Pepper Rabbit

Most bands are terrible with tape loops. What sounds great on record is often difficult to reproduce in a performance, and though a number of solo acts — St. Vincent, Andrew Bird, Owen Pallett — use it as an essential element of their repertoire, it’s rare to find a musician outside of consumate performer Jon Brion who ever makes tapping that pedal look easy. Yet Pepper Rabbit, a trio based mainly on keyboards, bass and drums, stitched in their live looping seamlessly on Tuesday night, fleshing out their gloomy psych-pop with clarinet, ukelele, harmonies and whatever was at hand in their surprisingly cluttered stage. It was precocious stuff from a wet-footed live act, but the songs were as sharp as their instrumental sureness, gaining a boldness and volume on stage that recalled Grizzly Bear’s promising early days. Head down the rabbit hole with these guys soon — before it becomes the Palladium. - RAWKBLOG.NET

As LA’s Pepper Rabbit took the Vera Stage on Sunday my first thought was here’s the classiest group I’ve seen at this section of the block party. Their performances matched their dress code as they ran through a short and sweet set of hazy indie pop. Cherishing the turnout, the boys in Pepper Rabbit interacted with the audience fondly and played with an equal dose of vigor and sensitivity.

Despite their small size — a three piece — the songs Pepper Rabbit created sounded clean and full. A waltz with heavy reverberation on the vocals here and a quick and punchy indie pop ditty there comprised most of the set. Any audience member listening to this band is probably immediately drawn to the vocals. They constantly float above the wave of bass and guitar offering a narration to their gorgeous sunken melodrama. With all this at the forefront, the drummer laid down sassy syncopated tom tom beats to add a subtly unusual edge to the band’s indie pop sound. The lead singer (and guitarist) often tweaked with some looping devices to harmonize over his own voice always resulting in a blissful vocal arrangement. He even busted out a clarinet and used the same mechanism to loop its brisk tone for background ambiance.

Towards the end they performed a new track unavailable on the recording. This was the highlight of the show for me, employing a more powerful guitar sound and entering the realm of dissonance occasionally. The chords stayed crunchy for its remainder as the vocals soared and the bass hypnotically grooved. With such polished playing and boldness of dynamics it was hard to believe that Pepper Rabbit just an unsigned band from Los Angeles. Their performance at Block Party definitely garnered more fans. - KEXP.org

Hailing from Silver Lake, California, Xander Singh and Luc Laurent have created one hell of a songwriting duo. It’s a good thing too; with a relatively long line of good rabbit-named bands in the past year (see White Rabbits/Frightened Rabbit), there was a pretty high bar already set for Pepper Rabbit. Despite their common names, however, they couldn’t be more different than the other bands who share the rabbit moniker. The band has also drawn some comparisons to bands like Mercury Rev and Atlas Sound, but lo-fi isn’t the hook for these guys; it’s their haunting melodies.

In addition to singing, the band uses just enough technology and live looping to keep their sound fresh, while also enlisting just about every instrument in the book. From trumpets, accordions, banjos, ukulele, and even the piano — these guys can and do play it all. How would we describe the sound? Avant-garde folk would be a good place to start. - KEXP

The music of L.A.’s Pepper Rabbit — the duo of Xander Singh and Luc Laurent — clatters with orchestral charm. Think a low-fi (and more organic) MGMT, with vocals that (as Rawkblog accurately notes) recall Mercury Rev’s Jonathan Donahue. - BUZZBANDS LA