AIRBORNE TOXIC EVENT: Airborne Toxic Event

By Lyndsey Matthews

August 5, 2008
Originally published at CMJ.com

These L.A.-rockers pack their debut with the driving energy of the Strokes, but with more life and less grit. They mix soaring string sections (recently made popular by the likes of the Arcade Fire), but add a punch of jangly guitars to get even the laziest dancing and/or head-rocking with quite some force. Yet lead singer Mikel Jollett's rumbling baritone colors these buoyant melodies with a tinge of sorrow, giving them surprisingly great depth. His melancholy timbre is no put-on. Jollett was working on his first novel two years ago when his mother was diagnosed with cancer, he and his girlfriend broke up and he came down with pneumonia all in the course of one week. In the aftermath, he found himself finishing songs instead of the book. Eventually Jollett gathered four other musicians from a mixture of punk rock, jazz and classically trained backgrounds to round out the group. While these influences manifest themselves throughout the album, Jollett's literary background is still predominant. Even the band was cribbed from a section of Don Delillo's novel, White Noise, where the main character is exposed to a chemical outburst, known as the Airborne Toxic Event.


Tracklist For Airborne Toxic Event :

01. Wishing Well
02. Papillon
03. Gasoline
04. Happiness Is Over-Rated
05. Does This Mean You're Moving On?
06. This Is Nowhere
07. Sometime Around Midnight
08. Something New
09. Missy
10. Innocence


Web: myspace.com/theairbornetoxicevent