By Glen and Julie
In the wake of the huge popularity of their original acoustic video series, it was an easy decision for The Airborne Toxic Event to do it again as they readied Album Two for release. In February 2011, they announced their intention to take the project to the next level.
Back in 2008, after we finished recording our first album at a friend’s house and before we left home for two years, we filmed one-take acoustic versions of all the songs on the record-each one in a different locale around Los Angeles. The L.A. River. The Colburn School of Music. Griffith Park. Noah’s car.
We didn’t really know what to expect, except that we wanted to show the songs in different contexts. In the process, we stripped down the music in some places, expanded it in others, and learned that Daren can drive a boat while holding down a beat.
Thanks for all your comments and emails about the videos. In advance of the release of our new album All at Once on April 26th, we’re excited to announce The Bombastic, a new series of one-take acoustic performances of all eleven songs from the upcoming record. Starting today, we’ll be releasing one a week until the album comes out. There will be special musical guests. And one cat.[i]
The announcement was accompanied by the release of the first video, showcasing the title track, “All At Once.” Dipping back into their All I Ever Wanted bag of tricks, the band is joined by old friends the Calder Quartet, the Lalo Guerrero School of Music Children’s Choir, and music students from the Plaza de la Raza Community Center in East Los Angeles.
If the purpose was to get the fanbase revved up for the new album (which, as it happens, was really only a small part of the story), they could not have picked a better song with which to start. Opening with a dark close-up on Mikel Jollett’s guitar and hands as he carefully plucks the quiet opening notes, the perspective widens throughout a first verse that sets the thematic stage for the album, eventually revealing the entire band as the other members join in.
The tension and tempo rise, and it’s not until near the two-minute mark that you realize the Calders are in on the act as well. By the time the chorus-less song reaches its apex, the screen overflows with a couple dozen musicians, each adding to an anthem that immediately dispels any concerns of a letdown from the heights scaled by the debut album. Before the closing words of this, the first of 11 tracks, even begin to fade from our ears, we are sold.
Jollett would later admit to being particularly proud of this effort. “(It’s) one of our favorites from the Bombastic series. We had all just flown back from tour a couple hours before we filmed this.”[ii]
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“There’s something honest about it,” says Jollett of the Bombastics, all shot with one camera in a single take. “The hard thing is to just stand there and play your song. Everybody fakes it and you live in a world where everyone is faking it really well. So we’re like, let’s do something you can’t fake and (with) Bombastic we’re going to do the same thing as the acoustic series, but larger productions.”[iii]
That honesty is integral to the appeal of the videos, and it is why the band emphasizes that the project is not just a marketing ploy; it is a work of art in and of itself.[iv] Says Jollett: “You can do a lot of bells and whistles in the studio, where you correct things or you add stuff in, but you can’t really fake it when you’re just playing a song. And so, at the end of the day, a song is a song is a song. A good song, you can play as a polka, you can play it as a punk song, you can play it at a piano bar; it just really doesn’t matter. So the idea was, we just wanted to let the songs exist in this way, without all the various accoutrements of a modern record, or like you would see in a highly edited video.”[v]
Like the All I Ever Wanted film and several of the band’s previous music videos, the Bombastic series was directed and shot by Jon Danovic. “We shot in a lot of different locations,” says Anna Bulbrook, “and it’s basically just us playing each song in the simplest possible way, with just acoustic instruments, and every single video is just one take.”[vi]
Asked by one interviewer where the videos could be found, the band had some fun.
Jollett: “They’re all over those internets. I think they’re at Bitly and Tumblr.”
Daren Taylor: “If you do an Altavista search, you can probably find it there.”
Noah Harmon: “Use Prodigy to dial up…”
Jollett: “What you’ve gotta do is get your Friendster account up…”
Harmon: “Once you get a free disc from AOL in the mail, put it directly in your computer, and hook your modem up.”
Bulbrook (trying in vain to reign it back in): “You can find the videos on our website and Facebook page and Twitter and so on, and the YouTube and the Vevo.”
Taylor: “Or go to your DOS page…”
Harmon: “Type in http, backslash, backslash, colon, star pound six…”
Taylor: “Command, Airborne Toxic Event…”[vii]
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As advertised, ten more videos arrived over the next ten weeks, each release raising anticipation of the album one notch higher. Unlike the original acoustic series, the Bombastic did not follow the running order of the album. The opening track was followed on February 22 by delicate ballad “All for a Woman,” filmed on a rainy Los Angeles day at the First Baptist Church in Koreatown.[viii] The video is notable for Harmon and Steven Chen swapping their usual roles, with Chen taking over Harmon’s familiar stand-up bass, freeing the latter to grab some spotlight time with a subdued but spellbinding acoustic guitar solo. Meanwhile, Bulbrook carries the melody on piano and fills the air with angelic vocal accents befitting the heavenly environment.
The third release brought The Airborne Toxic Event and the Calder Quartet back to the Colburn School Conservatory of Music in downtown Los Angeles, which was previously the site of the acoustic video for “Innocence.”[ix] This time they delivered an equally gripping rendition of fan favorite “All I Ever Wanted,” which would receive its studio release on All At Once after having previously been available only as a live recording. The video was the first indication that the studio recording would include different lyrics and some variations in arrangement from the film version.
From cramming into the back of a car for “Does This Mean You’re Moving On?” to Taylor drumming with one hand while steering a boat with the other on “Something New,” the fun factor was a big part of the first album’s acoustic series. While the Bombastic is more serious for the most part, the band did try to incorporate that element into the fourth installment, “It Doesn’t Mean a Thing.” It didn’t quite go as planned.
