About this Event
Formed around Bay Area transplants Beto Brakmo and Maxine Garcia, alongside drummer Eric Promani and former Jermone’s Dream/Sea Wolf guitarist Scott Leahy, Fime's story starts with a gig as the backing band for indie breakouts Jay Som.
Like all of us, they expected a very different year out of 2020, and after some collective mourning for the gigs they'd lost, Brakmo suggested they write their own album instead. Informed by half-remembered and fictional stories of the past warped by the failures of human recollection, Sweeter Memory is as ambitious sonically just as much as it thematically, thanks to production from Jay Som’s Melina Duterte.
Over the course of the record, Fime makes such a definitive and direct mark, it’s hard to believe they could ever be anyone’s backing band again. Sweeter Memory is the stuff of headliners-in-the-making, with flashes of arena-ready guitar rock, post-hardcore gang vocals, indie rock, and country twang all appearing in equal measure.
Instagram / Spotify
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Alms was started in 2018 by Roman Zangari as a recording outlet for some songs he had written while attending college in Santa Cruz. Once he finished school and moved back to LA, it grew from a solo-project into a real band with the addition of Tristan Walczak & Ellington Peet. Alms self released their first collection of songs titled “Dogpile”, in the fall of 2019. The record largely dealt with themes such as anxiety, disillusionment towards the future, and how uncertainty has become a defining characteristic of the times. Sonically, it incorporated elements of shoegaze, grunge and post-punk into a mix of sentimental, guitar-centric alternative rock, via the likes of "Built to Spill' and 'Pixies'. Since then they have released a slew of singles and EP's, culminating in a 4-song EP titled "Somehow, Always," in June of 2021. Written and recorded during the early days of the Covid 19 Pandemic, "Somehow, Always" marked a shift in the band's approach to songwriting and saw them moving away from the more dissonant and abrasive sound of their first recordings, to something more earnest and immediate. The by-product of a severe period of self-reflection, the songs on "Somehow, Always" hold a magnifying-glass up to past relationships, friendships, and identity, with brutal honesty. The band is currently set to release a follow up EP in the summer of 2022.
Instagram / Spotify
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Los Angeles-based songwriter Spencer Hoffman has been gigging for a decade, since he, his brother and their high school friends formed the band Honyock when he was age 16. They would go on to open for such acts as La Luz, The Dodos, Anna Burch, Surfer Blood and collaborate with members of Father John Misty and producer Riley Geare (Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Caroline Rose).
Hoffman's debut single "Like a Bird" marks his first effort under his own name. The song was written as he was moving up and down the Pacific Coast before settling in Los Angeles. It draws inspiration from the American folk tradition, country songwriters such as Roger Miller and Guy Clark and 19th century romantic poetry. "There is a poem by Percey Bysshe Shelley called 'To a Skylark' I was inspired by," Hoffman explains. "In the poem he pines to be able to sing with such natural joy as a Skylark, which flies so high it is heard but not seen. I was listening to a lot of Joni Mitchell and my friend Joules (Sea of Bees) and thinking that they get close to singing in that effortlessly untethered way. Singing is a joyful act but also one of mourning and sometimes desperation. I wonder if it is the same for birds."
Instagram / Spotify
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Resident DTLA, 428 South Hewitt Street, Los Angeles, United States
USD 12.00 to USD 15.00