Oregon Music News

On Thursday night at the Doug Fir, fans packed the dance floor and Loch Lomond didn’t disappoint, continuing to create magic off the release of its newest EP, Night Bats.

The band is a cross between DeVotchKa and Arcade Fire, with vocalist Ritchie Young’s dynamic, poppy voice echoing over an assortment of harmonics and melodies that build and fade at the right times.

Loch Lomond’s music is thoughtful and quiet at times, but can ascend into powerful, booming crescendos the next…the transition is seamless. There are few bands that can switch from folk to chamber pop so effortlessly, but Loch Lomond is one of those bands.

On Thursday night, the crowd bobbed and weaved, fixated on the stage. Loch Lomond’s music isn’t dancing music. It is the kind of music you listen to in quiet admiration. Loch Lomond won’t elicit rock and roll style raucousness on the dance floor, but it isn’t needed nor even appropriate. The band’s melodies are a treat for the ears and keep the audience riveted. From the backup vocals of Jade Eckler (whose strong voice accompanies Young’s perfectly) to the acoustics to the clarinet to the harmonic sounds of the vibraphone (like a xylophone but more magical), fans heard everything Thursday night.

Every song Loch Lomond performed on Thursday night was greeted with grand applause and an encore was granted amid widespread delight. The band left the crowd with one of its latest songs, “Northern Knees Trees and Lights,” a folky melody that sent off the crowd in a state of contemplative wonder.

The band also made sure to leave some time to talk to the crowd. Young appeared on stage with his customary shirt and tie, except with a slight touch.

“I bleached my shirt because it was dirty,” Young told the audience. “In all my photos I’m in the same shirt.”

If there was one gripe about the show it was that the band didn’t play “Wax and Wire” despite some calls from the audience for it. Frankly, it was a little odd that the band would leave out such a solid song, especially because it is Loch Lomond at their most brilliant. It is everything Loch Lomond encompasses, with Young’s voice put to the test amid an endless assortment of instruments and harmonics. It is quiet at times and ends with piano building up to a huge crescendo. It should be a staple for every Loch Lomond show.

It would be remiss leaving out the other two bands that played before Loch Lomond at the Fir.

The night opened with Billy Goat (friends of Loch Lomond), a two-piece band that played before a projection of lights and stars. Billy Goat’s music was the kind of music you could imagine hearing if floating in space. It was mood music that drifted you off to another planet, quiet and melodic and surreal at times. It was a good opening for the magic that was to come.

Shelley Short played next and was a complete surprise. Her voice is beautiful, folky and calming at times, but can also be sultry and bluesy. Her voice alone takes you to a different place, perhaps to a tranquil meadow or bubbling brook. But the finger-picked acoustics, harmonic vocals, quiet drums, tambourine, and organy keyboard also add a dreamy quality.

In fact, anyone who heard the three bands at the Doug Fir Thursday night may still be dreaming.

Chamber pop sensation Loch Lomond will be visiting the Doug Fir Lounge on Thursday night, and with the way the quintet has been shattering venues for the last two years, it should be another rousing live show guaranteed to instill their magical music into anyone in the vicinity… and stay there well past the show.

Vocalist Ritchie Young is the driving force behind the band with his high-pitched, poppy falsetto echoing above a proper orchestra. Loch Lomond takes you to a place, and then one-ups that place, continuing to build upon the sound with a vast array of instruments throughout each song. Instruments include: guitar, percussion (Young); clarinet, bass, ukulele (Scott Magee); keys (Dave Depper); vibraphone, banjo, and various other sounds (Jason Leonard).

Lomond’s latest release, the five-track EP Night Bats, is a sign of the band evolving. As Young put it talking to OMN in November, it is a cross between their old recordings and a full-length album they hope to release sometime this year.

Over a year ago, Loch Lomond opened for The Decemberists for a month. Young said it was an eye-opener to play in front of that many people. But Loch Lomond already has people opening their eyes and ears to the wonderful world of chamber pop, and before long, grand crowds will be a regular occurrence for the Portland band.

Listen to “Wax and Wire” on their MySpace page and you will have a good idea of the breadth and beauty of Loch Lomond’s music.

Sunday’s PDX Songwriters in the Round at Rontoms was an experiment in collaborative presentation, one with mixed results.  Each of the eight featured songwriters played a single song in each of the four rounds that spanned the course of the night.

There were excellent moments throughout.  Kyle Morton, of Typhoon, gave consistently standout performances.  His songs had a flair for the dramatic, accompanied by hand-clapping friends singing backup vocals.  Kelly Blair Bauman also opted for accompaniment, and his lead guitarist’s tasteful solos gave Bauman’s set a Band-era Bob Dylan vibe.  Leonard Mynx likewise succeeded in channeling Dylan.  Grey Anne’s a capella duet with Ryan Giles was a highlight–experimental, beautiful and playful.

Noticeably absent was Ritchie Young of Loch Lomond and The Brothers Young.  He was slated to play.

