Home > Indie

06/26/2016

Signs of Life from Lungs and Limbs

By THEA PRIETO // See them Friday, July 1 at Kelly's Olympian

At this very moment, the indie electropop band Lungs and Limbs is touring through the Northwest, and next week they are bringing to Portland their own seductive blend of stripped-down dance and funk with a healthy dose of hallucinogenic bedroom pop. They will be joined by local groups Hosannas and Darkswoon, along with Colorado-act Eldren, at Kelly’s Olympian on July 1^st. Mix together Hosannas’ ambient avant pop, Darkswoon’s electro-haze, and Eldren’s psychedelic dream rock, and it’s sure to be an evening both fantastically upbeat and synth-hypnotic.

Just last week, Lungs and Limbs celebrated the release of their new single “Less Ordinary,” which SF Weekly called an “‘80s inspired track that you can’t help but dance to.” In between the release show in San Francisco and packing up their preschool-short bus-turned-tour-mobile, Katrina Rousseau (vocals, synth) and Nick Tudor (guitar) anticipated their summer Signs of Life tour.

“The Signs of Life tour is going to take us from San Francisco up to Seattle, down to Los Angeles with cities in between,” said Katrina. “The tour is coinciding with the release of ‘Less Ordinary,’ the first single off of our upcoming EP Big Bang. This will actually be the first tour we’ve taken as Lungs and Limbs.”

“That alone is very exciting,” said Nick. “I’m also excited to be able to share the music from our first EP Lifelike with a broader base of listeners. My main hope for the tour is that it will go well enough for us to strengthen our circuit around and out of the Northwest.” 

With their new EP Big Bang due to be released this November, a year after the release of their 2015 debut EP, Lungs and Limbs will no doubt have some fresh, new tunes to roll out on their Signs of Life tour.

“Big Bang is a step up for Lungs and Limbs in terms of continuity and songwriting,” said Katrina. “We learned so much about arrangement and production from working on Lifelike, and the result is a more cohesive, polished collection of songs. Nick is also our producer and engineer, and he has really taken Big Bang to another level as far as production and arrangement go. These songs just have a lot more room to breathe within their arrangements.”

Both Lifelike and Big Bang were produced and engineered at Make It Work Studios in Occidental, California, the band’s own recording studio born out of a converted horse stable. Like the recording space, the tour bus, and their EPs, each of Lungs and Limbs’ songs contain traces of the band’s progress as well as their grassroots.

“‘Less Ordinary’ is fun and danceable,” said Katrina. “When we wrote it, I was thinking about all the people in my life who help make me my best person. ‘Ricochet’ was the easiest and most fun to put together and is probably my favorite track on the new EP. It came about after Nick and I had eaten psilocybin and it pretty much wrote itself on the spot. We call it ‘psilo-pop.’ It's very fun and interesting but polished and short.”

“‘Less Ordinary’ was a fairly different direction for our band sound-wise,” Nick reflected, “but the production has helped aim the rest of the EP. The second single ‘Lightspeed,’ which drops in August, has been my favorite to work on. It wasn’t actually going to be the second single, but when I had finished it up we liked it so much that we got in contact with our PR and had them switch it out. It’s full of synth sounds that we had a lot of fun recording; it’s one of my favorite melodies on the EP.”

 “We’re releasing ‘Lightspeed’ with a show at The Great American Music Hall in San Francisco,” said Katrina. “We’re going to be touring up and down the west coast for most of the rest of this year.”

 “It’s going to be amazing,” said Nick, “Kelly’s Olympian is going to be a lot of fun. Darkswoon was great to play with on our last stop at the Kenton Club.”

 “And Eldren from Denver have a great sound,” said Katrina. “I'm particularly excited to hear Hosannas, because I went to high school in Forestville, California with the Laws brothers. It will be really cool to do a show with them for the first time.”

Playing in order at Kelly’s Olympian on July 1^st: Darkswoon, Eldren, Lungs and Limbs, and Hosannas. Show is at 9pm, tickets are $5.

Save

Comments