Foreign Born
Foreign Born - Early Warnings
Artist: Foreign Born
Hails From: Los Angeles, CA
Musical Style: Indie, Pop, Shoegaze
For Fans of: The Walkmen, Grizzly Bear, Cass McCombs
Why you should check them out:
A haunting mixture of sunny pop music and droning shoegaze fuzz, Foreign Born create uniquely lush and spacious songs. With a choral expansiveness, fronted by hook laden guitars and a soulful croon courtesy frontman Matt Popieluch, the L.A. quartet is setting sites on new frontiers.
Background Check:
When Popieluch originally meet guitarist Lewis Pesacov in San Francisco, neither could foresee the partnership ahead. Becoming roommates and ending up in L.A. together resulted in Foreign Born, officially formed in 2003. Both musicians had a plethora of projects on various back burners, but the melodic and immersive music they created together took precedent. Together they joined with drummer Garrett Ray and bassist Ariel Rechtshaid to lay down the tracks of their 12″ debut, which was quickly obtained by Startime Records and followed with an EP in 2004.
In the following months, Foreign Born took off, touring in the company of acts like Rogue Wave, French Kicks, Cold War Kids, and even the likes of Black Mountain. After moving to Secretly Canadian Records, Foreign Born released Person to Person in 2009. Acclaimed as a dense and exceptionally well rendered album, Person to Person is a rock and roll record propped in front of a thick shoegaze background and lit by surprisingly harmonic and hypnotic ballads and crooning hip shakers.
The secret to Foreign Born’s success lies in their softly experimental approach to blending genres. With a lo-fi earnest, the group can at once “ooh ahh” their way out of a hand clapped breakdown and still creepily whistle in your ear. Sometimes it can be a bit unnerving, yet the result is usually charming more than it is alarming. Person to Person is the type of album who’s greatness dawns on you about half way as Foreign Born remain sensible to the fullest, expanding throughout the record both with fun, summery relief, and more baroque and intricate elaborations. One of 2009′s best, Foreign Born are shaping up to be one of this year’s most anticipated acts.
Where you can find them in Cyberspace:
On Tour:
still so in love these guys
This reminds me much of Albert Hammond Jr.