“Ulcer Soul”
from the album Talk in Circles
2005
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The Willowz are four pretty young things from Anaheim, California, whose excellently shambolic new album, Talk in Circles, takes garage rock back to its roots — literally.
“We recorded it in our bass player’s brother’s garage,” says singer/guitarist Richie James Follin. “We’d do our guitar tracks sitting in my minivan with the mixing board on the seat. It’s better than spending so much money in a studio.”
Talk in Circles is a sweet-and-sour cocktail of buzz-saw guitars, Stooges propulsion and coed shouting about boredom, bad love and youthful uncertainty that ends with singer/bassist Jessica Reynoza, 21, intoning, “We can die now.” To date, the group’s messy DIY approach has made it the odd band out in its hometown. “Orange County’s music scene is really shitty — all these hardcore and emo bands,” says Follin, 21, a sophomore English major at Cal State Fullerton. It was their mutual distaste for Anaheim bands — and their mutual love for the Zombies, the MC5 and old soul music — that united Reynoza (a classical guitarist and abstract painter) and Follin (who’d gotten into L.A. punk through his mother, an art dealer who dated Henry Rollins back in high school) after they met in a college bookstore in 2001.
The Willowz went through a succession of drummers and second guitarists, practiced in an abandoned house and struggled to launch their first cross-country tour. “We couldn’t rent a car because we were all seventeen or eighteen,” Follin says. “The only person who’d drive us was this transvestite from New York. He was mad creepy.” Their big break came when French director Michel Gondry put two of their songs on the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind soundtrack. “They didn’t have a big budget for music,” Follin says. “His people found us on MP3.com.”
Though the Willowz aren’t yet famous among garage revivalists, they have done their part to start a rivalry with one of the genre’s biggest names. “The Strokes were playing in L.A.,” Follin says. “We snuck in and ended up hanging out with them. Our drummer was drunk and got in a fight with their bass player. We ended up spray-painting ‘The Willowz’ on their tour bus.” ~ Christian Hoard, Rolling Stone
 The Willowz |