We are very excited to welcome The Districts to the shop on March 14th for a must-see in-store performance. They are on the road with Dr. Dog and promoting their show on March 15th at the Madison Theater.
The Districts will be your new favourite band if you like ragged US rock, country-tinged Americana with elements of blues and folk. If you like music made by young men who appear to have just stumbled out of bed. For whom languor is an energy. There are tracks on their debut EP that tap into traditional American musics and amp it up, give it some contemporary welly, like a latterday Little Feat, which suggests they are going to remain a cult concern. And there are other tracks which point towards a Stateside Mumfords, others where they evince a penchant for rocking out that hints they could be Kings Of Leon big. That debut EP was produced by Bill Moriarty, who worked with Dr Dog, and is released on Fat Possum, label home of Townes Van Zandt, Dinosaur Jr, the Black Keys and Smith Westerns, so there are some more clues right there. Sleek futuretronica this is not. The boys – and they are still only in their teens or very early twenties, even if they do approximate the sound of ravaged, bedraggled older men who like a drink and the odd crafty fag – formed at high school in 2009 when they all were 14 and 15. They began as a covers band playing at the school coffee house, where they performed versions of Jimi Hendrix’s Voodoo Child and Purple Haze and Led Zeppelin’s Good Times Bad Times. Soon, they were playing their own songs, none of which were quite in the same league as the Hendrix and Zep numbers, but that didn’t stop the assembled letting their hair down, even the ones who were bald. By 2012, they had an LP’s worth of toons (to quote Todd Rundgren, who knows a thing or two about barnet), which they titled Telephone. We think this SoundCloud here comprising nine tracks is that 2012 album (it’s not on Spotify). It has the same raggedy quality as their newer material, and a similar kind of lazily lurching dynamic.
