Diamond Rings

written by Amil Niazi photographed by Mason Poole

One would expect to roll up on electric blue eyeliner and zebra hot pants, or at the very least something in a fuchsia. But when finally reaching the cozy alterna-café (literally called, ahem, Alternative Grounds) in the heart of Toronto’s eclectic Little Poland, instead of explosions and bedazzles, it’s startling to realize the subject is merely a dewy, albeit colossal, young man with the kind of demeanor that’s more low-key vibe than brazen attitude. Meet John O’Regan aka John O aka Diamond Rings, a mid-fi pop star on the rise with a penchant for gold leggings who knows his way around a catchy hook.

He’s a little surprised by your narrator’s surprise at his vanilla appearance, since it’s 10 a.m. on a Monday morning and he, like most of us, didn’t have the psychic energy it takes to brush out his hair, let alone apply neon eyeshadow. But it’s cool. One would just assume a little more panache. “I can’t really wear glitter at my local coffee shop,” he laughs. “I don’t want to come across as ‘that guy,’ you know?”

Fair enough. 

Still, it’s a complete 180 from the DIY videos that have been circulating on music blogs and a departure from the hype-heavy prose being put forth by the likes of Pitchfork.com and NME, who put Diamond Rings on their “50 Best New Bands of 2010” list. This is no diva-in-disguise; there’s no meat dress to awkwardly negotiate around in conversation. It’s just another dude in a café. If anything, the glitz is implied and the real buzz surrounding the 24-year-old is prodigal musical ability. In fact, John O, rather than exude status or diva sensibilities, betrays a fandom and serious love of killer pop music. “I love Janet Jackson,” he coos, sharing what’s on repeat in his Toronto loft. 

John O states he was a jock in his former life, and as a performer he has embraced the transformative power of costume, much like the anonymity of the football and basketball uniforms he once donned in schoolyard activities. In dress, he’s like a supernova lighting up the stage, dazzling even the notoriously hard-to-impress denizens of any given nightclub. The crowd may be keen to avoid making too much of a scene, but John O’s on-stage look clearly doesn’t adhere to the same rules. “I love the idea of commanding people’s attention in that way,” John O lets on. “It’s performance. It might not be right for every show, but there’s something special about the reveal, about utilizing that kind of drama,” he says of the physical accoutrements that have garnered the sort of media gawking that would make Lady Gaga proud. 

Born in Oshawa, Ontario, the kind of endangered industrial town Bruce Springsteen would have immortalized in song (were it not Canadian), it’s no small wonder this gender- and genre-bending artist has come this far wearing little more than Boy George-era war paint and spandex leggings. Oshawa—a place composed of equal parts rust, smog, thoroughbred horseracing, and suburbia—is not the usual launching pad for the kind of lanky androgyny that underlies John O’s pop appeal. “It’s not exactly a glamorous place,” he underscores. Of course, like any small town boy living in a lonely world, a stint in Guelph, Ontario’s nurturing arts community and a move to metro Toronto crystallized the metamorphosis from experimental free bird to bedazzled peacock. 

But it’s almost a shame that the outfits are attracting the majority of the attention because there is more here to the emperor than his clothes. The beat might be Pop—all dirty synths and flair—but the genius is in the impeccable composition, the heartbreaking lyrics, and the painstaking care each song is granted. It’s the stuff of teen dreams mixed with the melancholy of adult mistakes, catchy pop songs infused with a little misery. The surface might be Cher, but everything below it is Stevie Nicks. “The songs actually started out as folk tunes,” John O admits. “There was a real emphasis on strong lyrical themes and chord progressions. When I started to perform them live, I was just looking for a way to make them sound unique and more contemporary.”

After speaking for a little over an hour, it’s evident there is an incredibly mature aesthetic intelligence that colors John O’s approach to all mediums. He’s even made use of his visual arts background on stage, trading brush strokes for liquid liner. “It’s just like painting,” he says of his relatively newfound love of makeup application. His invented persona is subject to change at whim, requires no justification, and makes no apologies. It is the kind of personal invention and reinvention that could only exist now amongst the children of Madonna fans. “I trust my own judgment,” explains John O, “and go with what feels right. If that means rocking Air Force Ones with nail polish and leggings then so be it. That’s what I’ll do.”

