From the musical underground of Los Angeles comes Goldenboy, a band comprising of two in-studio guru’s and one very tasteful drummer.
Their debut release on fledgling label, b-girl, is the new lo-fi. By using older analog techniques, these three guys update the D.I.Y. mentality of oh say, Sebadoh or Dinosaur Jr. But, this ain’t the indie-rock you kids are familiar with, and it shows on their debut album, Blue Swan Orchestra.
Principal songwriter Shon Sullivan (vocals, guitar, keys, etc.) conjures up images of Belle & Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch doing his best Lou Reed.
Adding more than a backbeat are drummer Bryan Bos and bassist David McConnell. McConnell also adds his production touches to 3/5 of the tunes on the album. In fact, both McConnell and Sullivan are quite the heavy hitters in the Los Angeles music scene. Sullivan is a band member with Crowed House’s Neil Finn and indie folk troubadour Elliott Smith. McConnell has also collaborated on Elliott Smith’s forthcoming album. In fact, Smith contributes his signature tenor falsetto to “Summertime,” one of the several standout tracks on the album.
Blue Swan Orchestra is a very mellow pop record. Many of the songs flow together much like XTC’s masterpiece, Skylarking. The mood straddles the fence of both brooding elegance and playful charm, though the album does have a tendency toward a split personality.
Most of the songs on Blue Swan Orchestra are punched up by McConnell’s studio treatment, while sounding neither overproduced nor amateur. Tracks such as “Wild was the Night” and “Sing Another for the Winterlong” are dense and intelligent enough to please audiophiles and uber-hip indie kids alike.
The tunes that Sullivan recorded on his own are sparse and incredibly trippy. “Twenty Months in a Hale Storm” and “Sunlight Through the Fog” blend together to form something like a nice opus about the weather. The piano/vocal treatment of “Baby doll” is aided by odd samples of manipulated tape stating “hello there gentlemen, I’m your baby doll” over and over.
“Big City Lights” is a quick little ditty that begins with a sample of what sounds like an acetate of a 1920s film score and ends with a hard right panned bit from a radio adventure of the same era. While these four homegrown tracks don’t necessarily fit with the congruence of entire album, and should probably have been released as a separate EP, they tend to work if viewed as a break from the rest of the action: dream sequences, commercials or whatever.
The real tests for this band have been happening over the past several weeks as they have been touring the Midwest and Southeast. After seeing them last night in Asheville, it seems that they pull off the intelligence of the album with ease.
Live, Sullivan switches up between guitar and keyboard, sometimes playing them simultaneously. Drummer Bos plays an old organ and some odd beat generator on several songs. They will be returning next Tuesday, Oct. 29, to Vincent’s Ear in Asheville.
Though only in their infant stages, Goldenboy will be an important band to keep an eye on in the future. Here’s to folks writing and recording real songs with brains and emotion.

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