Sir Sly will deliver their third album, The Rise & Fall Of Loverboy, on April 23rd. The So-Cal group have shared a few songs off the upcoming record including “Material Boy,” “Little Deaths” and “Citizen.”
Lead singer and guitarist Landon Jacobs says, “The Rise & Fall Of Loverboyis an album about falling in love with someone new, and the magic that brought into my world. It’s also about slowly eating away at that magic through drinking and self-medicating, and my journey into early sobriety and reckoning with my past.”
I *feel* like Sir Sly came to play Victoria a bunch of years ago….but I think I missed that show (if it’s the one I remember). Dang. Was always down with these guys, even back when they had that weird little ghost mascot and had songs like “Gold” bouncing around soundcloud. Ah, that’s my mistake. I should have went. Just too many shows you know…then there’s a pandemic and regrets of shows missed.
I had the opportunity to yap with drummer/programmer Hayden Coplan. We talked about the new album but I wanted to get a bit of the backstory. The vibe I get is that Hayden and lead singer Landon Jacobs go back…and it turns out they do. They grew up together in Orange County, went to the same church, and played in a variety of short lived highschool bands.
It wasn’t till Landon graduated college and he made the decision to focus 100% on music that Sir Sly was born.
Hayden and I also talked about the new record. I asked him to tell me something interesting to listen for on the new record. He told me they are playing around with a bunch of samples buried in the songs and Landon’s lyrics are open with a narritive that ties the record together.
Hayden from Sir Sly sent over the new song “High” which he says “turns a hotel-room panic attack into a creative breakthrough.” And assures us in the press release that that quote is 100% true.
He has a little biographical story of the journey Sir Sly has gone on…. the roller coaster hype machine ride. The press release is pretty good, so fuck it, I’ll just copy/paste that and you can check out the song below. Though to be honest Sir Sly…I miss the soundcloud links… bands are all in on the monetized streams. You wanna get paid, I feel you, but watching a 30 second movie trailer before hearing one song is lame. Also Hype Machine doesn’t chart youtube or spotify or apple music embeds. Be warned hopeful band!
April 20, 2014: It’s a day off on tour with The 1975. We’re colonizing a beige, Spartan room at the Courtyard Marriott in Oakland. Landon, our front man, steps out for a smoke.
Shortly thereafter, he becomes one with the universe. Additionally, my man sprawls out on the bathroom tile, smiling, scared, and stoned, naming off a list of people to whom he must give this newly discovered, all-encompassing, cosmic love.
September 16, 2014: The trip subsides, we finish the tour, and release an album called You Haunt Me. It does pretty well. My Mom tells all her friends about the time we played Conan, and how she heard us on the radio.
Deep inside, I’m a little disappointed because I read somewhere on the internet that we were supposed to be the next Coldplay, yet I still drive a 2001 Nissan Pathfinder with a check engine light.
Over the next six months, we start, and later abandon, a sophomore album full of minimal electronic songs. The lyrics are mostly outward facing, obtuse, anxious. It was good, but Jamie xx we are not.
June 2015: Back at square one and thinking hard about words like “sonic” and “identity,” Jason makes a round, booming instrumental in his studio in Costa Mesa. I cobble together a sampled, sauntering drum beat on a bus in Italy. Landon comes up with this sticky melody that’s part talking, part singing, all feel. We get in a room and they meld together.
It ends up being a revisionist retelling of that April 2014 night with a wink and some rose-colored glasses, borne of a desire to have a song to dance to every show.
We feel like it’s good shit.
I play it for an anonymous Uber driver and he’s all in. My Dad hears it and says it is “poppier” than our old stuff. My brother loves it and posts it to his Instagram months before it’s released because he thinks it’s already out.
Now: “High” comes out. “It’s an upbeat anthem about ego death” lead singer Landon Jacobs told the biographer, while I was on the other line of the conference call. “It really opened up the honesty of the record.”
Fittingly, it’s the first song from a forthcoming album that is lived-in, loose, and against all odds, a celebration. Thanks for listening.
Occasionally it stops raining in Vancouver…and when it does, not a bad view eh? That from the CFOX studio looking east toward the Eastside of downtown and out towards the suburbs. My iphone camera is not a real camera…but you can see out to Brentwood (left) and Metrotown (right) and even Mount Baker (kinda….tucked to the right of Metrotown).
Last night I was DJing at Match Pub in New Westminster. I have been DJing there on Thursdays for the past little bit. The first few sets I’d say have been….uneven? as I get back into the swing of it, but last night was the first time it felt good. Settled into some deep house, chill wave beats, a little hip hop or remixed hip hop and modern rock. I think it sounded alright. Still a work in progress, but last night was encouraging. That Bob Moses track was a hit, actually had a few folks come up to ask what it was.
