ILAD and No BS! tonight at The Camel

Dean Christesen — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 17:30:00 +0000

ILAD and No BS! Brass will be performing together tonight at The Camel as part 2 of No BS!'s "With Our Powers Combined" series. On March 27, No BS! performed with one-man-band Gull and dancer Rachel Warren, and back in February they allowed a project from Maggie Walker Governor's School to open for them. They fill up The Camel every time they play, but let's get one thing straight: this is a band that doesn't need marketing tricks to pack the house. Their collaborations with artists of different genres seem genuinely out of curiousity for musical results, and not just strategies to sell more tickets. It's common knowledge: these guys throw a great party.

ILAD fans are familiar with the band's flexibility for new situations and their penchant for switching things up. With strong ties to the experimental and avant garde scenes, rock formulary is hard to find. Performing together with a brass band does not even seem out of the ordinary for this group. The results are bound to be special, but a special experience is what listeners come to expect with ILAD. Their new album Here//There will be released tonight.

ABOUT ILAD
Coalescing the experimental spirit of their debut, The Spoon, with the more focused song-writing and groove-based stylings of National Flags, Here//There is set to become a breakthrough release for ILAD. For about two weeks in May of 2008, Here//There was recorded in a fury. The band laid down enough material for 2 records and then some. After long debate on how to release this immense collection of almost 30 songs, they boiled it down to a single disc and plan on releasing the extra material as an EP called We Still Gawn Move in Fall of 2009. The body of work yielded from the Here//There Sessions documents a band in the midst of an intense phase of prolificacy with no sign of letting up (it’s been reported that they’ve already begun writing music for a 4th album and claim to, yet again, have enough material for at least 2 records). ILAD has evolved from a chance grouping of 4 individuals of which McDaniel assumed the main responsibility as singer and songwriter on The Spoon into a much more egalitarian outfit on Here//There, where there is no clear frontman, but instead all members share in and at times trade off the leadership role. The instrumentation/sound palette also expanded greatly on Here//There to include more piano and guitars, Hammond organ, Wurlitzer, Casio keyboards, accordian, clarinet, wood flutes, banjo, throat-singing, glockenspiel, various shakers, chimes and small percussion, etc., and they even enlisted the vibraphone-playing talents of Ralston’s older brother, Cary Ralston (aka .:. impossible, who has assumed the role as ILAD’s personal artist-in-residence). Yet with all of the musical chairs being played by the 4 members, the band somehow managed to never give in to the ADHD impulses so tempting in studio environments or to lose focus on the core songwriting of Here//There; but instead has greatly matured the identity so uniquely their own. It is this ability to so successfully and keenly navigate through such a democratic creative process together which seems to be the legacy ILAD is just beginning to build.

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