Dios (Malos)
Indie Rock / Alternative
Where we’re from has a lot to do with our approach to our music, and with who we are. We’re all from the South Bay in Los Angeles. That’s our bond.
We’re from a different part of L.A — an L.A. that is usually disregarded for its artistic contributions to the city. The South Bay isn’t the suburbs you see in movies or T.V. It’s beachfront ghettos, airports, refineries, ports, you name it. It’s a pretty diverse part of town — Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Polynesians — all in the same schools and working the same jobs at the mall. We’re friends with surfers, skaters, gangsters, musicians and 9 to 5ers we grew up with.
A couple of us grew up near the fabulous forum in Inglewood, home of the Showtime Lakers, minutes from the Beach Boys’ childhood home in Hawthorne. A couple of us grew up near some of the prettiest tide pools and cliffs in Southern California, minutes away from where Black Flag practiced and played their first shows. There’s definitely a little musical history here, and we’re proud of that.
Because of the musical history, and I guess, to some extent, the isolation from the better known artistic areas of L.A., we had a lot and a little to learn from. What the hell else is there to do if you don’t want a 9 to 5, you suck at school, and you don’t like Westside and Hollywood hotspots? You stay home, get drunk in the backyard with your friends, listen to music and form bands. Which is exactly what we did. And we sucked at it like everyone else. But we kept going and here we are.
Our influences range from Chavela Vargas to Os Mutantes to Karp. I grew up listening to Run-DMC and LL Cool Jay on K-DAY, early-90’s Ice Cube and “The Chronic.” Other members of the band grew up with the stuff their older siblings were listening to, from 80s and 90s Brit Pop, bands on I.R.S. Records and Rodney on the Roq, to old standards like Hendrix, Sabbath, and Zeppelin. I’m sure it all comes through in what we do now.
As for the “sun-kissed-California-easy-breezy-beach-pop” label we were plastered with last year: we respect the Beach Boys for Brian Wilson’s experimental compositions. It’s about “Heroes and Villain,” not “Fun, Fun, Fun.” El Segundo isn’t Surf City. Jackie isn’t playing the bongos at a fire pit. We’re just trying to write good songs and we’re trying to dress them up or down, creatively and interestingly.
In the past year we’ve played with many great bands and played some really big shows that we never expected to play. We’ve had the opportunity to travel around the country and go to the UK on someone else’s dime, and we greatly appreciate that. Now we just want to record the rest of our backlog and write bigger and better things, learn to play them live, be as good we can be and hopefully not self-destruct in the process.
We are still trying to get our act together, we’re still evolving, trying to figure out who we are and what we’re doing. Hopefully we’ll never figure it out, because we’ll always be doing something a little different, never forgetting that a good song is first and experimentation is a must.
We just finished our latest record in June, just in time to take the rest of the summer off. We’re happy with it. It’s 100 times better than the first record. Cereal.
We recorded it in Seattle at a little place called Avast!, which has been the site of some of our favorite recordings. We chose Phil Ek to produce the record for three reasons: the last Karp 7" (which FINALLY did justice to Karp’s awesomeness), a couple little known Duster records I absolutely love, and the fact that he is highly flexible and easy to work with. He was generally open to trying anything unorthodox we would think up, and he was very patient about our colon cleansing. He’s an all-around ding dong and never a “harsh toke” (Seattle slang).
We tried our best in the very short amount of time we had to record,
so we hope you folks like it.
Love Joel Morales.
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