Pictorials
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Pictorials

Portland, Oregon, United States

Portland, Oregon, United States
Rock Pop

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This band has not uploaded any videos
This band has not uploaded any videos

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"Cool New Tune from Pictorials"

We don’t typically associate Portland with post-punk sounds; that seems to be more in line with their friends nearby in Seattle. But, I’ve been really enjoying this new track from Pictorials, a band that came together after other projects failed to meet their needs. The group gave up on their trained instruments, trying to create a sound all their own. If this is a good example, then their debut Learning EP is shaping up to be quite a gem. I’ve enjoyed the mood, which has created a slight swaying of my arms and body, giving me a nostalgic feeling for my appreciation of good old fashioned art-pop. Bet you like this jam. - Austin Town Hall


"Black Moth Super Rainbow - The Echoplex - 5/12/12"

With openers Pictorials and Lumerians both receiving sizable applause, the show featured one of the most pleasant and engaged crowds I've ever endured. Typically when the opening bands are good, it bodes well for the rest of the night, especially in L.A., where it takes a gunshot to get someone to look up from their iPhone.
Pictorials opened the show with a nice set of indie-pop jams, drawing influence from bands like Interpol, while combining post-punk elements with more modern dance-oriented numbers. They were extremely tight, well-rehearsed and clearly passionate, but also very pasty and somewhat dull. - LA Weekly


"Tonight in Music: Pictorials"

(Doug Fir, 830 E Burnside) Like sunny fall days that grow dark too soon, Pictorials' debut EP, Learning, is glorious and then it's done. At just four songs long, it's the best possible advertisement for the album they damn well better be hard at work making right now. The songwriting is beautiful and the lyrics sound as if they really mean something, but Pictorials are a rock band, and the guitar is the most important part. Guitarist/vocalist Morgan Nicholson sounds a little something like Julian Casablancas, but that may just be a coincidence, because as new as this band is, Pictorials seem to have a fully developed sense of themselves - Portland Mercury


"Pictorials Super West Coast Tour Diary"

There was a whole mess of awesome energy surrounding this tour. This was our very first tour as PICTORIALS!! There was such an excitement around these shows that it felt like we somehow snuck onto these bills (I am certain we actually did). There was an immediate nervousness when we got the offer supporting Black Moth Super Rainbow on their West Coast tour; as ecstatic as we were, the excitement was so ripe, we all thought it was going to fall through somehow—or anyhow.
The fear we had stemmed from the fact that we were still in our infancy as a band. The nine months we had been playing together we had a very limited five shows under our belt and no output aside from a single lo-fi recording that the songwriter from Black Moth had heard, which—you'll have to ask him for the reason—he liked enough to take us out on their West Coat tour. Tour aside; we were put on a perpetual time crunch prior to leaving. Once we realized we were going to be out playing bigger stages than we were accustomed to, we wanted to write material that would fit them. There was also an impending pressure that we could be with out many of the things we wanted to make our live set realized. For the betterment of the project, we knew there was a significant amount of work to be done before we played the first show in Seattle.

The month prior to us leaving, we decided to find a fourth member to ensure the keyboard parts were going to realized the way we wanted them to be, which nearly didn’t happen. Fortunately, two weeks prior to us leaving, in came Damaris Peterson, who wins for being such a talent, who wonderfully learned the parts of the songs and rehearsed them up until she stepped on stage with us for the first time in Seattle. We also wrote, rewrote and threw out nearly two-dozen songs in preparation for the tour. We then hit another slide of luck a few weeks before the tour when Dylan Magierek from Type Foundry/Badman Recording Co. offered to take us into Type Foundry to record our EP just days before we left for tour. With all of this in mind, we wanted to make sure we put the work in we had to. All of these objectives created a very necessary and entirely positive push for our young band.

I want to take a moment and state here just how incredibly awesome Portland is. Everything about this tour was a one big last-minute decision after the other, which only provided us with more energy to play these shows. We would not have been able to do the tour as well as we did with out this city. Fortunately for us, there was an incredible amount of positive energy and teamwork on our side to meet every avenue we needed to before leaving, and we were only able to meet our band goals because we live in such an incredibly helpful city. Dylan Magierek wanted to ensure that we had music to take out with us on tour, so he essentially mixed our EP the day before we left. With the Type Foundry recordings in hand, we were burning CDR’s moments before we jumped into the vehicle. We also had a snag with our visuals, which were provided by our friends at Wooden Lens, who worked overnight just to bring them to us minutes before we were on the road. Everything fell into place at the very last minute, and it only amplified the anticipation for our little tour, along with a full certification that we live in one of the most helpful cities in the country world.

All right, everything came together. We have to leave and actually play a show. Our tour vehicle, a Chevy Tahoe, housed our band wonderfully (seriously, for something that is designed for groceries, I am convinced this vehicle was made to house a four piece rock band). We are on the road to play Neumos in Seattle just hours later. - Willamette Week


"Black Moth Super Rainbow Joined By Lumerians and Pictorials @ Holocene"

A bubbly talkative crowd files into the renovated warehouse bar-venue. Clusters of people are already eagerly moving closer to the stage at half past nine when Pictorials start. A steely guitar begins pinning quick blues notes down to the accompaniment of a youthful nasally sort of 80s new–wave voice. The acoustics and sound-levels are working really well for these guys, a rich full-bodied and bass heavy sound bounces from wall to wall and into the ears of the happily head-nodding crowd. Pictorials embody some of Portland’s obsession with the retro but revive this theme with a reduced and determined pop project which draws as much from classic blues singing and 60s rock and roll as it does from the likes of New Order and Joy Division. - Be Portland


"Labelmates 2012 @ Holocene"

After a series of DJ sets from representatives of a few of the local labels present, buzz band Pictorials celebrated their album release with a lively set. The debut EP, entitled Learning, comes from their own imprint Déjà View. You can check out a stream of the new EP here. Recorded with Dylan Mageriek (starfucker, Badman recording co. Weinland) at Type Foundry Studios, the new tunes are turning plenty of heads, including Black Moth Super Rainbow whom the band toured with earlier this year. The band’s set last night was a fantastic display from the trio, with singer and guitarist Morgan Nicholson belting out song after song in sort of a melodic trance with the enthusiastic crowd cheering him on. - Be Portland


"Pictorials, "Sense of Vanity" - We finally meet a Portland band who's not trying to weird us out."

