Dorks And Losers

It’s not wholly uncom­mon to see roman­tic rela­tion­ships blos­som between exist­ing band mem­bers. What is slightly uncom­mon is to see a band still remain intact when a rela­tion­ship ends, espe­cially if two-fifths of the band comes from the same family.

That’s the story of Philadel­phia quin­tet East Hun­dred, when broth­ers Brooke and Will Blair (who play gui­tar and drums, respec­tively) asked Brooke’s then-girlfriend Beril Guceri to sing for some of their songs.

Beril’s immense stage fright com­pounded the awk­ward­ness of work­ing with her boyfriend and his brother, to which she cred­its Brooke for help­ing her get through the uneasi­ness: “Singing leaves you so vul­ner­a­ble, but it was [his] sup­port that made it com­fort­able” (press release).

David Sun­der­land (bass) and Susan Gager (key­board), both close friends of the Blair fam­ily, soon joined the band to com­plete the five-piece out­fit. When Brooke and Beril broke up, the two made the hard deci­sion to con­tinue mak­ing music together, which only added fuel to the band’s cre­ative fire.

What was intended to be an EP soon became East Hun­dred’s first full-length album Pas­sen­ger. The com­bi­na­tion of Beril’s Nina Persson-like (The Cardi­gans) vocals and the band’s raw pop melodies some­times mask the album’s gen­uinely emo­tional under­pin­nings, as in the open­ing “Slow Burn­ing Crimes” that deals with the heartache of lov­ing some­one (“Do you really wanna know / I found it in a pho­to­graph it can’t last / All along the way home”) or in the more tumul­tuous “Plus Minus” that deals with the roller coaster heartache of truly lov­ing some­one (“We could split two hearts / We could thrill these hearts”).

The band starts to mean­der at the album’s mid­point, iron­i­cally start­ing at “Autopi­lot” that extends a series of dizzy­ing mem­o­ries a cou­ple of min­utes too long whereas “Pony” exudes the dreamy fan­tasy of a prom night that never hap­pened. “Along The Way” fin­ishes the regret­ful sequences of events with a blurry hang­over before the long march (“Dear Blue”) toward sobri­ety and the first bright morn­ing sun­rise in weeks.

It isn’t until the clos­ing “Afterlove” that we real­ize why we suf­fered through the aches, the end­less denial, the dis­il­lu­sion­ment, and the bit­ter­sweet sat­is­fac­tion of hav­ing loved, even if it was for a short while.

Brooke explains that “maybe we’re not the first to write that breakup album as the rela­tion­ship falls apart… but that still doesn’t mean it’s easy.” Although as the album title sug­gests, it’s eas­ier because we’ve all felt like we’ve been down that road before.

[pho­tos via Sneak Attack Media + MySpace + EH]

____

Track list:

1. Slow Burn­ing Crimes
2. Plus Minus
3. Dead­pan
4. Autopi­lot
5. Pony
6. Along The Way
7. Dear Blue
8. Sigh And Wave
9. Afterlove

Pop­u­lar­ity: 4% [?]