OurStage

Yeah I like this. It’s got a great 80s feel to it and as we all know; music cycles in approximately 20 year blocks LOL! It is true though. Anyway, how come there are only three band members on your photo collateral and four on your MySpace?! Eh?! The sound is great. The guitar rake intro is right out of late eighties Manchester and then the tune switches over to a more New Romantic era theme and flicks between the two throughout. There’s also a rather sneaky, yet brilliant West Coast US rock theme happening too, which reminds me of RHCP a little, but it’s the mix of these different ideas that makes for a great tune here. It contains enough variation (which we love here) to keep me hooked in and there aren’t really any moments where I switch off. It’s a bit Goth too, which might not go down too well, but fuck it. REMINDS ME OF: Alarm, RATM, RHCP, Heaven 17, Teardrop Explodes, Waterboys, Happy Mondays, Stone Roses, ABC SCORE: 9/10 IN A SENTENCE: It’s excellent and Living Atheist Music says so! ATHEIST: Vad

Each week, we take a look though our Sonicbids dropbox and let a band tell us about themselves. This week, get to know Televandals. You can catch them at the Paradise Rock Club on Tuesday, May 27 Band Name: Televandals Members: J Restless - Guitar, Effects, Lead Vocals - Allston, MA Nico - Lead Guitar, Synth, Loops & Effects, Backing Vocals - Allston, MA Ride-Out - Drums, Beats, Backing Vocals - Boston, MA Nick - Bass Guitar, Backing Vocals - Boston, MA Releases: Madison Avenue Reality EP, February 2008 Web site: www.myspace.com/televandals How did you form? It's taken some time for Televandals to complete its lineup, but we are excited by the camaraderie and musical vision the four of us share. What is most remarkable about the band is the symmetry of the process through which we formed. J Restless and Nico first met in 2006 while simultaneously seeking to form a band predicated upon innovation and creating a dynamic new musical sound. After briefly playing under the Televandals name in early 2007 with other collaborators, the band had the good fortune to meet Ride-Out in the spring of that year. The new lineup debuted with interim bassist Michael Fine in August and, after a rather extensive search, adding Nick Post as the band's fourth permanent member at the beginning of 2008. Who are some of your influences? It may sound like a cliché, but we all bring such multifaceted influences to the table. Our music is inspired by everything from old school punk to synth-driven electronic dance music to 80s British dark-wave and countless others. Some of the bands that have inspired us: The Clash, Radiohead, The Killers, Bloc Party, Muse, Massive Attack, Rancid, LCD Soundsystem, Kill Hannah, Squarepusher, The Knife, Kings of Leon, Blur, The Sounds But instead of rehashing these influences, we've taken our respective inspirations and worked together to create music that is both original and dynamic. Finish the sentence, someone would like your band if they like... A sound that is epic, edgy, hypnotic and apocalyptic, and songs that force you to think, touch your soul and make you want to dance like hell. If someone couldn't decide between going to an electro club or a punk show on a given night, they would be completely fulfilled coming to one of our shows. What has your most memorable moment as a band been? Perhaps our most memorable moment was the release of our debut E.P. "Madison Avenue Reality." We had spent an extensive period of time in the studio recording and arranging these four songs, all the while refusing to compromise regarding our artistic vision. Simultaneously, we were engaged in the process of designing album art, creating promotion strategies and doing everything necessary to get the E.P. ready for release. All the while performing live, writing new material and searching for an additional member of the band. You can't really appreciate the amount of work that goes into music until you've experienced it firsthand. But the first time we heard the music after it was mastered made it all worthwhile. It was a vindication of all the hard work that not only makes it all worth it, but makes you energized to do it all over again. And again. That was the first of many memorable moments still to come for Televandals, but was still a seminal experience that we will never forget. Walk us through your songwriting process... There really is no one formula for songwriting in the band. Most of our songwriting derives from someone presenting a riff, beat, loop or other sonic idea that we will all work on collaboratively. Other times, someone will come in with part of a song (a verse, chorus, etc) and we will again collectively work to arrange the song and write additional parts. This dynamic has allowed us to bring our songwriting to a new level of intricacy and has inspired some radical new ideas both presently and for the future. Who is the best musician in your band? We all bring different strengths to Televandals that complement the diverse skills of the other members. There could never be a best musician in our band because every song is always a combination of all of our talents - the four of us bring out the best in each other. We believe true musicianship goes far beyond technical ability. While we all have musical talent, it is our collective passion and energy combined with each of our aforementioned strengths that allows us to work well together, create innovative and sonically challenging music, and translate all that into vibrant and exciting live performances. It's the very fact that each of us has unique skills that makes us different from almost every other band and essentially eliminates the concept of "frontman." What is your favorite local venue? Probably the Middle East Upstairs. We've played there twice and appreciate the intimacy that room allows us with the audience. The sound is very good and the club has quite a history as a spot for up and coming local acts. You feel like you belong onstage in that room Our second time playing there was a particularly dynamic show to a packed room - one of those performances where everything went perfectly and we seamlessly connected with the audience. We look forward to playing the Middle East again soon. What separates you from other local bands? Our innovation and our ability to synthesize so many divergent musical styles - especially the combination of guitar-driven rock, beat-laced dance and synth-inspired electro - into cohesive, ambitious and accessible songs that simultaneously sound original and familiar. In addition, our music incorporates a social insurgency with politically charged lyrics that confront societal inequities and controversial themes that demand that listeners think for themselves. We also feature a very intense and explosive live show, to which we plan to add increased visual/audio-visual components in the coming months. Our shows capture the energy and passion of late 70s punk combined with the hypnotic dance/trance textures of modern electro-inspired styles. What do you have coming up that people should know about? We have the first installment of our incredible new dance night "Dissent." This will be a recurring event in New York and Boston that will feature the best up-and-coming rocktronica, electro, discopunk, darkwave, shoegaze, and synth-rock bands and DJs from throughout the Northeast. For the first time, there exists a vehicle for a new breed of music and performance - the "hybrid" acts that blur the lines between live and electronic music to produce one incredible sound. The first "Dissent" will be at New York's Fortune Cookie Cabaret on Friday, May 16th, with future installments to follow in the coming months. We also are scheduled to perform in Round III of the Emergenza Festival in Boston at the Paradise on Tuesday, May 27th. There will be a full slate of summer shows to be announced soon, with a possible Northeast tour pending for mid-to-late August. Convince our readers to see your next show... When Televandals take the stage, it's about raw, uncontrolled unstoppable energy. "If a voice is a weapon mine is a machine gun." That is who we are when we perform. We want you to leave feeling like you can take over the world, that you can rise above the disillusionment and despair to truly make a difference with your life. And if you feel a sense of grandeur, hope, inspiration, and downright immortality when you go home that night, then we have succeeded. If you're intrigued by what you've read about us, check out our music on Myspace and be there at our upcoming shows. We promise you won't be disappointed. We're looking to revolutionize the way music and society coexist. Are you with us?