Rontoms was rough for the songwriters who performed acoustic and solo. The setting, with the songwriters almost sitting in the audience and playing in front of a fireplace, was warm, personal, and inviting.  Unfortunately, the large crowd drifted in and out of attentiveness.

Conversation drowned out the more sensitive performers like Sean Battles.  His Name Shall Breathe was also an act that suffered.  His tender, honest, and unassuming performance was frustratingly unmatched for the crowd in the back.

It was interesting, though, to see seasoned performers like Grey Anne interact with, and play through, the talkers.  Her performance was beautiful and engaging, with a charming awkwardness to her lovely songs. Bud Wilson, of Aan, was also bluesy and ear-catching.

PDX Songwriters in the Round was a good, if imperfect, introduction to some of Portland’s song masters.  Grey Anne, His Name Shall Breathe, and Kyle Morton are acts to keep an eye out for.  To see Morton play in the sprawling band Typhoon, check out “Spin the Wheel Night” at Holocene, for another unorthodox show from Portland labels Tender Loving Empire and Bladen County Records, January 21st, 8:30pm (21+).

PDX Songwriters in the Round this Sunday night at Rontoms looks like a great chance to see some of your favorite PDX songwriters playing intimate, solo sets.  It should be a good opportunity to watch some of Portland’s best playing stripped-down, familiar favorites and trying out new material.

Ritchie Young, of Loch Lomond and The Brothers Young, will be one of nine featured songwriters.   His solo performances are gems, events that rival his full band’s flair for drama and passion.

Leonard Mynx, Bud Wilson (Aan), and Kyle Morton (Typhoon) will also be playing sans band, along with some particularly fantastic solo acts, namely Grey Anne, Kelly Blair Bauman, and His Name Shall Breathe.  It’s a long, holiday weekend, and this showcase is an excellent excuse for staying up late on a Sunday.  Doors at 8 pm, performances begin at 8:30 pm.  Plus it’s FREE.

See the full list of artists here.

The musical landscape is littered with family music acts, some brilliant (The Jackson 5, The Pointer Sisters, The Everly Brothers), some less so (The Osmonds). Thankfully, the sibling band we have in Portland, The Brothers Young, falls squarely in the former category. Formed by brothers Dustin, Dillon, Ritchie (also the front man for Loch Lomond) and Michael Young, the group (which also includes Levi Ethan Cecil and Trevino Brings Plenty) play the cut up method with their sound, letting lazy programmed beats carry folk guitar picking and precise, unforced singing. Their latest album, the recently released The Sun Says He’s God, puts all of these aspects on display, rolling along with an unhurried grace that only the most assured musicians could pull off well. Oregon Music News spoke with Dustin Young via e-mail.

Were all the brothers in the family particularly close growing up?
I would say that we’ve had (and still have) our battles, but I can’t imagine not being close. We don’t really know what that feels like. “Time is the Killer,” is a track off the new record, and it has a lot to do with those daily annoyances we go through that end up creating a love song for each other.

Did one of you show a musical interest before the rest or did you all come of age musically at the same time/age?
Ritchie (our oldest brother who’s not technically in the band) is eleven years older than our youngest brother Dillon. Because there are so many years between us, Ritchie started playing music long before some of us. But younger siblings tend to have a fascination in their older siblings interests. It’s a question I have myself: would we have gotten into music if he had not?

Did you live in a very musical household? What sort of stuff would you all listen to when you were growing up?
My dad played guitar and sang old John Denver songs, and my mom pretty much listened to oldies. She swore she had soul music in her genes. The Nelsons, her large, close-knit family, spent most of their free time playing music together. Her father actually owned a music shop.

Your sound is an interesting amalgam of genres – with these downtempo beats coming up against more folk and country stuff – is that just a reflection of your varied musical interests?
I would say that although we each have our own musical interests, I think that on our own, our individual music would still end up having those same overtones.

Is there one of you that leads the songwriting more than the other brothers or do you all share a role in shaping the songs equally?
We all take equal part in writing. We bring songs to each other, and then collaborate to build on those foundations.

There are plenty of bands with siblings in them – and it is something that seems to cause a lot of interesting tension within the group dynamic – do you experience that within the group?
Yes. But we know each other well enough that we tend to be able to work things out.

You were playing with Ritchie for a while but he is no longer a part of the project – why is that?
We originally created Brothers Young so two of any of the four of us could play under that name at any time. Foureveryoung has four in the name, so it’s really hard to constantly explain to people that there’s only three brothers playing that night. I would say that Foureveryoung is still very much alive when Ritchie is not so busy with Loch Lomond.

What can you tell me about the new album?
This album has more of a live-band feel, and more worked out song structure than anything we’ve recorded collectively before now. Also, the packaging is very special. I don’t know if you know much about letterpress, but each color layer has to be individually designed and then pressed by a human, using, in this case, over a hundred year old equipment, which can’t exactly be run by a hamster in a wheel. We hired trained pugs to fold and hot-glue all the cases though.

