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Irving

MusicBlog

Location: Los Angeles

Website: http://www.thebandirving.com/

Bio: Formed initially by members Alex Church (bass), Steven Scott (guitar) and Brian Canning (guitar), Irving began as a thrown-together rock outfit to accompany a friend's ... (more) art opening. Within a month, Brent Turner (drums) joined, and the group began working in earnest on the songs that would eventually appear on its first album, Good Morning Beautiful. The release of GMB in 2002 showcased the band's penchant for writing witty pop songs with whimsical backup vocals and upbeat melodies.

By the year's end, Aaron Burrows (keyboards) signed on, and the band was back in the studio. The I Hope You're Feeling Better Now EP, released in 2003 to critical acclaim, exhibited Irving's unrelenting willingness to experiment with pop song structures, and highlighted the innate strengths of a band in which all five members are songwriters.

In the two years following the release of the EP, Irving opened for such notables as Franz Ferdinand, Arcade Fire, Broken Social Scene, Polyphonic Spree. The band's songwriting has also taken a noticeably more thoughtful turn. While the innate pop sensibilities continue to stand out above all else, Irving's songwriting has matured--the sounds and structures more intricate, the subject matter more thoroughly realized.

The band's second LP, Death In The Garden, Blood On The Flowers was the result of five musicians and their distinct influences, bound by an uncanny knack for melody and harmony. With production and engineering help from Phil Ek (The Shins, Modest Mouse), as well as Aaron Espinoza (Earlimart) and Jim Fairchild (from Grandaddy), Irving corralled its many distinct influences into the clearest vision to date. Burying dark images and melancholy subject matter beneath a shiny veneer of bright and dreamy pop, DIGBOF prompted Kevin Bronson of the Los Angeles Times to remark, "this could be the Beach Boys scoring a Hitchcock movie."

The band spent much of 2006 on the road in support of DIGBOF, headlining venues across the United States, and in 2007, traveled to Germany and Austria in support of the German release of the LP on the Records & Me label. Between dates on a busy tour schedule, the band worked furiously in the studio throughout the 2006 and 2007 to put the finishing touches on volume one in the Seasons EP Series: THE SEASONS - [fall] vol. 1_covers. (less)