Whatever the combination, the formula is working. His carefully constructed persona is carrying the crafty songs, helped by their infectious videos, to the front of the stage and all over town. In fact, he hasn’t even released a full-length album and already he’s touring the world. “It’s incredible,” he exhales. “It’s just been non-stop, and now the tour. I’m thrilled that fans are really connecting with my music, and I can’t wait to meet every last one of them.”

Papercranes

The Blossoming Gusts of A Musical Settler

written by Matthew Bedard photographed by Amanda Demme

Risking cheesiness, one’s inclined to marinate on the fabled scribblings of Ralph Waldo Emerson while at a picnic table with tabbouleh avec roast potatoes and American Spirits high above the golden-green, soupy mire of the L.A. flatlands. Emerson penned that polarity is met “in every part of nature … darkness and light … in the fluids of the animal body … in the systole and diastole of the heart.” Systole—the expulsion of blood from the contracting heart to the rest of the body—might serve as the crowning metaphor for the band papercranes, a morphing psychedelic-alt-folk ensemble fronted by the beautifully transfixing and thermally cool Rain Phoenix—a band seemingly bent on dishing a kind of fevered oxygen to the needy limbs of its audience community. Systole, however, metaphor holding, cannot exist without its diastole—or ventricular uptake—and, for papercranes, this uptake materializes via contribution of new and rotating members into its fold. 

Phoenix, softly desert-hued from a day’s prior performance at Joshua Tree’s Manimal Festival, shares on this sort of dichotomous, creative tug-of-war, and its percolation of participants: “What determines the choosing, or being chosen by, collaborators is a vibe—the most obvious part is execution, and the ability for us all to find these melodies and translate them to where a crowd can feel it. That’s what a vibe is to me. And it helps if people are excited to be a part of it. But personalities are a big part, too.” She pauses at the thought of communally breathing life into her songs, “I’ve been very, very lucky so far as a musician that I’ve played with people who’ve really liked the music. There’ve been moments of apathy, but sometimes I feel like those might be my energy gusts.”

“Gust” perhaps best describes a papercranes performance. But it depends on where you’re standing and when. Earlier this week, at a club in Hollywood, Phoenix, after declaring an intended short set in light of prevalent audience ADHD, stomps, writhes, and pierces the smoky bar with intense cries and calls. She’s backed by a quad of lithe, strings-and-chord-kneading, Santa Monica Mountain Sasquatches, one known as Kirk Hellie, and a delightfully loud drummer dude called Norm Block. Phoenix’s singing is beautifully effusive, with a peppering of rhythmic malaise, her presence wickedly charged. And the next morning, the opener, “Shell,” from the forthcoming album, let’s make babies in the woods (raw-recorded in Phoenix’s garage studio, out January on Manimal Vinyl Records), seamlessly finds itself hummed over coffee, album-thematic participants are contemplated, and the woods, well, settled on. 

Still, if you’re catching a papercranes gust at their downtown L.A. residency, Bordello, this November, the effect yielded might equate to a warm blanket of welcomed melancholy or cerebral stillness. It simply depends on Phoenix and those lending themselves to the effort. Months ago, for instance, in Echo Park, the crew was yet another incarnation, this time as a part of a charity-driven arts collective called Gift Horse Project, all six-deep alt-country horseplay, bangles and jangles, and amber swilling rays of sunshine. Range is papercranes’ inventive feather-in-cap. 

To whit, Phoenix describes her journey toward what can be a trying, but often fruitful, creative process: “I’ve been working more on learning how to listen, or just ask questions. And so much of that is trying to get out of my head in those moments, and that’s what I like about performance. Whether I’m apathetic or depressed one week and then happy and think the world’s wonderful another, performance always brings me back. That energy and movement and people—that’s the ultimate. And so much about collaborations is openness and discussions and questions and answers and not getting stuck in your head and assuming someone’s thinking this, or feeling this, or playing that, because you’re just letting it go, you’re just gonna see what rides.”

