Featured Artist - Nov 2007 (Click Here)
The L.E.D.s
Contact: Daniel Batkin-Smith
dan@eep.co.nz
www.theleds.co.nz
I can haz synth? Yes you can and lots of it, courtesy of the L.E.D.s.
The evolution of the L.E.D.s began three short years ago, courtesy of Marcus Thomas and Blair Parkes who, in 2004, formed "Thomas:Parkes" after both being involved in several guitar-based bands over the previous years.
After writing and releasing the album "Big Machine" as Thomas:Parkes, Marcus and Blair decided to expand the sound.
The introduction of Helen Greenfield (formally of "Barnard's Star") to the line-up introduced more feline synth, luscious vocals, and a dash of strings to the mix. This, of course, made the name Thomas:Parkes not only obsolete but incorrect and the search for a new name began. After exchanging many txts and e-mails and much googling (to ensure the name was unique); Helen, Marcus, and Blair settled on the name "the L.E.D.s" - not least because it was a cool name and the omnipresent light emitting diodes on their gear...mmmm
Towards the end of 2006, the L.E.D.s released their debut album titled "...we are the L.E.D.s". The album contained several singles that charted in the RDU Top 10 and led to the eccentric Dr Hitchcock including "Modernist Cut" on the compilation "This is not the chch sound".
Following the production of a music video for the second single "Rumba", the L.E.D.s asked drummer Dan Batkin-Smith to join the band in an effort to step up the live performances. The L.E.D.s continue to use programmed beats mixed with live drums during their live performances and still manage to record and write new material despite being split between Christchurch and Wellington.
Together their powers combine to create catchy, electro-fuelled pop and a super-good time. After several synth-licious, crowd-pleasing performances in Christchurch and a tour as part of the Karajoz Public Address Great Blend, the L.E.D.s are currently working on a new album, scheduled for release in the first half of 2008.
www.theleds.co.nz
www.myspace.com/theleds
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Reviews
The Opinionated Diner/Simon Grigg - 30 July 2007
But they might kind of understand The L.E.D.s. Their album came out
last year, via a home pressing in Christchurch, in New Zealand's almost
deserted South Island (the isolation helps add the necessary
eccentricity to give this its alt-pop glitter), and a lot of people I
respected talked about it over the months. But, could I get it in
Auckland…nobody had heard of it. Instead I got NZ on Air's Kiwi Hit
Disc 95 in the mail. It was shockingly, gruesomely, awful, and I
wondered what had happened to the edge in NZ's local industry (nobody
is buying NZ records anymore…after tens of millions of dollars spent
over the last decade by government agencies, it's the terrifying truth
that no-one will publicly admit to, although they are all saying it in
private), until I finally found, via Smoke CDs --in Wellington, a copy
of …we are The L.E.D.s .
I'm in love. I love this album more than I can
possibly say, or at least, put into words. This is legacy stuff. I
understand this. Any album which references so well early NZ
electronica (Car Crash Set and Body Electric), jangly almost early
Flying Nun-ish, (although slightly more McGuinn-ish than that) guitar
sheen, and yet sounds so absolutely, but simply, contemporary, works
well for me. Soft, resigned, melodic and yet, at times, it's gets
resolutely noisy as well. It's the first perfectly formed pop album
I've heard from New Zealand this decade. Another album, I understand,
is due soon and I'm craving it already.
The L.E.D.S are a garage band, they do it all themselves and
almost nobody notices them in the establishment. And then I note that
most of those awful records on that Kiwi Hit Disc are getting full
signed releases by someone and I understand exactly why, at it's most
obvious level, NZ's recording industry is in such dire trouble, and yet
if you dig deeper, it most assuredly is not.
http://opdiner.blogspot.com/2007/07/like-search-for-murder-clues-in-dead.html
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A Secret Less Well-Kept: The L.e.d.s At The Dux, Plus An Interview - Aug 02, 2007
Music fanatic, Dr Creon Upton, on why the L.e.d.s have changed his life
Contributors
to this site seem to be having some kind of public love affair with the
L.e.d.s, so I thought it would behove me to contribute to the
collective embrace. David Haywood made the first move, eulogising here
over the band's first album, We are the L.e.d.s, and then Russell Brown
snuck in a plug for them during this interview, describing them as "the
summer's best-kept musical secret, the L.e.d.s." That soundbite now
appears at the beginning of the band's forthcoming album, tentatively
titled, yes, We are Still the L.e.d.s.
