Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on January 2011

Courtesy of Hostess

Local Natives were the toasts of last summer’s Fuji Rock, and their debut album, Gorilla Manor, earned a place on many music critics’ 2010 best-of lists. All they need now is a proper night’s rest.

“We’ve been on the road for a year and a half pretty much straight,” says vocalist and guitarist Taylor Rice, who’s still in bed at his hotel trying to rest up for the last of a string of London shows. “It’s a little bittersweet, because we will have to re-acclimate into society and sleep in the same bed every day. We really love touring, but at the same time we’re now really looking forward to the next record.”

With Gorilla Manor, Local Natives joined a coterie of bands like Broken Social Scene and Grizzly Bear who set multiple singers and complex harmonies over a musical stratum of psychedelia and 21st-century folk.

“I’ve been singing with Ryan [Hahn] and Kelcey [Ayer] for eight years, since we were kids,” Rice says. “The three of us were all songwriters and singers, so it was natural for us to all sing. For us, harmony didn’t stem from a studio thing. We were never like, ‘Let’s lay a bunch of vocals on a track.’ We love the power of the live harmony. There are no harmonies on our record that we don’t do live.”

Like many of their peers, the members of Local Natives found ample inspiration in their parents’ record collections. “We had grown up with The Beach Boys and The Zombies, and it just started small,” Rice says. “We never had any formal training, but we just kept experimenting. We were drawn to harmonies by bands like Crosby, Stills and Nash that are interesting and different. Maybe they float into unison at one point or maybe they don’t, but it’s not just a standard third or fifth—it’s experimenting with voices.”

Gorilla Manor takes its name from the house in LA’s Silver Lake neighborhood that the bandmates shared during its making. The album runs from the sublime panorama of “World News” to the regret-stained intimacy of “Airplanes,” an ode to a grandfather the singer never knew. They’re songs that work equally well on the electrified stages of rock festivals or the unplugged environs of someone’s back porch.

Thanks to the success of the album, Local Natives can approach their sophomore disc with a lot more time and funding at their disposal. “We were all working jobs, and it will be a much different set of circumstances,” Rice grants. “We’ll get to take our time with it, more opportunities, and we’ll have more ideas to mess around with in the studio. I know we’re going to want to experiment and really push ourselves.”

In an age of digital singles, Rice stresses the primacy of the album format. “In a business sense, it is less important to make an album,” he says, “but we all grew up with albums and it’s still very much the paradigm for us.

“When you look back at this year’s landmark albums, you’re gonna look at Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs or Broken Social Scene’s record. There’s an MP3 culture that emphasizes singles that go out to the blogs, and for indie-rock bands like us, that’s our space. But I don’t see that we’re at a level where artists just record singles. I see us as dedicating ourselves to developing a body of work, and albums still make sense to me.”

For the next few months, Rice looks forward to intense songwriting sessions—and some much-delayed downtime with his girlfriend. But before that, there’s the issue of tonight’s gig.

“We signed in the UK first [with Infectious Records], and played London seven times this year, so it feels like the closing of a chapter for us,” he says. “We’re going to go home and take a break and disperse. Tonight is both a celebration and reflection on the end of the tour.”

Local Natives
Melodic indie band from LA. Jan 31, 7pm, ¥5,500. Club Quattro, Shibuya. Tel: Smash 03-3444-6751.