Following a self-released EP in 2003 and debut album two years later, with leaps from punk-topia Gainseville, Florida to New York, Phoenix recently settled in L.A., where she developed an atypical warmth for its music scene, a scene more often known for its myths of hefty contracts, potential for global spawn, and in tandem, a cutthroat pathos. “I love L.A. because of Manimal Vinyl, and its connection to music and musicians,” she says. “It’s very collective, and all the bands on Paul [Beahan’s] roster are more into sharing than being competitive. Everybody is happy to play together, and it just has this familial feeling, which is so shocking for L.A. I feel like it harkens back—like I live in Topanga Canyon in the ‘60s—and artists are happy to just be doing their thing, and there isn’t this thirst for fame.” 

Beahan says of Phoenix’s music trajectory and her finding a footing in Los Angeles, “I think that hearing Rain Phoenix’s musical journey is really special. She’s been involved in music for so long, but she kinda shied away from the limelight for a majority of that time. And now I think she’s really opening her heart to the world for the first time. And you can really hear it in the music. It sounds cliché, but that’s the actual truth.”

Phoenix pauses to spark a cigarette and look out over the myriad polarity, the circulatory jumble that makes up this impossible city. It’s a reflective gaze, but perhaps one Phoenix, at this stage of her career, can venture with an amassed calm. “It’s always neck-and-neck,” she adds, “self-sabotage and doing what you love for the sake of it. And sabotage usually wins, or has in the past anyway, and maybe by opening up more to community music, and relying on others to help push things through has been instrumental for me— because I’ve never been good at self-promotion. I loathe the idea. But it’s been really enlightening for me to connect and be part of this effortless, cool, creative conversation, luckily for the record I’m most proud of. It’s been a real experiment in letting go—disregarding the studied, clean production of my last record and allowing chaos and uncertainty to dominate.”

She smolders out her cigarette and concludes, “I really feel this is the time not only for us as individuals, but for the part we play, the things we do, in the government that we’re in, to find a deep therapy, a collective sort of therapy that brings us into a balanced place.”

Yellowfever

Minimal Pop Wanderers Find Solace in Freedom

written by Maxwell Williams photographed by Ben Aqua   

austin, texas is one of those wholly american towns that for one reason or another has been dubbed a “music community.” It’s a relatively big town of nearly two million, but like it’s sister city, Athens, Georgia, per capita, there are more musicians here than probably anywhere else in the world. There’s a college (University of Texas), they have two major music events (South by Southwest, Austin City Limits), and “there are 80, as a conservative number,” music venues around town according to Yellowfever’s Jennifer Moore. [There are actually over 200.]

So, how does a little, homegrown, organic band stand out from the critical mass of hip, young rock groups in such a musical mecca? In Yellowfever’s case, it’s with a warm, rhythmic, simple sound, and a friendly stage presence conducive to hitting the road and playing to a national audience. Last year, they collected all their EPs and singles in one convenient package with Wild World, the label established by the ladies in The Vivian Girls. And now they’re in the studio putting the last little embellishments on their debut album. “[The new songs] are really different than the old stuff,” says Moore. “It’s weirder: the arrangements are more complicated, and I tried to make the singing in longer intervals and with stranger melodies.” 

Still, they’ll never be accused of maximalism. First off, they are just a duo. Moore handles singing, guitar, and keys, while her best friend Adam Jones plays drums and guitar (sometimes at the same time). “We wanted our music to be open and uncluttered,” explains Jones. The sound has kinship with minimalist bands such as Young Marble Giants and The xx, while maintaining an oddball sense of humor. “On the new album, we have a song about Amelia Earhart and there’s a song about Adam’s son Miles. [The story of] Jamestown is one song. Mostly it’s like second grade social studies topics,” Moore jokes. “And there’s very hidden, masked, coded relationship songs, that no one will be able to decode.”

Yellowfever are constantly taking their sounds in a van across America. They’re beloved by a certain underground community. But their intricate sound doesn’t always hold the audience in thrall. America is a weird place. “It’s not like rock ‘n’ roll bar music,” Moore says of their music’s relationship to audiences in the Deep South. “We played in Tuscaloosa, Alabama one time and the bar was full with a Budweiser special. We were like, ‘Oh, this will be good. There are people here!’ And then we started playing, and everyone in the bar was wearing a white ball cap and were huge like they could wrestle a steer, and they all turned their backs to us.” 

