Go long!

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555The Los Angeles band tends to favour longer songs that don't fit the typical radio-friendly three-and-a-half minute single format.The quartet has more in common with British shoegaze bands or indie-rock outfits like Sonic Youth with extended guitar freakouts that venture off into fuzzville before settling back down.

Yet they have become unlikely radio favourites, thanks to edited versions of their singles Lazy Eye and Well Thought Out Twinkles off their 2006 debut, Carnavas.

"I'm a fan of longer songs," explains bassist Nikki Monninger over the phone from New York. "When we work with our producer, he tries to hone it in a little, but our tendency is to write longer. The song is over when it finishes. It not like we intentionally set out to write long; we just finish a song when it ends."

A case in point is their breakthrough single Lazy Eye, which was edited down to four minutes and 20 seconds, surprising the band, who wouldn't have been able to do it on their own, Monninger says.

"We never expected that to be a single -- it's seven minutes long and it's a favourite for us," she says. "We're at a loss for cutting it down...

"In our heads, it should be the way it is on the records. We would have cut like that it in the studio if that's the way it should be, but we understand -- at some point we have to let go and let people make radio edits."

Editing songs was on her mind the day of the interview last week, since she was preparing to meet the band -- which includes vocalist-guitarist Brian Aubert, drummer Christopher Guanlao and keyboardist Joe Lester -- to discuss how they were going to cut the song Panic Switch -- which clocks in at 5:44 on the new album, Swoon -- to 3:30 for their appearance on David Letterman the following day.

Not that Monninger is complaining about having to slice a chunk of the song out. She counts the band's first appearance on the show as one of the highlights of the band's career since the release of Carnavas.

The debut, received warmly by critics and music fans, set them on a whirlwind course over the past couple of years that had them touring all over the world, making new fans along the way thanks to a live show that impressed anyone lucky enough to see it. A case in point is Winnipeg, where they wowed a crowd of early comers at the Burton Cummings Theatre in 2007 with a half-hour opening set before main acts OK Go and Snow Patrol.

They will have a little longer to strut their stuff when they return to the city Wednesday for a headlining appearance at the Garrick Centre with Manchester Orchestra and Cage the Elephant (tickets are $28.25 at Ticketmaster).

The band's show was built up over many years playing clubs around the Silver Lake area of Los Angeles -- best known for nurturing Elliott Smith and Rilo Kiley -- in front of ever-growing crowds.

That's also where they got their name, which was derived from Silversun Liquor, a store at the corner of Silver Lake and Sunset boulevards where the band would pick up life's necessities, from booze to cat food.

"We started out as a live band -- we did that for years before we actually recorded something, so it helped us out to play so many lives shows before the EP," she says.

The 2005 EP Pikul (pronounced "pie-kull"), released on the independent Dangerbird Records label, set the stage for their major-label-distributed breakthrough Carnavas the following year. The album sold more than 300,000 copies and was a perfect showcase of their musical esthetic, which mined the guitar work of shoegaze bands, the loud-quiet-loud formula of the Pixies and the melodic hooks of the Smashing Pumpkins (an obvious comparison since vocalist Aubert and can sound eerily similar to the Pumpkins' Billy Corgan).

After a frantic promotional schedule, the band finally got time to work on Swoon. Monninger says the album has a more cohesive feel than the last one because the band didn't have to record it in bits and pieces.

"For Carnavas, we were touring, then we'd record and go out on tour, and record and tour, so it got schizophrenic," she explains. "We were playing different version of the songs live, then when we were recording we started changing some things. This time we just had a period of time set out for writing and recording."

The success of Carnavas didn't change anything for the band except wanting to make things harder on themselves when it came to the compositions.

"I feel like we're getting progressively more (technically proficient)," she says. "It's nice to have a challenge when we play live. Hopefully with each album we're getting better.

"We're in our own little bubble in terms of pressure on ourselves. Our label and management left us alone."

rob.williams@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition August 6, 2009 E10