Chief The Band – Yes, there’s an ‘i’ in between “Ch” and “ef”
Saturday, July 2nd, 2011
‘The Jesus Four’, that’s how some people describe these 4 gentlemen from Santa Monica, California on youtube. And they may not be just be referring to their Jesus-like hair.
They are signed under Domino Records, the same record label that brought you Four Tet, The Arctic Monkeys and Franz Ferdinand.
Pitchfork has this to say:
At heart, Chief seem more or less like a bunch of hippies. Almost every song on Modern Rituals evokes a band of longhairs, whether it’s the close, CSNY harmonies of “The Minute I Saw It” and “This Land”, the stoned Meat Puppets deadpan that lead singer Evan Koga temporarily adopts on “Breaking Walls” (complete with spiraling My Morning Jacket-styled guitar figure), or the album’s largely dippy lyrics, which hit their nadir on “Summer’s Day” with Koga opining, “I believe when I go/ You will cry tears of gold.”
Chief, four LA musicians who formed in New York then returned to California, have in their songs a similar quality of yearning for a vague, indistinct 70s America that, when you think about it, included a lot of different styles. They namecheck Neil Young, Tom Petty, the Band, and Crosby, Stills and Nash. They don’t really sound like any of them particularly, yet you can still tell that’s what they’re into. It’s a romantic idea of listlessly driving along a freeway in the smog-drenched midday sun, in a semi-stoned state, sometime between 1970 and 1977, ie before disco, new wave and metal took hold.
They currently have one full-length album out, Modern Rituals.
Evan Koga (vocals, guitar), Danny Fujikawa (vocals, guitar), Michael Fujikawa (drums), Mike Moonves (bass).
