You really should check out My Body.
Hey wait, where are you going? Not my body—although I suppose you are free to do that as well—but the lovely new band that's called My Body. It's the new project of Jordan Bagnall, formerly of Doubledutch and the early incarnation of Typhoon, and Darren Bridenbeck of 40 Hundred Thousand Locked-Up Guns and What Can Skulls Tell Us? They've been holed up in the bedroom and now have enlisted Alex Fitch (also of Typhoon) and Dan Hubner to make a live band.
Former fixtures on the Portland music scene and cornerstones of the Boy Gorilla collective, Bagnall and Bridenbeck have both been off the map for the past couple years, during which they'd struggled with writers block, but they spent six months holing up in the bedroom putting together new songs for My Body. As Bagnall says,
“Some really bad things happened to people I loved, and I needed to write about that, and that’s really what the doubledutch album was all about. But then things got better, and I fell in love, and I wanted to make music that was going to make people happy, and make them dance, and make them think about things getting better and falling in love, and there was a learning curve involved; I had to change the way I was writing to reflect the change in my attitude and it took a couple of years.”
There are a couple of exquisite new tracks available online on My Body's site and their Soundcloud (each mixed by Breakfast Mountain's Zak Osterlund). Here's the excellent "New Cat"—how great a song title is that—which I'm finding to be a ravishing, powerfully yearning bit of synth pop, both full of intoxicating sparkle and dirt-under-fingernails feeling. My Body play Saturday, March 31 at Backspace and debut a music video at Rontoms on April 22; a May 19 show at Mississippi Studios is also on the calendar.
