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French Miami

MusicPhotos

"Oui Señor"

Location: San Francisco, CA

Website: http://www.myspace.com/mrfrenchmiami

Bio: If you haven’t heard French Miami yet, enjoy your last few minutes of peace. Once their songs get inside your head, they start a ... (more) permanent loop and you will wake up and go to bed singing along. The only way out of this musical addiction is sleep deprivation.

French Miami’s raucous live shows use rock music structures to hold together more technical musical ideas. Jagged guitars, pulsing synths, and precise stop-start rhythms launch seductive refrains that have forced the crowd’s feet off the floors in post-punk singalong deliriums from SXSW to CMJ. The first time you catch their live show you might be shocked to discover there’s no bassist as their ménage a guitar-synth takes the low end as far as it can go with the head-nodding precision of a mathematical equation.

How is this possible? It helps that they’re multi-taskers.
Onstage, French Miami show off the technical cred behind their sound by moving non-stop and playing an average of two instruments apiece, usually at the same time. Singer Jason Heiselmann slides effortlessly between baritone guitar and keyboards while delivering vocal melodies in memorable strands too gritty to be called pop, too irresistibly catchy not to be. Multi-instrumentalist Roland Curtis is usually playing a guitar with one hand and a synth with the other with freakish proficiency. Meanwhile, drummer Chris Crawford does precisely what a drummer should do by anchoring their sound in a minimalist beat, knowing when to let loose and when not to.

This was no easy live show to wrangle onto a record, but French Miami knew the right man for the job. Phil Manley (Trans Am, Fucking Champs) committed their self-titled debut - a unique blend of prog, post-punk, and synth-art rock - to eternity. The album waxes nostalgic on anthemic 90s sounds from Archers of Loaf and Trans Am, tastes the angular grooves of Battles and Holy Fuck, and throws in the earnestness of the Boss and Fugazi to balance the sweet with the sour. The result is terse, jagged rhythms fueled by great hooks fulfilled in noisy abandon.

The first pressing of this mind-bending album saw daylight on a start-up label with a modest PR effort. Even with this minimalist approach to the press, French Miami still attracted considerable attention from UK tastemakers NME and the BBC, a stateside nod from Rolling Stone, and a lengthy three-month hold on the CMJ Top-Fifty in 2008.

Constant chatter among music critics, backed up with a devastating live show and a cult-like following demonstrated the band’s ability to reach a larger audience. Take Root Records jumped to re-release this soon-to-be seminal album and support the band’s touring through 2009 while actively cultivating French Miami’s next record that will surprise you all over again in 2010. Early demo tracks suggest you won’t get any more sleep next year than you got this year if it’s a year in which you’re listening to French Miami. (less)