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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...
Airborne Toxic Event
Every postmodernist worth his or her salt knows Don DeLillo’s award-winning novel White Noise, and its chief technological horror. But a merry band of dark indie poppers from Los Angeles’ fertile Silver Lake hood has adopted The Airborne Toxic Event as its own, in order to communicate bleeding-heart narratives of love, death and Dylar.
Squeezed somewhere between mainstreamers Echo and the Bunnymen, U2 and Heavenly States on the post-punk music map, The Airborne Toxic Event boasts some nice resumes. Front man Mikel Jollett has worked either side of the sonic divide, as a journo for National Public Radio, Los Angeles Times and Men’s Health; he’s even published a shorty in McSweeney’s. Other members of the band are classically trained and credentialed in music. The post-doc work has piled up nicely: The Airborne Toxic Event has lately caught the Silverlake comet tail in Rolling Stone, on Conan...
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Mikel Jollett once discovered the perfect complement to his band’s live stage setup in a junkyard.
The frontman of Los Feliz five-piece The Airborne Toxic Event had trekked to a local facility along with drummer Daren Taylor to sift through rubbish in search of a “big metallic sound.” With golf club and bat in hand, the two began banging until they stumbled upon just the right clunk: the hood of a 1969 Alfa Romeo, which would later be incorporated into the gaggle of L.A. shows that Airborne would play over the next year.
Though they’ve parted ways with the hood, Jollett seems keen on a revival: “At some point if we get to be a bigger band, we’ll probably bring the car hood back and actually start a whole junkyard percussion thing for Daren,” he jokes.
For a while, it didn’t seem like any band in L.A. was bigger than The Airborne Toxic Event. Considering the group’s penchant for atypical...
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“Is this them?” he whispered into my ear as we peered up at unknown faces.“They’re good, but I don’t think it’s them.” The trio then struck their last chord leaving the stage, and my belly rumbled.
“I’m starving – how much longer is this going to be?”
“This band will change your life, they’re going to be BIG, and I mean HUGE,” Barry, my music aficionado friend informed me.
With expectations soaring, and my blood sugar levels crashing, I hoped that I’d made the right decision to cancel my dinner date plans and bust out a 40-minute drive to the Echo. A group of five dressed in black smuggled themselves and their gear...