Maybe it was the sweet surrender of “Electricity” that first blinded us. Making great use of every electronic trick in their book of sound-style favorites, Santa Barbara electro champs F M L Y B N D gives farther and further gazes forward with the premiere of “Far Away”. A sextet from the little town of Isla Vista, CA (close to SB); this electric-pop family of believers is made up of Mac and Braelyn Montgomery, Erik Mason, Justin Huntsman, Al GoldenBear Valles, and Ethan Davis, a group dedicated to kicking out sounds of tight knit solidarity and love. Every song is comprised of sonic kernels they have loved for forever, or audio elements they have perhaps just learned to love; all soaked into the West Coast's riptide waters that sends all collected fragments into new water way channels.
The pianos comes in marking the opening numbers. Then the guitars follow the progression, and then the curtains lift to the full sound of weekends lost, those lost moments stuck at a festival, lost cell phones, found friends and even fonder memories. Flipping through an audio Rolodex, they dial in the numbers from the new romantics' technical tricks and into those further dream movement expansions lead by the rhythm piano processional of “Far Away”. The roaring fullness and magnitude of eliciting a great span of distance comes on like a big flash to open up the eyes of the sleepy, central coast consciousnesses. FMLYBND's collective joyful noise carries out through the ocean, up and down Highway 1, past Hearst Castle and collides into Moro Rock into a million LED sequins singing, “sweet darling…”
The FMLY expounded on their family values of classic cues and putting their favorite sounds into a blender.
“Far Away” seems like an encapsulation of a synth-drenched Summer. How do you go about sending everything, lyrically, vocally, instrumentally, etc, through the process of reverb that sends out signal and sound to that further point?
Well, we wanted to make a sound that was timeless. Something that gives you a sense of nostalgia without having anything actually happen in order to create it. For “Far Away” we pulled influences from bands like Simple Minds and New Order and other amazing bands from that era, while also pulling influence from dreamy french electronic music, and putting all that in a blender with west coast lo-fi hence the the fuzz and reverb on vox. There's not really any stand out bands from the west coast doing exactly what were doing. There are a ton of great bands, but we are just trying to pave our own path with our own sound through a very narrow passage way of genres.
You can read the rest of FMLYBND's discussion here in the Week in Pop.
Also, be the tenth person to e-mail me FMLYBND's name @goldminesacks with all the vowels included, and you could win 2 free VIP tickets-front of the line passes for their Los Angeles, Club Nokia show August 2 with The Presets.
