Over the course of three Smith Westerns albums, the group matured from fuzzed-out buzz band to 70’s-sheen rockers. But with the emergence of the band Whitney it’s apparent that it wasn’t frontman Cullen Omori that made the Smith Westies such an intriguing project. Instead, it’s guitarist Max Kakacek and drummer JulienEhrlich that have managed to re-purpose the band’s best ideas and push things to unexpected places.
Whitney are chill with lo-fi tracks are, if anything, even more magical live than they are recorded. Add in the visual of a drummer/vocalist and some expert brass instrumentation, and you have a perfect storm of sonic goodness. Their set at the Bodega Social was exactly that, and I’m counting down the minutes and seconds till they play in my city again. Light Upon The Lake, that pops with jukebox familiarity. Maybe it’s the guidance of fellow 70’s rock aficionado Jonathan Rado that translates the ideas of Whitney into such a fully-formed, unexpected debut,
The fabulous Los Angeles. based outfit Whitney rose from the ashes of the Smith Westerns, and they prove that a tune doesn’t need a brash, chunky riff to be thoroughly enjoyable.
This song is effortlessly beautiful with it’s stripped back vocals diced over foot-tapping guitar work. A lot goes on beneath this track, with strings, piano and a few big band brasses. However, it’s the simple, funky guitar riffs laced throughout which brings all the elements together. You could honestly take out every other instrument and the song would still shine.
Light Upon The Lake has slowly become one of my favorites in 2016.
The falsetto that Julian Ehrlich sings in. Normally, that’s a deal breaker for me as well but after a few listens of No Woman, I started to feel the interesting beauty that came with Erlich’s falsetto and the wonderful guitar playing of Max Kakacek (he of Smith Westerns fame). Then they released Golden Days when announcing the album and I was hooked. A few weeks later I received the full album and I haven’t been able to stop praising it since.
Ehrlich and Kakacek wrote this album after they each went though breakups. But labeling this as a breakup album would be wrong in my opinion. To me, it is more about two buddies helping each other during a tough time. They holed up in a Chicago apartment, writing the songs together; Whitney becoming their shared identity. Says Kakacek, “We were both writing as this one character, and whenever we were stuck, we’d ask, ‘What would Whitney do in this situation?’”
The next step up in their evolution was making the trek out to record with Jonathan Rado, sleeping in him backyard for weeks. Together with the help of some other talented musicians, they crafted a wonderful album of lo-fi country soul. It captures a period in their life in a way that combines the wistfulness of youth with the burdens of becoming an adult.
Formed out of the dissolution of personal and professional bonds, Max Kakacek and Julien Ehrlich’s new project is a transmission of inner rapids—and their first full-length, Light Upon the Lake, is a postcard from the calm on the other side.
The primary contradiction of Light Upon the Lake, the debut LP from Whitney, is this: how can music so strongly rooted in melancholy make you feel so glad to be alive? It’s a strange platter—and to be sure, Whitney’s kind of a strange band (just take a look at their introductory portraits on Instagram if you really want to, uh, get to know them). But in talking to Max Kakacek and Julien Ehrlich, the songwriting duo at the forefront of the group, it becomes clear that there’s an explanation for every contradiction—a key to every song.
The Fat Angel Sings 