Band of the Week: The Airborne Toxic Event

A talented singer can sell the most mediocre lyrics, but when you’ve got a lead who’s a major Don Delilo fan (the band’s name comes from the book White Noise), you can expect that he’s going to work a little harder at the writing than most.

Take The Airborne Toxic Event's song Wishing Well, with its spiraling refrains: And the walls spin… And you’re paper thin… From the haze of the smoke and the mescaline... The threat of your brow under unmade sheets…In your ear with the noise from darkest streets … We ran far and wide, you screamed you cried, you thought that suicide was an alibi… But you were always a mess, you were always aloof… Yeah, it’s awful, I guess, but it’s the awful truth.

Back last October, the guy who penned and sang that, Mikel Jollett, wrote to ask me to check out the band's music online and invited me to catch their show at The Echo with Tigers Can Bite You… And I ended up very glad that he did because I liked what I heard immediately – not only Wishing Well, but the also affable and smart rock songs Does This Mean You’re Moving On? and The Girls In Their Summer Dresses – and really enjoyed their live performance the next night.

Since then, The Airborne Toxic Event’s local popularity has been snowballing, most recently with a sold-out show with similarly rising stars The Deadly Syndrome at The Echo, which LA Times music columnist Kevin Bronson called “poetry you could dance to” and said “That sound you heard Friday night in Echo Park was a band breaking out.”

Their next show here in LA is on Monday, the 19^th at The Viper Room… and, yeah, you ought to go.

RELATED LINKS:
- Mini-Interview: The Airborne Toxic Event
- Wishing Well MP3 (YouSendIt Link – expires in one week)
- Mini-Interview: The Deadly Syndrome