Nootka Sound Festival - Two-day garage rock and psychedelic music festival at the Rickshaw Theatre and the Astoria, Aug. 29 and 30. For more details go to nootkasoundfestival.com.
Over the past week L.A.'s Allah-Las have immersed themselves in a full-on Pacific Northwest Coast experience as they kick off several months of touring in support of their new album, Worship the Sun.
The psychedelic garage rockers from Southern California played the Otalith Festival in Ucluelet last weekend and did an in-store session at Zulu records on Thursday night prior to their performance Saturday at the Rickshaw Theatre as part of this weekend's Nootka Sound Festival.
"Ucluelet was fun," says vocalist/guitarist Miles Michaud. "It was a cool location. A lot of people enjoyed the show, we felt good about it. We've been to Vancouver before but never to the island or up the coast there."
Between gigs this week the band headed north of Tofino into the Hesquiaht wilderness for a few days of rr before getting back to business.
"We met up with a mutual friend, somebody we know from Los Angeles," says Michaud. "We went on a boat about an hour and a half further up the coast (into the centre of Nootka Sound itself). We camped up there for a couple of days and there was some surf on the water, caught some fish, cooked on the fire and had a great time."
The band have two shows scheduled in L.A. at the beginning of next week and then they make their way to Europe for an extended tour of 25 cities including scheduled stops at the Psych Fest in Liverpool, the Badaboum in Paris and the Fuzz Club in Athens.
Allah-Las have an acute sense of what they want to sound like. Three of the four band members (Matthew Correia/percussion, Spencer Dunham/bass and Pedrum Siadatian/lead guitar) met while working at Amoeba Records in L.A. where they discovered a shared passion for garage rock and the psychedelic '60s in general.
They began performing together in 2008 and released their sublime self-titled debut album in 2012 featuring songs such as "Tell Me (What's on Your Mind)" and "Busman's Holiday" nailing down a '65 Stones vibe in the process - Southern California garage rock chasing the sun through a British invasion pop filter.
Their new single "Buffalo Nickel" premiered on the LA Times website last week while the 14-track Worship the Sun, is out on Sept. 16 through Innovative Leisure.
"It was a different process this time," says Siadatian. "It took more time. It was recorded in different places (with Dan Horne and Nick Waterhouse) and we experimented more in the studio. This record had all of us writing individually and then introducing songs to the group and working it out whereas on the first record we would riff on something together and then Miles would come up with lyrics after."
The Allah-Las are set to play at midnight at the Rickshaw Theatre to close out the two-day, two-venue Nootka Sound Festival
featuring local garage and psychedelic bands such as Dried Out and Cheap High augmented with performances from likeminded out-of-town artists such as Jacco Gardner, together PANGEA and the Entrance Band.
Last year producer Porter Bommes showcased all local bands in Sun Fest 2013 but this time around he and Kyle Haack from Snail Productions decided to branch out and bring in outside acts as well for the two days of music.
"We want to keep this a community festival, independently organized to promote the local scene," says Bommes. "We changed the name because we changed the concept to incorporate (a larger focus)."
Most of the out of towners happen to be from Los Angeles but that's purely coincidence and a matter of taste, according to Bommes.
"There's a good surf and garage rock scene right now and a lot of the bands are from there that I'm listening to right now."
The festival starts off tonight at the Astoria with Sh-Shakes at 8 p.m. Tomorrow both the Astoria and Rickshaw Theatre host a full slate of bands starting in the early afternoon. For a complete schedule go to nootkasoundfestival.com.