But the band has found itself pleasantly surprised in other towns. Moore elaborates: “There’s Lubbock, Texas. Like one indie rock band will come to town and everybody will be there at this kid’s house. They’re really good at organizing shows there. And 20 kids will come up to you and say, ‘Thank you so much for coming to Lubbock.’ They look like football players, but everyone is just really open and wants to hear new stuff. Buddy Holly is from Lubbock.”

Spending so much time on the road has afforded Yellowfever a manual writer’s knowledge of touring. “We cook on a camping stove,” Moore imparts. “The majority of the time we sleep on people’s floors. Sometimes it’s the unfortunate punk house, where it’s carpeted and smells like kitty pee. You get into it, though. It’s a little bit like urban camping. You get good at being a good guest. There’s a lot of people that are like, ‘Ah, man, we eat so terribly on the road. We spend all our money on hotels.’ You should put in your magazine advice that touring bands should bring camping equipment and a Coleman stove.” But what’s the toughest temporay lodging Yellowfever have endured? “The weirdest place I ever camped on tour was jail,” Moore invokes. “I accidentally took a brisket knife through airport security. We were going to play the Seaport Music Festival [in New York City]. And then they arrested me.”

Time on the road isn’t always easy. Jones’ towheaded young boy Miles sometimes tags along and has become Yellowfever’s unofficial number one fan. “He wasn’t at first,” laughs Jones. “He hated us when he was younger. He was against me practicing, and he was always very annoyed, but now he loves it. He listens to us all the time. There were several shows on this last tour that were early shows, so he was able to come, and he was up front dancing and singing along. I try to bring him as many places as I possibly can, which is why we tour in the summer. But it’s such a terrible time to tour. When we’ve toured in the school year, my wife stays at home with him, and my parents help out. So, during the school year, we can tour, at most, two-and-a-half weeks.”

But it’s on the road Yellowfever are the most comfortable, plying their craft in a multitude of American cities, branching either direction from the central location of Austin, and just flat out hitting the road. “You know how you take a walk or a drive in your town or you commute to work, and you have these landmarks that you remember and become accustomed to?” says Moore. “It’s weird, when you go on tours for years and years, you start noticing stuff on the drive from Phoenix, where you’re like, ‘I remember that mountain. I remember this convenience store; they have good ice cream.’ Or there’s vans on the border between Arizona and California and they sell grapefruit that’s grown there locally, and you immediately drive through the California border and they ask you if you have any out-of-state fruit. You have to hide it. We do that every time. We see a lot of the country.”

Puro Instinct

The Shimmering Glow of Los Angeles’ Past-Leaning Futurists

written by Maxwell Williams photographed by Stevie and Mada

In a dark-lit al fresco corner of a well-hid hollywood eatery on a down-winding day, the phone rings, an ELO ringtone; the caller ID across the top reads “Piper Kaplan.” Kaplan is the lead singer of Puro Instinct, and she is waltzing up La Brea, heading towards the restaurant to be interviewed. “Yo. Sky and I are walking up. We’ll be there soon,” Piper drawls, slow as SoCal traffic. Sky refers to Skylar, Piper’s sister, a willowy blond, and the lead guitarist for Puro, as those close to the band affectionately abridge. They arrive and sit and sidle up to the table to discuss whatever it is that comes to mind. It should be noted, however, that Puro have recently emerged as the best band in Los Angeles. 

Hyperbole being a bitch, let’s take a moment to run down exactly why this is, and why it is fact and not fiction: there are several emerging scenes threading through L.A., one sinew being the “Ariel Pink” crew, and Puro—being from that side of the tracks—recently traveled the country with them. This wouldn’t be strange in any matter, except for the fact that Skylar Kaplan, the Stephanie to her DJ Tanner, is merely 15-years-old. On tour, this lead to a few lean-on-me moments—thankfully, the sisters get along like, well, sisters.

“I was mentally prepared for the worst,” Skylar admits about her first sojourn into the rest of the world from the enigmatic West Coast, where she’s spent all her life. “There were a few low points where it sucked, because I’m so young, and I couldn’t go with people when they wanted to go out. Ninety percent of the time, I was with everyone and included, but it’s in your face a lot, like, ‘Oh, you’re young, you’re young, you’re young.’” 

