to start playing my guitar,” Jollett says. “And I realized that music is all I want to do.” Over the course of several months, Jollett, 35, recruited the group’s other four members through friends of friends, meeting keyboardist Anna Bulbrook at a taco stand after a night of bar-hopping.

The Los Angeles-based band hails from all over the musical spectrum, from punk (drummer Daren Taylor) to classical (Bulbrook). The result of their diverse musical influences? Their self-titled debut album, out Aug. 5, and a full slate of festivals and small shows, including a few gigs in the U.K.

Despite his emotional and financial struggles, Jollett is confident he’s on the right path. “We were so poor, we knew the going rate of blood,” he jokes. “But in the last year, we’ve started becoming respectable.

“Sometimes things in life just have to break, but if it’s in you, you just do it.”