Now,
maybe Public Address writers are a bunch of old crusties (y'know, just
hypothetically), but the kids bopping along to the L.e.d.s' magic at
the Dux recently were barely out of high school. Surely such young
hipsters can be regarded as reliable arbiters of musical cool, even if
Haywood and Brown are -- let's be brutally honest -- more likely to
perform the inverse function.
I'm sure the youthful Dux audience was unimpressed by, if they
noticed at all, Brown's pre-recorded line opening the gig, and they
were no doubt equally nonplussed by the ever-laconic Blair Parkes's
contradictory greeting: "Hi, we're The Fall." In fact, despite the
band's getting a fair amount of airplay on RDU, I'd guess this audience
barely knew what they were in for at all.
But then the music started.
'Infectious' has got to be
the most over-used word in writing on pop music, but seriously folks,
this stuff is just made to get you moving. It's uncanny.
If
you're familiar with the Dux, and with the essential
Reuben-Thorne-icity of all things Christchurch, you'll know that the
mandatory stance at this venue is old-school leather-jacket posing --
statue-like, preferably against the bar, holding grimly to that
protective pairing for the critically uncertain: a beer and a look of
studied seriousness.
So it was a real revelation to see, firstly, the undergraduate
contingent dancing through the entire set; and then, even more
astonishing, the hard-core punters at least twitching a shoulder or
two. This band is so undeniably cool, and they are so clearly having
such a good time, that it's impossible for even the most hardened
dickhead to sneer.
We are the L.e.d.s. Who are the L.e.d.s? What do they want? And what are they going to do now that they've got our attention?
In a nutshell, they are Blair Parkes, Marcus Thomas, Helen Greenfield and Dan Batkin-Smith.
And they're creators of funky, poppy, synthy beats, as well as
catchy, unpretentious, grunty pop, and witty, clever, cruisey tunes. To
prove my solid grounding on New Zealand soil, I'd say their music has
more than just snap, crackle and pop; it has that X-factor; like Andre
Adams on an unrolled green-top, it makes things happen; it's a
high-performance, fuel-injected, mallow-puffing musical manifesto.
And what they're going to do is make more of it. Rock on.
The
band really began life as a duo: Thomas and Parkes, who both come from
a background of jangly guitar-pop. This was Thomas:Parkes, with Marcus
Thomas on bass, voice and percussion duties, while Blair Parkes
controlled the synth, vocals and guitar. Finding that this was not
quite enough for what they wanted to achieve, they invited the
lusciously-voiced Greenfield to join them. She now sings, plays cello
and does her share of synth work. Batkin-Smith on electronic drums is
the latest addition to the band. Parkes, Greenfield and Batkin-Smith
live in or around Christchurch, while Thomas lives in Wellington,
meaning rehearsals are more conceptual than actual affairs, while the
composition process owes a lot to the efficiency of NZ Post -- still
living in the Cretaceous period of dial-up, Parkes explained to me,
snail-mail remains his preferred method of sharing material.
I've been following Blair's music since the early nineties,
when he was part of Christchurch band Creeley, and he's always written
great pop tunes. But this recent move away from guitars, with
increasing emphasis on computers, synths and pre-recorded backing
tracks for the live shows, has been a major watershed for him. He is
thriving on a new kind of creativity that is all about the production
process, collaborative composition and testing the possibilities of
electronic media within a musical aesthetic that successfully combines
the kinds of sounds and attitudes we'd associate with a less drum-heavy
New Order, a more relaxed and approachable Kraftwerk, Gary Newman with
a healthy dose of valium, all inflected with a DIY Flying-Nunishness
that's quite happy about not being high art.
And, it would seem, everyone just loves it.
