February 28, 2017 | 0 Comments

SCARVES – MALL GOTHS is at Top 200 Radio Now!!!!

I’m so excited about this FRICKIN’ KILLER record by my Seattle BFFs Scarves, which is doing so great so far!! The album title is MALL GOTHS which is maybe all you need to know, just go listen to it now. It’s great. You may remember them from the record Empty Houses that I did a radio campaign for back in 2014 (#128 on the Top 200!). This record is even better. Like you may possibly recall if you’ve been around for a couple years, they play mathy, literate, talky, emo-inflected indie pop, a la Joan of Arc, who by the way they opened for in Seattle a few weeks ago. KEXP is already playing them, as are a lot of the rest of you—get on board if you’re dragging, and let’s shoot for a lofty-ish goal and get Scarves into the Top 50 this time around!!!!

scarves mall goths album cover web

SCARVES

MALL GOTHS

Self-Released

Scarves only seems to be getting better and more self-assured over time. Scarves combines a jarring mixture of Northwest indie, math rock, and classic emo to create an emotional landscape more relatable than many of the other indie rock outfits out there, if only for their stark honesty and abrasive attempt at human connection. “ – KEXP

Mall Goths is an album comprised of ten vignettes depicting characters along the I-5 corridor between Bellingham, Washington and Portland, Oregon. Struggling against their reality, desperate for rebellion, yet inextricably stuck, they fall in love in one city and break up in the next, all over meticulously unhinged instrumentals.

Scarves was formed in mid-2013 by Niko Stathakopoulos of Silicon Girls, Marshall Verdoes of Mt. St. Helens Vietnam Band, and David Price of Natalie Portman’s Shaved Head. All three found themselves in bands in the midst of implosion, and wanted a creative outlet that existed simply for the sake of making art and blowing off steam. The project took on real significance for Stathakopoulos when they began work on their debut release, TV EP (2013), with Sam Anderson of Hey Marseilles. “Lyrics suddenly became super important to me,” relates Stathakopoulos. “Suddenly our slacker rock sensibility wasn’t enough. I wanted our songs to mean something, to tell a story.”

After touring behind TV EP for a few months, they headed back to Soundhouse in Seattle to record their first full length, Empty Houses, with Dylan Wall (So Pitted, Craft Spells). Scarves toured lightly in support of the release, and once again, discord crept into the project: “I am the only original left,” says Stathakopoulos. “During that time, we went through 11 members.” In late 2015, drummer Cael Watts and bassist Hector Rodriguez III joined Stathakopoulos, and the band got back to work. Newly invigorated, the band booked time at Chris Walla’s legendary Hall of Justice studio for their next record.

Written while Stathakopoulos was travelling continuously through the Northwest, the record crackles with the bleary-eyed intensity of too many hours spent flying down the highway. “My girlfriend at the time was living in Portland, so I would drive eight hours from Bellingham to see her,” says Stathakopoulos, “or I would drive two hours to practice with my band who all lived in Seattle. We would practice and get the instrumentals done together, then record them on an iPhone, and I would drive around listening to the little blown out audio files and just sort of diary over them.”

Tonally, Mall Goths can be broken into two sides, the first half hopeful, the second heavy and tinted with hindsight. “Dissolve” charts the brutality inherent in the service industry, while “Slasher Flicks” looks enviously at the simple life/death duality of horror films, a welcome reprieve from the complicated emotional minutiae of the average day. Against a backdrop of tall pines and freeways, Stathakopoulos sketches snapshots of banal reality and the inevitable longing for escape. Wrap yourself in Scarves’ angular guitars and intriguing melodies, and perhaps you’ll find that it’s in the ubiquitous details of daily reality that our shared humanity dwells.

RIYL: Joan of Arc, American Football, Cursive, Built to Spill, Modest Mouse, Dismemberment Plan

Start With: 4, 6, 10

FCC: 1 says “goddammit”; 10 says “damn” and “dick”; otherwise CLEAN