The Guardian – Feature
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
By Dave Simpson
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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New York Post – Feature
Heartbreak makes Airborne Toxic Event iTunes
Fave
By Larry Getlen
December 21, 2008
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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San Jose Mercury News – Feature
Rising rockers take novel approach
By Shay Quillen
December 12, 2008
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 …
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NME – New Music Radar
New Music Radar – The Airborne Toxic Event
When death haunts you, your music really starts to matter
By Mark Beaumont
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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Spin – Breaking Out
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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Los Angeles Times – Calendar Feature
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.
By Scott Timberg, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
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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NME.com
By Mark Beaumont
Posted on 08/08/08 at 08:28:49 pm
Posted on 08/08/08 at 08:28:49 pm
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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RADIO: World Cafe Next on WXPN/NPR
Go here for the interview and in-studio performance
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.
The Globe and Mail
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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USA Today – Backstage Pass
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 …
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