There’s nothing about Foreign Born’s full-length debut, On
the Wing Now, that sounds specifically Californian. In fact, it
seems like it might have crept down from Toronto or Montreal, with
plenty of splashing cymbals, interlocking orchestral guitars, and icy
reverberation glimmering by the torchlight of the band’s hopeful
melodies. It’s a genuinely good album; don’t be put off by the fact
that it came out on a label run by perennial Hollywood douchebag (and
“Celebrity DJ” to the stars!) Steve Aoki.
What’s more noticeably
symptomatic of the band being from Los Angeles is their careerist
streak. They’re all gussied up in the current issue of GQ, and
they did a guest shot on the NBC show Chuck (filmed, by the
band’s account, while they were very drunk). Bass player Ariel
Rechtshaid even produced “Hey There Delilah” for the Plain White
T’s—although I can’t imagine it was the barebones production that
got the ditty played on the radio ad nauseam last summer.
On the Wing Now wasn’t produced on a ginormous budget in a
slick Hollywood studio—although it sounds like it could have
been. In actuality, guitarist Lewis Pesacov painstakingly recorded the
album at home. After the record’s completion, the band toured the
country hawking handmade copies out of a van rigged to run on vegetable
oil.
Save the commerciality for the band’s lighter-ready anthems, with
soaring sing-along melodies and trilling guitars that arc over the
proceedings like fighter jets at an air show. Singer Matt Popieluch
resembles a young, scrappy Tom Petty, with ghost-blond hair, a disdain
for intelligible enunciation, and the courage to scrape the upper
registers of his range. The band is accessible enough—and good
enough, it must be said—to be huge. Their music is tailor-made
for large audiences to share in communion, and if their second album is
as good as the first, that’s exactly what they’ll find. Somehow, I
don’t expect Foreign Born will have a problem with that.