“World News”
from the album Gorilla Manor
2009
Local Natives open for Blind Pilot at the High Noon Saloon in Madison tomorrow night, Tuesday, June 16 at 7 PM. Ticket information is available here. Highly recommended.
Local Natives are almost too good to be true. Whether by default or design — and they would have to be pretty calculating to have planned it — they have qualities in common with three of the most highly acclaimed American bands of the last few years. They have the rhythmic lightness of Vampire Weekend, the hippie-barbershop harmonies of Fleet Foxes, and the sense of the stately and dramatic, elegiac and epic that you get from the music of Arcade Fire. This means that sometimes you might consider Local Natives (is that a tautology or are they just pleased to see us?) to be a little pat, their songs almost too conveniently contemporary in the way that they tick all the boxes; or you might simply be grateful that you’re getting the best of three great bands in one neat — hairy, bearded — package.
The latter view seems to have been the one held by attendees of the recent SXSW, many of whom judged Local Natives, who used to be called Cavil at Rest, to have been one of the hits of the festival, if not the hit. This must have been good news for the band, who are currently unsigned and share a house in Silverlake, Los Angeles; a situation that probably won’t continue for much longer, unless they like being permanently at close quarters. They sound as though they do, so impressively do their voices merge, achieving a warm intimacy, or do we mean intimate warmth (hey, we can do tautologies, too). They call themselves a vocal group, not a guitar band, and apparently spend more time arranging their harmonies than anything else, and you get the impression that Rice, Ayer, and Hahn all could be lead singers in their own right. But they don’t neglect the songcraft: songs such as “Airplanes” are immediately likeable albeit quite intricately constructed, with dips and dives and shifts of tempo, but they generally build towards an indie-orchestral climax whose message would appear to be: life is complicated but joyous! They even manage to make Talking Heads’ “Warning Sign” sound like a jolly prayer. And if you happen to divine a little contrivance and feel as though you are being pushed towards certain emotions by five particularly intelligent young musicians, then maybe that’s just a tribute to their proficiency and powers of persuasion, to their skill and control.