Soars

Add another noun-as-verb, difficult to Google, but nonetheless remarkable selection to your library – Soars. You’ll be glad you did.

Mystically floating in from the fertile crescent of Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, Soars’ silky and slow burning self-titled album offers an ethereal half hour of aerodynamic, cathartic sounds. Dramatic, elegant dream pop sure to fire neurons in the Slowdive/Bark Psychosis/Talk Talk part of the brain, Soars’ eight tracks congeal into a meditative yet engaging and accessible mood exploration. As such, there are no standout tracks; Soars crafted the rare album that resonates as a single piece. None of those crappy sythns or compressed beats that seem to be creeping into psychedelia these days – just beautifully sculpted guitar sounds, whispered vocals, and compelling melodicism. Simple instrumentation, profound result.

Calling Soars shoegaze is a bit unfair, as such majestic and far-traveled music self-propels above commercial air traffic space. Earthgaze might be a better reference. Get the album now via La Societe Expeditionnaire, then go like the shit out of them on FaCeBoO!k. Save Soars until the season’s first real chilly evening for the more revealing experiential effect.

For fans of: A Sunny Day in Glasgow, Pale Saints, Slowdive - The Decibal Tolls

"They push along delicately, establishing moody elegance before ribbons of breathy words enter the mix. Like My Bloody Valentine, the balance of instrumentation and vocals are projected with paleness, but expertly considered, leaving your head floating in a dreamy wash of sadness, begging for inward reflections..."
strangersinstereo.com - Strangers In Stereo

Soars at Glasslands, Brooklyn, 8.13.10

There are few reasons to show up anywhere on time: doctor appointments, appearances before a judge, alternate side parking of your car and funerals.

The reasons to show up early are even more scarce: a hot date or a good opening band.

Last night, Friday the 13th, I had both a hot date and a chance to see Soars play live an early set at Glasslands.

Their current hit is “Throw Yourself Apart”: brooding excellence, a methodical spiral burrowing into the psyche; this should have been used on the Inception soundtrack.

Their thundering, tree-shaking bass is unfortunately belittled by the recording on my camera and I was surprised by the weight imparted in their live set as compared to the much produced, almost ethereal recordings. Though my date noted that they could use a drummer to make the sound even bigger, there is grit and grime imparted in the best way by the foursome, making me leave my comfortable beer and cold seat to make my way close to the stage.

After their short four song set, I was yelling “one more”, “one more please.” Alas, that wasn’t possible. Glasser was going on next. As I walked back from the stage, the singer, Chris Giordani, caught me and said: “sorry, we can’t do another one, time constraints.”

Next time Soars will have the center stage.

P.S. The recording above is sub-par due to my equipment, but do give a listen to their recording of “Throw Yourself Apart” and visit the Soars. - Sentimentalist

Otherworldly shoegaze by suburban four-piece Soars feels just as haunting live as it does on their debut. Re-imagining the underpinnings of lo-fi pop, Soars’ perfectly gloomy anthems pair scratchy synth with melancholy, resulting in a sound that is simultaneously felt and heard. Half heart, half sensation, the vapid space between each note fosters longing for the next ethereal chord or riff. Nearly hush-hush vocals echo alongside reverb that shifts, sinks, and soars. It would be impossible not to think of terms like dark wave or psych pop when listening to their LP. Comparable but completely different, Soars sound settles beyond the genre’s limits, resulting in eight tracks of deliberative exploration that pushes past familiar and embarks on something further, something unpredictable, fresh, and new. Released on La Société Expéditionnaire, Soars is a transcendent full-length from oscillating intro to end.

With a quick thump and crisp clicks, “The Sun Breaks In Every Way But One” sounds out with laidback surf-like riffs and coolly calm but vibrant vocals. A relatively upbeat track, Soars first open’s the album with optimism buried beneath a weathered awareness that accompanies lessons often learned by disillusionment, loss, or pain. “Throw Yourself Apart” is rhythmically hypnotic. Washed out vocals settle above a swirl of guitar mechanical buzzed out beats. Previously released as a single, “Throw Yourself Apart” is an easy favorite and a perfect snapshot of Soars at their best. Ending in full-out distortion, this track’s final seconds defy all things sentimental, leaving listeners fumbling for afterthoughts outside the jurisdiction of its deliberately messy outro. The lengthy and dirge-like “Escape On High” gives way to “Ditches” a moody yet well-orchestrated pop ballad that ripens and blooms in its latter half, fading out atmospheric and memorable. “Ditches” unfolds like Chairlift’s “Territory” only with more emotive diligence, evident in its chorus and caustic yet symphonic swell. The psyched out start of “Figurehead” is a well-fashioned downer in comparison to the album’s start. Far from cheerful, “Figurehead” is brooding and brilliantly dark, save for its shining guitar riffs. Synthy interludes in “Young Adult” bring to mind Numan’s Pleasure Principle while the album’s final track “Monolith” sweeps in with nearly tribal backbeats that ease into mournful chords and vocals well worth the song’s namesake. A gorgeously somber debut, Soars does more than impress.