Plucked through my old Veneto playlists and played a few old favourites like Sir Sly…then today my man Jesiah messaged me to turn me onto a new Sir Sly single, “Expectations.”
Last Fall, we set off on the process of writing LP2. “Expectations” was one of the first songs that came. Since then,…
My wife Coral and I went out the other night for a random Wednesday night of debauchery. A friend was having a birthday and said they’d be crushing at a place in Chinatown called The Emerald. It was off Main Street and Nik described it as, “Emerald Room is on Gore, it looks like a foreclosed-upon stripclub from outside, and then inside it looks like an opium den where you’re gonna get your pinky finger cut off with a cigar cutter, and then you go through a curtain and it’s full of disillusioned hipsters drinking negronis. I love it there.”
He wasn’t totally wrong. It was a bit of a battle getting the kids to sleep, so we left the suburbs late, and it was a rain storm but we persevered.
Found the spot in a deserted rain drenched Chinatown.
When we got there, there was some weirdo jazz-ish band playing, lots of the mentioned hipsters…but no Nik. (he apparently had been denied service? oy vey)…But Coral and I made the most of it and crushed a few cocktails. I had to have one of those mentioned negronis.
There are just too many songs. I JUST heard RAC‘s “Let Go” for the first time yesterday and the song came out last September.
The song came on yesterday and I thought I recognized the male vocal as that dude from Bloc Party. When I got home to a computer I was able to see the song does in fact feature Kele Okereke. The song also has a female vocal provided by Amanda Warner of MNDR.
The song is very bright, until you dive into the lyrics. And now… a Sir Sly remix.
We’ve been enjoying the other pride of Wasilla, Alaska, Portugal, The Man on the Zone. The current single is “Purple Yellow Red and Blue.” Trolling the US modern rock charts the other day, I saw that “Modern Jesus” is getting a few spins. Well, we better punch that up.
Lastly… I did notice that Sir Sly is getting some radio love with their song “Gold.” I have always dug these guys. They remind me a bit of The Neighbourhood.
The Hype behind these guys has been building for awhile… check out this “next big thing” article form over a year ago! Part of me thinks I have posted this article before, deje vu.
AC was wondering if “indie pop was a real genre, well check out their label Neon Gold says, “a monochromatic blend of vigilante pop.” Vigilante pop?
Pitch.com had a chance to interview the guys a couple weeks ago. It’s worth a read. Writer Natalie Gallagher asks lead singer Landon jacobs about the song “Gold.”
“Really, that song … it’s funny because we wrote that song, and I was over at dinner at Hayden’s apartment, and he was like, “Oh, you have to hear this new artist that’s coming out. You have to hear this song. It’s called ‘Royals’ by this girl named Lorde.” And I heard it and went, “Hey, lyrically, that’s the same thing that we’re doing in ‘Gold,'” and so it’s kind of a funny coincidence.
Obviously, that song is the most massively famous song of 2013, but it has some of those same internal-monologue questions that we ask in our music. Like: “What is success? What do I want out of life? out of music?” All those kinds of things. “How do we define success?” And then, “What is my dream?” It’s a little bit sarcastic, that line specifically. The rest of the song is kind of a sincere search into the things around that theme.”
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It’s time to go, but before I do… let’s keep on the Neon Gold train with London’s CHPLN. Song is called “White Snow.”
the write up from Neon Gold: “Meet CHPLN, two new chaps out of South London. Their debut single, “White Snow”, floats in quietly and settles on you like the first flakes of winter, calm and composed as the track springs to life over sinfully smooth harmonies and frosty nocturnal transmissions. With shades of Metronomy and Hot Chip swirling together in and amongst the classic aura of Jungle, it’s the perfect soundtrack to a brisk walk home after a wildly introspective night on the town.”
Jesiah alerted me to another slinky song from LA’s Sir Sly bouncing around the internet tubes. Their Ghost ep is out NOW in NA (Neon Gold) and on March 4th in the UK (National Anthem).
Sir Sly is the greatest band in the whole wide world.
That probably isn’t true, but I was reading a blog post about blog posts that said a “shocking” statement off the top is critical for blog success! (Thanks Chris).
But sirsly, Sir Sly is pretty good. Hilly Dilly had these guys on their blog yesterday and said something about them being perfect! Sir Sly’s Ghosts ep went hot yesterday on iTunes and I imagine I’ll be downloading it for some heavy feature at The Veneto Lounge (Friday nights yo).
So dark and melodic. I just settle right into these jams from the LA based group.
The Morning After 