For God's
sake, those children at the Dux yelled for an encore. At the Dux. The
band was so taken aback they had to admit apologetically that they'd
used all their backing tracks and it'd have to be a repeat. No worries.
They swung into 'What I See,' a definite hit-pick from the forthcoming
album, and it got us all back on our feet, savouring this moment of
unselfconscious good-times.
So I made a trip out to New Brighton to chat with Parkes and
find out what he and the band think they're doing. He ushered me out of
a perfectly warm lounge, into a freezing studio-shed, sat me on the
floor, and thoroughly impressed me with his total inability to
articulate what he's doing with his music.
Nonetheless, among the ramblings of a man who clearly thinks
far too much about everything, there were some real gems of insight and
passion.
I started out asking him about the composition process in this band that is only occasionally in the same room, let alone city:
"Well, realistically I'm writing the same kind of songs I've
been writing for 25 years.... I start a rough song, with melody,
rhythm, voice; then I send it to Marcus to do whatever he wants to do.
Then Helen comes along and does some bits; then I edit, arrange, mix
etc. I try to leave a song open enough for the others to approach it
and add their take on it.... You're trying to get to the essence of the
idea."
This seems like a big thing for Parkes, a certain tension between the idea of a song and the freedom of the song itself:
"The
aesthetic of the music is really important; it's like picking your
palette of sound without letting that dictate your creative path too
much. Having an aesthetic idea is really interesting. You don't want to
be trying to do what you're wanting to do; it's like automatic playing
within a defined area, you set parameters but try not to dictate what
you do.... You might write five similar songs, but there'll be one that
you can't have written without the other five.... It's a fuck of a lot
of grunt work, so there's a lot of unpleasant work to do to achieve
your goal."
I suspect that the L.e.d.s' lyrics are integral to the aura of
cool that surrounds their songs. Parkes is one of those writers whose
ear is ever-attuned to the nuances of colloquial conversation, and his
songs are like collections of phrases that are arbitrarily yet
brilliantly pieced together, signifying without meaning, evoking
without telling. I asked him about this:
"Lyrically, there are quite a few things that I try not to do. Narrative stuff is what I try not to do, or relationship stuff."
I
moved the conversation on to the shift away from guitars and the
embracing of synths. I'd been wanting to ask Parkes about this for a
while, because it'd come as such a shock to me originally, and because
it seemed to me such an outrageous success. The response was candid:
"If you play guitar music for 19 or 20 years, there wasn't
much new for me personally. I ended up writing so many songs, I was
making music that I wouldn't buy and wouldn't go out to see.... It was
getting away from having a rhythm guitar in a song, that was the key
thing, because I was repeating myself -- ultimately I was pretty bored
by it. Marcus and I tried to set about changing it....We'd been using
computers for a couple of years, and realizing some of the things we
could do....You don't have to have it terribly worked out beforehand,
the recording is part of the compositional process, but the editing is
also.... I've got a 48 track studio on my laptop, which is just cool.
It's about spontaneity of recording; I can sing straight into the
laptop.... Like I might be running [baby son] Nico's bath and I get an
idea -- I can just go out to the shed, record it, and then go back to
the bath. Yeah, it suits my lifestyle."
Making this kind of music has completely altered the approach
to playing live for someone who cut his teeth on the typical guitars
and drums bash-it-out technique. The band now plays live with two
synths, a bass guitar, Batkin-Smith's electronic drums and the
indispensable pre-recorded backing tracks. This latter, particularly,
struck me as a major change in direction, and I wanted to know Parkes's
take on it:
"When the band was just Marcus and I it was a way of making
the recorded sound live. There are definitely pluses and minuses:
technically it's more difficult than just playing guitar -- you need to
be able to actually hear what you're doing. It's a more disciplined way
of playing.... We just made it up as we went along. We didn't really
know how we would do it, just bumbled a process as we worked out how to
sound okay live."
And why does he think the band is working so well? Why do the kids like it? What are they doing right?