What is next for the band?
The Sun Says He’s God was meant to be recorded and put out in a month, but took over a year when all’s said and done. So although we’re very proud of the album, some of the songs have a newer, fresher feel in the direction that we want to go. And so we’re really excited about writing and recording our next album, maybe this time we’ll try to be more realistic about our recording time. There’s three of us writing songs, so we’d like to put out multiple albums a year.

In the two years since Loch Lomond released their first proper band album, Paper The Walls, this lovely chamber folk outfit have made that slow steady climb up the hill toward international renown. Much of it has been on the strength of their sharp and often dramatic live performances that swing from small fragile moments that hinge on the interplay of a finger-picked acoustic guitar and singer/songwriter Ritchie Young’s falsetto to clattering, shuddering crescendos that resemble woozy sea shanties. The quintet have taken their live show around the U.S. with startling frequency, including last year’s month-long jaunt as openers for The Decemberists.

This spirit is captured most immediately on the band’s latest release, the five-song EP entitled Night Bats. It starts with the most indie pop recording Loch Lomond has done to date before falling into another dreamy sway. Along the way, they make time to add some muscle to an older song and cover a vintage ’60s-era Bee Gees classic, finishing it all off with a rousing and haunting closing track that will linger in your synapses well after it has stopped playing.

Oregon Music News caught up with Young after an afternoon recording session at OPB and before the band geared up for their CD release show at his new club The Woods.

Why did you decided to just release an EP at this time rather than a full-length album?

Well we have a full-length that we recorded this last year. It’s called Little Me Will Start A Storm and it’s going to come out in spring of 2010. We had this window of time to come into the studio and record and mix and master in 20 days. It was really great to do something where we didn’t micro analyze every part of it and second-guess everything. In the end, we decided to kind of remix a few of the songs with Tucker Martine. And it has been since August 2007 since we released anything on disc, so we did this EP. I like it a lot. I think our full-length is a little more experimental than anything we’ve put out before. The EP is the cross between the old Loch Lomond recordings and our new material.

The first two songs on Night Bats – “Ghost Of An Earthworm” and the title track – have a fable like quality to them. What was the inspiration behind these two?

When I was 14, I saw an episode of Ripley’s Believe It or Not and in it was an Indian peasant who in his backyard saw these giant glowing earthworms. About six months ago, I had this really vivid dream that I was one of those worms but that I had swallowed a skeleton and could walk around. “Night Bats” is essentially a love song about a person I was dating. She was very much a day person and I was very much a night person, so there was this real love/hate relationship in the way we looked at the world. It showed me that you can be not right for someone but still care about them very much. So, I put that in a fable setting, and wrote a not vague metaphor for that situation.

You also re-recorded an older song, “Spine”, for the record. What prompted you to revisit this one?

I recorded the original recording five years ago, with just me and another person. But the way we had been doing it live and it had life and energy and we’re going to start playing it again this year. It’s a fun song. And we were really tired of ending out set with that song, “Tic”. We had being doing it for so many years, that we felt we needed a crescendo at the end of the set. So we decided to retool that song and give it life again.

How about the Bee Gees cover on the album, “Holiday”?

That song was chosen for us by a friend of ours, John Brophy, who is just a huge fan of music; he runs Baby Ketten Karaoke. He was putting together a compilation and he said, “I really want you guys to do this song by The Bee Gees.” At first I said, “No, that’s not right for us” But listening to it, I realized that in a weird way that recording was an influence on the band that we’re not even aware of. It sounds so much like what I hope Loch Lomond sounds like to people.

It feels like, with this new material especially, you are really putting the focus on the vocals and pushing that forward in the songs. Was this on purpose or am I just imagining things?

Yeah, on this new record and the EP, the vocals driving force them. For about a year, we have been really focusing on the vocals for live performances. Before, a lot of the focus has been on the instrumentation of the band. I think that we want to keep that a huge part of what we’re doing but have the vocals be the most present thing. And it’s just really fun to sing with people that love singing. You know The Flash Choir? Watching them, you can tell everyone involved just loves singing. Watching them perform is such a huge rush. Even when I’m sick onstage with the flu and having a fever, or I have a toothache, when I’m singing it just kills all of that. Of course, when you’re done singing, it all comes back…

Loch Lomond went on tour with The Decemberists not too long ago. What was that experience like?

It was amazing. They were total professionals and really sweet to us. No rock star attitude at all. It was a fantastic experience. For me, I get really excited and overwhelmed that we play a show where there was 200 people there. Then we were playing to 2,000 to 4,000 people a night for almost a month. It was really an eye opener.

You also opened up a venue in Portland, The Woods. How did that get started?

At the end of The Decemberists tour, I was talking with my roommate Vivian Lyon about it. She’s a lawyer, but didn’t want to work for anyone and I was getting tired of looking for work after touring. It was a lot of planning and somehow it fell into line. I really didn’t think it was going to happen. We couldn’t get loans to start it up, but the economy fell to the point that it allowed some people with an idea to just run with it. It’s been like going to school for opening a business. I’ve learned a lot and I have so much more to learn, but it’s been fun.