Portland's Pictorials bring to mind this endless summer of re-issues, as it seems we can hardly go a month without invoking the monolith of material churned by Brit labels like Factory and Creation in the 80s and 90s. When we talk about Portland, we're used to wracking our brains and musing wildly to pin down a new noise band or experimental outfit. Pictorials are a blindside band. We knew there had to be folks in Oregon that could write good pop records without having to wedge in the weird tendencies, it just took us awhile to find them.

Pictorials is a threesome comprised of Nate Otani, Morgan Nicholson and Mike Moreau. Spawned from a love for Brit masters from Manchester, the group is comprised of dudes who used to be in weird bands like Otani and Moreau's electronic project Procedures and Nicholson a touring player with Black Moth Super Rainbow's Tobacco, but when they got together it became less about experimentation and more about finding an escape from banality. On "Sense of Vanity", the opening track from the band's Learning EP, Pictorials are talking circles around the matter at hand in the name of avoiding the mark of vanity. It's as though in all their efforts to elaborate on the various ways they are outside of vanity's grasp, it becomes curious as to who they are trying to convince, a valued friend on the other line or themselves. - Impose Magazine


"PICTORIALS, ‘SENSE OF VANITY’ – FREE MP3 DOWNLOAD"

Pictorials’ style of post-garage punk-pop is lackadaisical and mellow, and it should be played loud, indoors, on rainy days — possibly when you’re stoned.It’s grey and wet in NYC as we recover from the pre-apocalyptic Hurricane Sandy, and as such, I’m feeling a special interconnectedness with Portland, Ore., a city that seems to experience similar weather about 80 percent of the year.

Thus it’s fitting that I’m writing about one of the indie capitol’s latest yields, an XTC-inspired lo-fi trio that spins synthy garage-rock tunes with subtle punk undertones. Today we’re giving Diffuser.fm readers a taste of Pictorials’ first single, ‘Sense of Vanity,’ a track that features an anthemic chorus and bright, hope-inspring leads.

Part of what makes Pictorials so fresh is the band’s purist beginnings. When Diffuser spoke to bassist Mike Moreau, he told us, “We didn’t know what we were doing — I didn’t know. The band was just for our friends and us. We didn’t necessarily know where we were going to take it, we just knew it was fun, and we liked playing with each other.” - diffuser.fm


Discography

Still working on that hot first release.

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Bio

-Pictorials formed in the late summer of 2011 in Portland, Oregon as a two piece drum and guitar combo between Nate Otani and Morgan Nicholson, which would later be expanded to include Mike Moreau on bass guitar, keys and backup vocals. While Otani, Nicholson and Moreau have known each other years prior to starting the band, the project materialized after Nicholson finished touring with Tobacco (Anticon) and Moreau & Otani disbanding their electronic project, “Procedures”. With both Otani and Nicholson free from other projects, Pictorials materialized out of a few home recordings off of an iPhone and with the focus of abandoning their learned instruments for a different musical experience they were accustomed to altogether. Stimulated by the sounds of XTC, the Wake, Felt, Factory and Creation records bands, Pictorials began with the urge to make music with textured fun in mind. With no prior experience before, Otani dropped the bass to learn the drums on an electronic Simmons kit, Nicholson for the first time fronted the project on guitar & vocals and Moreau later abandoned the guitar to pick up the bass, keys and vocals. “We didn’t know what we were doing—I didn’t know. The band was just for our friends and us. We didn’t necessarily know where we were going to take it, we just knew it was fun and we liked playing with each other” Moreau recalls.
The band was originally intended as a simple escape from the banalities of the everyday happenings that Otani, Moreau and Nicholson were involved in, but after a few months of playing with each other it quickly became a fulltime project when they gained recognition from Dylan Magierek (Badman Recording Co, Starfucker, Mark Kozelek, Type Foundry) who invited them into Type Foundry Studios to record an EP. The Type Foundry sessions, which would later make up the Learning EP, pushed the band to a cohesive state.
With little intention of accomplishing what they have in their young lifetime, just after six months into their existence, the band was invited on a sold-out spring 2012 tour with Black Moth Super Rainbow (Graveface). The opportunity to take Pictorials onto bigger platforms was a huge surprise for the band. With this privilege in mind, the band accepted it as a motivation to improve and hone in on their sound.
Pictorials have been featured in the San Francisco Guardian, Impose Magazine, Willamette Weekly, Portland Mercury, LA Weekly and various other publications. After finishing a successful tour with Black Moth Super Rainbow, the band is gearing up to release their first EP, Learning, on their own imprint déjà view in October of 2012. Audibly, Pictorials is a band that could have fit finely on any bill at The Haçienda. With combining post-punk elements with more modern dance-oriented rhythms, Pictorials is a fine fit next to many of yesterday's Creation, Factory and Rough Trade releases their sound recalls."