“To Die in LA“
from the album 4th and Wall
2007
iTunes
The area of downtown Los Angeles around 4th and Wall streets is not exactly postcard material, especially after 9 p.m. “It’s not that happy a place,” bassist Francis Ten says. “At night, it’s just rows of homeless people. When you first go down there it’s a bit intimidating.”
There, working in the wee hours in a loft studio, Ten and his bandmates in West Indian Girl made their sophomore album, 4th & Wall. But the album owes as much to 4th and Wall as it does to what happened on the road, where a studio project started by Ten and singer-guitarist Robert James grew from a duo to a sextet — “and became a real band,” Ten says.
West Indian Girl’s self-titled debut came out in 2004 on Astralwerks, but Ten and James struggled to re-create it live. Now, with singer Mariqueen Maandig, keyboardists Nathan Van Hala and Amy White, and drummer Mark Lewis on board, it’s as if the sextet’s artfully layered dream-pop underwent assertiveness training.
“It was a completely different writing process, having the different personalities and emotions come into play,” Ten says. “A lot of these songs were fleshed out on the road, so instead of a song just being written and recorded in the studio, it’s allowed full gestation.”
From the jammy, intrepid glimmer of 4th & Wall, you’d never suspect it was shaped amid the grit and desperation of late-night downtown. “We’ve always been laced with a certain degree of positivity,” Ten says. “The nice thing is that we’re doing our own thing; we’re not looking over our shoulder thinking, ‘Oh, there’s another band that sounds like us.'”