Soars’ self-titled album will be officially available tomorrow Oct. 5, but it looks like you can order it via La Société Expéditionnaire if you'd like right now.

- Dianca Potts - The Deli Magazine

Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley was once a manufacturing Mecca. Its steel built the New York City skyline, sustaining an entire region for generations. With the turn of the century, however, cities like Allentown and Bethlehem — modestly populated municipalities that supported many of the state’s other communities — went, for the most part, belly up. As industrial manufacturing moved to Asia, the need for Pennsylvania-bred labor dissipated, leaving Valley communities in search of a new identity.

Given the circumstances, it would seem easy for a Lehigh Valley musician to feel isolated, even fatalistic, about one’s future in eastern Pennsylvania. But for Soars guitarist David Kresge, this is no time to feel despondent.

“Home is hard,” he says, discussing the place where Soars’ recorded its eponymous debut album. “I love it and hate it at the same time. We live in a shell of three industrial towns that are trying to survive economically, and that forces me to be creative in a way that I think living in a major city and having everything at your disposal does not. You have to dig for something special. Keeping DIY places going, keeping a job, meeting like-minded people, trying to convince your bedroom musician friend to play out — it’s tougher. But there’s a tenacity in the underground music scene that seems like it exists because we can’t not have this creative outlet. Soars wouldn’t have made this record, this sound, if everything was good and beautiful and fun. We reflect back everything that’s wrong and try to reconcile that at the same time.”

A haunting dream-pop band with musical influences rooted in experimental, punk, and noise, Soars has created a sound indicative of the hard-nosed, love-hate relationship that it shares with the place it calls home.

“We live in a shell of three industrial towns that are trying to survive economically, and that forces me to be creative in a way that I think living in a major city and having everything at your disposal does not.”

“[Vocalist/guitarist/programmer] Chris [Giordani] and [bassist/programmer] Anthony [Perrett] were in a band called Memes that was a really engaging patchwork of pop and noise,” Kresge says. “They were really pushing the boundaries of song structure and recombining all these influences that I felt needed to be heard, but no one was doing at the time. [Keyboardist/programmer] Briana [Edwards] actually suggested I go to this house party to see them play. I was immediately floored by them, spilling beer on pedals, and I launched a beer can at Chris’ head. Our first ‘meeting’ was almost a fistfight. Briana had to assure him I was just having a good time, and I absolutely was, albeit out of my head. After that, we became friends.”

Following the breakup of Memes, Kresge messaged Giordani about taking on a new project. Giordani and Perrett, fans of Kresge’s guitar drone and electronics in Goodnight Stars Goodnight Air, had the same idea. “It made good sense,” Kresge says, “since both projects had so many commonalities, even though the execution was completely different. We were all moving toward deconstructing sound, and I think we all knew it would work somehow.

For Kresge, the album—though it deals with loss, isolation, and the fall-backs of life in a post-industrial region—remains hopeful and forward-looking. “It works through that darkness toward an understanding,” he says. “I think people will find these songs beautiful, not something that takes those themes and plunges you deeper into that darkness.”

The music, in many ways, emulates the mountainous peaks and valleys of eastern Pennsylvania. Angelic, textured swells break melancholic drone. Lilting vocals rise above layers of noise. Each track is an ascent from the song before and a descent into the next. Many of the songs contain an entire series of these ridgelines, an emotional terrain that one must trace and re-trace throughout the album.

Lehigh Valley, in so many ways, is not New York City, not even Philadelphia. But for Soars, the Valley is home. Through music, through its deconstruction of tone, pop, and notions of what life in eastern Pennsylvania ought to be, the band has created a hopeful, arresting album.

“This oxbow lake offers to push you deeper into depression,” Kresge says. “But the flip side of that is you have to work so damn hard at what you want to achieve that you feel like you can do anything anywhere. It doesn’t offer anything but a kick in the ass. I love it here.” - Alarm

"I listened to Soars (La Société Expéditionaire), the debut album by the quartet Soars, before I knew they were from Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley. I went to college there and remember well the eerie melancholy of fading heavy industry and low wet clouds. Soars — Briana Edwards, Chris Giordani, David Kresge and Anthony Perrett — make a noisy alluring rock that suits their setting. Edwards' distant-angel singing is wreathed in frosty reverb; the chime and crunch of the guitars in "Young Adult" and "The Sun Breaks Every Way But One" suggest bird song and wolf growls wrapped in fog. This is an indistinct music, a sum of overtones instead of notes, with attractive hints of turn-of-the-Nineties British drone — Ride with a female sigh; a less assaultive My Bloody Valentine. But Soars, in their first half-hour on record, do beguiling things with sweetness, distortion and suspense. (la-soc.com)"
-David Fricke, Rolling Stone - Rolling Stone