Friday, March 16   11:20 p.m.
Club One 15   (115 San Jacinto St)

Add this to your SXSW Calendar

  Bedroom Walls - Somewhere in Newhall
Download   |   Stream

Armed with a narcotic grace and a bone-dry sense of humor, Bedroom Walls aim to instruct listeners in the proper use of melancholy. The L.A. WEEKLY explains, "Music has to be liked a bit too much. Bedroom Walls make that easy, playing songs with awkward perfection. It's shamelessly melodic, kind of ambient, kind of spaced-out, surprisingly clever. It's like your little sister on drugs, insouciant and a bit off-the-wall." Or, as Bedroom Walls told the LOS ANGELES TIMES with a sly wink, "We just want to make people sad."

Bedroom Walls formed in 2002 when Adam Goldman, Melissa Thorne and Julian Gross (now of Liars) got together in Los Angeles to arrange the repertoire of ethereal non-sequiturs Goldman had been amassing by the light of the dirty L.A. moon. The group began rehearsing songs that would eventually populate their sleepy, infectious 2003 debut, I SAW YOU COMING BACK TO ME. In a brazen act of sublime idiocy, they dubbed their sound Romanticore. Critics and fans liked what they heard – the record earned praise for its stunning textures, shimmering melodies, and dark wit from the likes of ROLLING STONE, THE VILLAGE VOICE, and THE BOSTON PHOENIX, and DJ Nic Harcourt invited them on his legendary KCRW radio show for an in-studio performance. (ISYCBTM reached #9 on KCRW’s album chart the month of its release.) By this point, the band had expanded to a septet, including Kris Canning, Aurisha Smolarski and Sean Hoffman.

Now comes Bedroom Walls' sophomore album, ALL GOOD DREAMERS PASS THIS WAY (Baria Records), which has already received raves from SPIN, URB, and the ALL MUSIC GUIDE. Produced by Rafter Roberts (Sufjan Stevens, Fiery Furnaces, Black Heart Procession) and mixed by Joe Chiccarelli (Beck, U2, Rufus Wainwright), the record finds the band indulging both its melodic gifts and its love of ornate instrumentation. Goldman says he was trying to capture the epic schizophrenia of his high school mix tapes: "When you're a kid, you just love what you love without thinking too hard about classifications or sub-genres. So, I would make myself these mix tapes with a Squeeze song followed by a Pink Floyd song, followed by a Smiths song followed by Led Zeppelin. I found one of these tapes when we were starting to arrange this record and I loved the crazy internal logic of it. I wanted to get all of that – the anglo-pop of Squeeze, the mythic bombast of Led Zeppelin, the druggy sprawl of Floyd, the teenage narcissism of the Smiths."

After recording ALL GOOD DREAMERS, the band underwent another transformation, jettisoning the electric guitars and paring down to a mere quintet. The sound at once more intimate and more chaotic onstage, covering the whole spectrum from whisper to scream. It’s really just a continuation of the mission: to craft a sound that hints at the darker side of beauty and the lighter side of knowing your ex-girlfriend is happier now. Romanticore is spreading beyond Los Angeles to a suburban bedroom near you. It’s going to start showing up in the eyes of people you think you know, as sad and lovely as the sun setting through smog.