"I've
got no idea why the kids like it. It's pop music, we're trying to make
songs people like.... We're pretty pleased with it. [Laughs] I'm a New
Zealander and don't admit to things being good. I guess it works
because we've thought about what we're trying to do.... It's also about
having the right people. Bands are totally about that. Marcus is
amazingly good. Helen is great. And Dan's a top guy: we wanted to get a
drummer. It's an aural and a visual thing. Drummers add a lot to the
visual aspect of the group and add heaps to the dynamic aspect of the
group."
Finally, I wanted to ask about the band's branding, the
distinctive candy-like design that appears on their CD cover, on
badges, on cushions, and on the t-shirts they were all wearing at the
Dux. Is this a major marketing exercise, or just a laugh? Apparently,
it's a bit of both:
"Marcus does the art. It's about having a strong visual
identity -- thinking about what things look like ties in with how they
sound. Yeah, it's about having a brand, a strong sense of what we're
doing and making people want to hear what we're doing, making the art
match the music. And wearing the t-shirts on stage is fun."
And fun, friends and neighbours, is what this band is all about.
http://www.publicaddress.net/default,4378.smpost
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Adele Hunter-Higgins, Real Groove July 07
You are barely human'. Over and over on The L.E.D.s scratchy
sled.'You are barely human'. Click whirr repeat. "Barely Human". Over a
spare cyclic guitar line and retro-futuristic synth, those four words
again and again until it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The
L.E.D.s debut album is a finely executed work- it sounds like a far
away dream of the future from twenty years ago,with silver suits and
inexplicably robotic movements and dehydrated potatoes. All slinky bass
and minimal drum stutter, icy guitars and itinerant loops, it ably
mines a chilly vein of electro-rock. Then there's the barely human
part. It's all played with such a level of detachment that you start to
long for some warmth, to take the vocalists by the shoulders and check
for a pulse, for some sign of life. Blue light is a welcome save with
its harmonies that uphold the 'light emitting ' part of the band name,
and the latter part of Modernist Cut freaks out fuzzily in a satisfying
non-uniform manner, but the lasting impression of the album is one of
faint discomfort. It made my brow furrow.
*** three stars
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The Beat, The Press - 28 June 2007
The
L.E.D.s are a four piece electro indie act with a line-up that consists
of four members, all of whom are familiar and comfortable with
performing live. Frontman Blair Parkes [keyboards] felt right at home
in the tavern bar fell, with light banter throughout the performance ,
as did his offsider, the excellent Helen greenfield [keyboards], who
has previously played with the sadly now defunct Barnards Star. The
rest of the band is made up of Marcus Thomas [bass] and Dan
Batkin-Smith [whose cool drum kit looked a lot like scaffolding].
With a series of programmed beats and their live drummer and
bassist, The L.E.D.s produce a sound that at times ethereal and
haunting , before dropping back into moments of pop/ rock and dance
music.
The band's songs benefit from some well-chosen electro
samples, which on the night included Jean Michel Jarre's Oxygen, using
its simple chord sample as used on the track Rumba. With an obvioulsy
loyal following and recent suppoprt from RDU98.5FM giving them some
well deserved radio play, and their 2006 debut release We are the
L.E.D.s [Seaside] still available, the Beat will be expecting to hear a
lot more from this popular act.
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The L.E.D.S We are the L.E.D.S [seaside] [four stars] - Vicki Anderson, The Press 13 January 2007
The
package containing this and a polite 'please review' letter from
Canterbury group The L.E.D.S [Blair Parkes, Marcus Thomas and Helen
Greenfield] reached me a month after they posted it - from
Christchurch. That is 28 days during which I was deprived of hearing
the lastest Thomas - Parkes incarnation perform the mesmerising David
Lynch-type sounds on We Are The L.E.D.S. Futuristic distorted bass
dominates here. It's like standing far too close to an electro-fuelled
space shuttle blasting off for galaxies unknown and will have you
walking in light for days. I've been solidly thrashing this and it is a
space odyssey I highly recommend. Solid sounds shine on Cars, 38, Rumba
, July, Breathing Air and Blue Light. Also check out the classy
old-skool video for Rumba on YouTube.
www.theleds.co.nz
www.myspace.com/theleds
Note: Chart subscribers/members can download the L.E.D.s track 'Power' free for November 2007!