From the ol Hotline: Local bands are rounding out the lineup for the week-long FNX Radio Disorientation 2009 concert series, which on Monday kicks off a five night run at the Lansdowne Pub. Cambridge new wave comet The New Collisions will warm it up for synth-pop lad Owl City on Tuesday night, while Allston electro punks Televandals have been tapped to open for Brooklyn hipster duo Matt & Kim on Wednesday. One remaining slot, a support gig for UK post-punk gloomers White Lies on Thursday, should be announced today. The Diso-’09 series already had some local flavor, as New Hampshire’s Wild Light start it up proper on the launch night. All the shows start at 7 p.m. and are free, but you have to hit up www.wfnx.com and get on the guest list to enter. Each night should be a tough ticket in the House Formerly Known as Karma Club. The oh-so-sweet complete lineup features: Oct. 5: Dearly Beloved and Wild Light Oct. 6: Owl City and The New Collisions Oct. 7: Matt & Kim and Televandals Oct. 8: White Lies Oct. 9: Black Joe Lewis and White Rabbits Here’s some promotional words from FNX: You came to Boston for an education. In times like these, that means you don't have cash for anything else. No problem: WFNX is throwing a week's worth of exclusive FREE concerts at the Lansdowne Pub. You MUST RSVP for each individual concert you want to attend. (RSVP is not a guarantee of admission: all shows are subject to club capacity, so get there early to guarantee your spot.) Tweet #DisO if you go! ALL SHOWS are 21+ and take place at the Lansdowne Pub, 9 Lansdowne Street in Boston, across the street from Fenway Park. Doors open at 7 pm.

If you're placing a bet on who might become the next Boston band to make a dent on anyone's consciousness outside of Boston, then you could do a lot worse than TELEVANDALS, who put a Mass-pride punk spin on ultra-glossy electropop (or vice versa, if you prefer). Catch them at the Pill at Great Scott on September 4, and download their song "Good For Nothing" below.

The whole "alternative isn't alternative" anymore argument/joke is so tired that not even Gallagher will touch it (he'd rather smash watermelons, and rightfully so). So what do we make of a band like Televandals that takes the almost 30-year-old term "new wave" and somehow makes the wave sound new again? If you had no contingency plan for this occurence, it's time to make one up if Televandals' "Good For Nothing" is any sort of indication. This song is a mishmash of sound, as if the hazy early musical memories of someone with extremely hip parents were somehow uploaded into the multitrack machine which consequently spat out "Good For Nothing" like an Everlasting Gobbstopper. This song has the shiny guitar jangle of The Violent Femmes, the anthemic fist-pumping of The Clash and a whole mess of other inputs and outputs from late-'70s/early-'80s FM radio. While this song has the shiny, snazzy new-wave packaging, it still displays one of the hallmarks of a good song: it takes you somewhere. The piece has an overall arc, from the almost tentative early strains of guitar through the boisterous vocal presence to an ending which is nigh anthemic – almost every ear will find someone to hitch onto within the 4-minute-ish run of the inappropriately titled "Good For Nothing."