Dec 12, 2017

We Are The West is an experimental folk-rock collective from LA featuring singer/guitarist Brett Hool, stand-up bassist John Kibler and drummer/vocalist Elizabeth Goodfellow (also touring drummer for Iron & Wine). Low Anthem, Led Zeppelin & Moody Blues all come delightfully to mind when you listen. Under the Radar has the premiere of the video for the peaceful lead track “Siren” from their debut album, The Golden Shore due March 30th.

Kibler describes how the idea for the video came to be: “The seed was planted a couple of years ago when we went to see The Low Anthem. They had this Leslie speaker contraption in front of a guitar amp, and I realized we could do the same by taking apart this broken old Lowery organ we kept in the parking garage. We decided to film ourselves disassembling the organ at sunset, and edit the video together in reverse so that it appears we are building it at sunrise.”

Says Hool of the song, “The idea of the siren and her song, of course, is an ancient one. It seemed only right to begin ‘The Golden Shore’ with her call, luring us perhaps to ruin, perhaps to paradise. So we built her an instrument and we tore it apart.”

Here’s some background on one of the lifeblood bands of LA’s music scene:

We Are The West is a convergence of sound and space. Dedicated song-stylists, the Los Angeles-based group has developed a uniquely immersive approach to performance, playing both concert halls and improvised venues, including their acclaimed underground parking garage concert series.

Brett Hool [voice/guitar] and John Kibler [bass/voice] formed We Are The West in a shipping container on a sheep farm in Holland, and began performing as a duo in an abandoned convent in Brooklyn, before moving back to California. Originally described as “a two-man orchestra of stunning vocals, meditative guitar, and exploratory double bass” [ABQ Journal], the group now includes an extended family of musicians with Elizabeth Goodfellow [drums/voice], Sylvain Carton [clarinet/saxophone], Ben Tolliday [cello], Joe Kennedy [keys], Paul Cox [organ], and Mathias Künzli [percussion]. Often seeking out nontraditional and acoustically inspirational spaces in which to perform and record, their national tours have included performances in natural desert amphitheaters, mine shafts, tow lots, redwood groves, sunset coves, and Masonic temples, in addition to traditional theaters and festivals.

The LA music scene’s best-kept-secret of the past few years, We Are The West’s underground parking garage concert series presents a recontextualized and genuinely deep musical experience. The Saturday before each full moon, the band transforms an everyday office parking garage into an extraordinary performance space. Different guests open each night, from established artists and acclaimed bands to chamber groups and avant-garde sound experiments.

We Are The West has released four EPs, each recorded in a different improvised locale: their LA parking garage, a barn in western New York, the high desert of New Mexico, and a ranch in Sebastopol. For their first full-length album, ‘The Golden Shore’, due out in Spring 2018, the band went to Grammy winning engineer Husky Höskulds in downtown Los Angeles to record live as a trio with their longtime drummer Beth Goodfellow.