Piper sticks her neck out a lot for sis. “I think you think that more than we think it though, honestly,” Piper demurs. “You don’t wanna hang out with fucking 15-year-olds. I would much rather hang out with you than most 20-year-olds. We facilitate each other’s destinies. We really do need each other for this to work.”

It sounds a bit far-fetched, but it’s all true. Skylar is a talented guitar player; the two girls are the principle songwriters, and they depend on each other to make the songs, backed by young, blonde, buck bassist Cody Porter and a cast of talented Los Angeles stalwarts. Plus, Skylar simply couldn’t go out on tour without Piper. Tour, after all, can be perilous and hard living, especially for a couple of vegans. But it’s not as simple as it seems. See, Piper is a living, breathing musical encyclopedia. If Regis Philbin asked you a question on early-‘80s Bulgarian yacht rock, and you wanted to reach out to the eminent authority, you’d use your lifeline on Piper before you could say Shturcite. (Bulgarian for “crickets,” the band is as popular as The Beatles in their homeland.) And to accentuate the band’s rare humor, Piper DJs under the name Heather Gram. The band is ballyhooed by L.A.’s psych gods the Rademaker brothers (who played in Further and The Tyde, among other bands). It all piles high atop the above statement, the best band in L.A. thing.

But, the true test, of course, is the music. Ah yes, the music. The two E.P. 12”s (vinyl only, bitches) on label du jour Mexican Summer are nuggets of beachy, muzzled cream-pop. Live, Piper comes across as a mash-up of Stevie Nicks 2.0—all blonde and sensual and throaty and confident as a motherfucker—and that new breed of young rock star, full of disaffected apathy. Maybe it’s just a Californian affectation, this sort of disaffected youth thing. Or whatever. 

But the songs! The songs are clever and simple all at once, groovy exaltations to a supreme awesome feeling. Or they’re dark odes to being a mess, living in a time when America fucking sucks (“Tour opened my eyes to the sad reality of how good we have it [in L.A.],” says Piper, “and to have it good here, is to say what?”). Or they’re just blissful pop, blown up to shimmering, ecstatic atmospheres of possibility. That is to say, it’s hard to say what exactly “Luv Goon” and “California Shakedown” and “No Mames” and the other songs that grace Headbangers in Ecstasy are. The album is, in Piper’s own words, killer. “I don’t think everyone should be going apeshit and cramming as much information into 45 minutes as possible,” Piper says with exasperation and a gulp of a French martini, “but that’s what we did, and I’m pretty stoked on it. That’s one of the reasons I love Ariel [Pink’s] music. On the one hand, you’re on this fantastical voyage into deep space, and then he’ll do one thing that reminds you that you’re actually right here. You’re the listener, but he takes you where he wants you, like he’s your guide or something. I want to do that with music. Give people a chance to travel when they don’t have any money and they don’t have any drugs and they don’t have any way to make anything better. Optimistic nihilism is the way to fucking roll.”

There’s a humor there, here, in there air, on the record, in their lives. Piper laughs, sensual and throaty, like she sings. She takes another pull off her martini. She’s the talker, the center of attention, and you just want to give her the floor. The conversation continues and the things delved into are philosophical and heartrending and too complicated to get into in such a short amount of time. But it’s profound. And Sky laughs along, never skipping a beat. Imagine her, on stage, just a young girl, but she puts her head down and nails riffs and solos and speaks through her instrument. She looks serious on stage, and she plays with her heart on her sleeve. “In New York, I gave some boys googly eyes when I was playing,” she admits. That elicits some more laughs, and some more tugs on martinis.

The record itself is a bit of a concept piece. Piper’s mentor (and inspiration behind starting the band) R. Stevie Moore, a legendary outré musician who has recorded some 400 albums since 1968, is all over the record, in homage to outsider music and the self-aware sense of place in music’s canon. “The record is supposed to be a shitty radio station AOR comp, but every band on it is Puro Instinct, and Stevie’s the host.” It’s leftfield and crazy and totally fucking perfect. It’s pure and instinctual. Perhaps that’s the name of the game.