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The Botticellis

MusicBlog

Location: Outer Richmond

Website: http://www.thebotticellis.com/

Bio: The Botticellis have an obsession with pop music, melodic songwriting and the cinematic sounds of yesteryear, but they're not lost in some oldies Neverland. On ... (more) Old Home Movies, the quintet Ð Alexi Glickman, vocals and guitar; Zack Ehrlich, drums, keyboards, vocals; Burton Li, guitar, keys, analogue delay; Ian Nansen, bass, vocals and Blythe Foster, lyrics and vocals Ð gives us ten luminous snapshots of sun-bleached memories. The vision is uniquely Californian, and while their music basks in the warmth of the Sunshine State personified by The Beach Boys, it's also steeped in the shadows and queasy uncertainty of Raymond Chandler. Glickman puts it this way: "The sunny, carefree backdrop of the endless summer often masks the complexities of relationships that can bring darkness into your heart."

The songs on Old Home Movies are built with elegant melodies, shimmering guitars, dreamy keyboard textures, drumming that can be both subtle and dramatic, subliminal bass lines, Glickman's plangent vocals and Foster's deliciously ambiguous lyrics. The tunes are as concerned with atmosphere as they are with meaning and blow through the mind leaving behind a smoky, wistful mood. The Botticellis' stylized sound echoes the production aesthetic of some of the great 70s pop records from Big Star, Chris Bell, and George Harrison.

Old Home Movies is polished, orchestral, and surprisingly subtle, with a remarkably full and mature sound for such a young band. The classic, larger than life production is full of delicate flourishes; each song is a tiny gem. The album opens with the title track, its snaky, sinuous melody full of yearning and regret. The hallucinogenic sound of the Vox Continental gives the song a nostalgic feel, intensified by Glickman's charmingly regretful vocal. "The experience of going home is always so different than that of leaving. You've grown up and reinvented yourself. You can't go back on the same road you took when you left," says Foster. The clanging twin guitars and reedy sound of an old pump organ playing long sustained notes bring a summery vibe to "Stay With My Brother," a counter to the song's melancholy lyric. The song is warm and inviting, but you can sense the dusk is close by. "The Reviewer," one of the album's heavier tracks, features a panoply of jangley guitar sounds; crashing power chords, fuzzy lead lines and Ehrlich's relentless tom thumping. Glickman's cynical vocal paints the portrait of a guy as obsessive about music as the band he's reviewing, and is obviously jealous of. "It's hard to ignore the press," Glickman says, and the gulf between commercial success and critical acclaim is often hard to fathom. It seemed like a good topic for a post-modern rock song."

Set against the backdrop of a pulsing Andean folk rhythm, Glickman's haunting, vocal and the group's towering harmonies make the surf heavy "When I Call" eerily catchy. "Botticelli means 'little barrel,' a surf term Zack and I started using as kids for our favorite California wave," Glickman explains. "When you're inside a wave like that, you really understand the 60's surf sound. I guess "When I Call" is a bit of an homage to "Greenough Vision".

The band produced the album with the help of Anton Patzner (Bright Eyes) who played violin on "Who Are You Now," Matt Cunitz, whose museum of vintage keyboards colors the music and Jason Quever (Papercuts), who played drums on "Flashlight" and helped capture the band's balmy sound on analogue tape. With everyone in the band contributing to the arrangements and shaping the overall sound, Old Home Movies is a true ensemble endeavor from a group of musicians bringing their new light and classic sympathies to indie music.

The Botticellis began when Zack Ehrlich and Alexi Glickman met playing Suzuki violin duets in a southern California kindergarten class. They started writing songs together in grammar school and continued playing in bands together in high school and college. While studying music at UC Santa Cruz, they met lo-fi auteur, Burton Li, who helped produce an early album for the duo. Li soon joined the band and under the influence of his analogue obsessions, the three moved further up the California coast to San Francisco. Not long after, lyricist Blythe Foster and bass player Ian Nansen were pulled into the fold. The ensemble now lives communally in San Francisco's foggy Outer Richmond district, where they've been working on Old Home Movies for the past four years, refining their muzzy, slightly drugged out, psychedelic sound. The Botticellis' debut promises to bring burnished, finely crafted pop to the people, filling the heads of their audience with vibrant memories and California day dreams.
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