“We originally planned to have something like 30 cats in the video, all playing with yarn and toys, but as it turns out, cats don’t like loud guitars and drums. Like, at all. In the end, one stayed, and the rest got the hell out of there” (Anna’s attempts to corral them while playing notwithstanding). “It was quite the scene. Noah learned the banjo for this one, and this is Anna’s first official performance with a xylophone.”[x]
Next up was “Welcome to Your Wedding Day,” the first of two overtly political songs on the album – a notable departure from the almost painfully personal compositions that had defined the band to date. The musicians rock the aggressive tune in an underground parkade, illuminated only by the headlights of a car and a pair of motorcycles.
“Wedding Day” was followed up by its natural partner, “The Kids Are Ready to Die” (the order of the songs reversed from the album and most live performances). The band says of “Kids,” “This originally started off as kind of a punk song. We changed it but then it ended up as, well, a kind of punk song.”[xi] Jollett carries it by himself for the first three quarters of the number, playing the dark dirge all alone against a non-descript concrete wall before the camera pans to reveal the entire group set up in a stairwell. The other members join in to bring the song to a haunting close.
“Strange Girl” sees things take a turn towards the slightly creepy, as the musicians gather in a darkened Silver Lake bedroom,[xii] where they play next to a young woman deep in sleep. The video is bathed in green to create a striking night vision effect.
“Changing” was the album’s first single, and already a radio hit by the time it dropped as the Week 8 Bombastic. The opening keyboard notes are played instead on glasses of water before the band launches into an infectiously energetic performance. Midway through, The Airborne Toxic Event takes a backseat to members of the Strikers All-Stars, a seven-man urban soul dance troupe whose frenetic slaps, claps, stomps and whoops form an extended rhythmic breakdown.
On April 13, the band premiered the Bombastic video that diverges most significantly from the album recording, in “Numb.” A straight up rock song is stripped down to the barest of bones, morphing into a forlorn meditation shot on a quiet MTA bus on a still Los Angeles night. The release came on the same day that the official music video for the song was made available for free download.
In 2013, The Airborne Toxic Event would conduct an informal social media poll, asking fans to name their favorite acoustic video. The winner? “Half of Something Else,” which was released one week before the album. Clad in formal attire paired with stone-faced expressions (with the notable exception of Jollett, who cannot suppress a Cheshire cat grin, which he attributes to the fact that the crew was pushing the carousel by hand because the engine was too loud), the Airborne musicians and their Calder cohorts go round and round on the historic Santa Monica Pier carousel as they offer up another flawless performance.
On April 26, All At Once finally arrived – as did the final video in the Bombastic series. For the uninitiated, “The Graveyard Near the House” was a revelation. Filmed outdoors on a rainy night in Silver Lake,[xiii] the setting provides the perfect backdrop for Jollett’s most affecting poetry yet. The Bombastic, like the album, ends as it began: with profound ruminations on life and death, love and loss, clothed in stark black and white.
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Notes:
[i] The Airborne Toxic Event Band Mailing, Feb. 16, 2011.
[ii] The Airborne Toxic Event Facebook post, (March 5, 2015), https://www.facebook.com/TheAirborneToxicEvent/posts/10152853126527585.
[iii] Nick Eardley, “Laying it bare: The Airborne Toxic Event,” Nick’s Blog, (October 10, 2010), https://nickeardley.wordpress.com/2010/10/10/laying-it-bare-the-airborne-toxic-event/.
[iv] Brenna Ehrlich, “Airborne Toxic Event Priming Fans for Album Release With Series of Acoustic Videos,” (Apr 05, 2011), http://mashable.com/2011/04/05/bombastic/.
[v] “Airborne Toxic Event Priming Fans for Album Release With Series of Acoustic Videos,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?x-yt-ts=1421914688&x-yt-cl=84503534&v=JWDcpYf2fPI.
[vi] “Airborne Toxic Event Priming Fans for Album Release With Series of Acoustic Videos,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?x-yt-ts=1421914688&x-yt-cl=84503534&v=JWDcpYf2fPI.
[vii] “Airborne Toxic Event Priming Fans for Album Release With Series of Acoustic Videos,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?x-yt-ts=1421914688&x-yt-cl=84503534&v=JWDcpYf2fPI.
[viii] The Airborne Toxic Event Band Mailing, Feb. 23, 2011.
[ix] The Airborne Toxic Event Band Mailing, Mar. 3, 2011.
[x] The Airborne Toxic Event Band Mailing, Mar. 10, 2011.
[xi] The Airborne Toxic Event Band Mailing, Mar. 22, 2011.
[xii] The Airborne Toxic Event Band Mailing, Mar. 30, 2011.
[xiii] The Airborne Toxic Event Band Mailing, Apr. 26, 2011.
Julie publishes musingsfromboston.com, a music blog with the bipolar personality of wannabe philosopher and charlatan music critic, where she is just as likely to review the audience as she is the band. Her first Airborne show was at a lingerie party hosted by WFNX at an Irish-Mexican bar in Boston’s financial district. She does her best to live by the motto “only one who attempts the absurd can achieve the impossible.”
Glen is the founder and editor of This Is Nowhere. He’s grateful for an understanding wife and kids who indulge his silly compulsion to chase a band all over the Pacific Northwest (and occasionally beyond) every time the opportunity arises.
