The Firebird Band
Gig Seeker Pro

The Firebird Band

| INDIE

| INDIE
Band Alternative EDM

Calendar

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

Music

The best kept secret in music

Press


"The Firebird Band . The City At Night . BiFocal Media/Lucid Records"

"Mixing electro elements (synths, drum machines, etc.) with indie rock, The Firebird Band come with their third full-length, arguably their best to date. The first album reminded me the most of Braid (the band co-frontman Christopher Broach used to be in). The second album was lacking too much of an indie rock element and seemed to focus more on the electro side. This album is in between, blending the two styles in a way that truly works..." (CM) impact press (www.impactpress.com) - ww.impactpress.com


"Firebird Suite... Formed by Braid's Chris Broach as a side project, the Firebird Suite was also known as the Firebird Band and the Firebird Project, depending upon varying members. The act's sound, unsurprisingly, springs mostly from Broach's imagination,"

Firebird Suite
Formed by Braid's Chris Broach as a side project, the Firebird Suite was also known as the Firebird Band and the Firebird Project, depending upon varying members. The act's sound, unsurprisingly, springs mostly from Broach's imagination, with a sound similar to that of Braid

AVERSION.COM March 31, 2004
"Archives"
Firebird Suite[/Firebird Project]
Lucid Records

This is a compilation of three groups between the years of 1996 and 1998: The Firebird Suite, The Firebird Project and The Firebird Band. To distinguish between groups is unnecessary, useless, confusing and indeed stupid, because all you really need to know is this CD features music written by Chris Broach, former guitarist and occasional vocalist of emo heroes Braid. The cast of musicians revolves around him slightly for each song, but all is essentially the same group in scope and sound.
Broach’s songwriting is more restrained, less D.C.-influenced and more somber and reflective than Braid’s output during the same period. While unavoidable similarities between Braid and the Firebird Band do exist, the easiest comparison lies with New Jersey’s indie group The Van Pelt. Especially on a song such as “September,” Broach’s songwriting approach of soft/loud/soft/loud, and spoke/sung vocals are uncannily similar to The Van Pelt’s Chris Leo.
More than an anthology of The Firebird permutations’ songs, this album is a time capsule of the sounds of emo between 1996 and 1998. Before all the imitation and proliferation of mallrat nü-emo, there was a visceral and raw genre evolving. Bands such as Christie Front Drive, Mineral, Boy’s Life and Braid all thrived at their creative peaks. Although it has received only the scantest attention, and nonexistent praise, at its best The Firebird band is revealed as a worthy peer of all those emo luminaries.
The anthemic “Nothing to Blame But Your Fame” continually pleases after repeated listens and recalls the immediacy that made Broach’s songs with Braid so resounding (see “Circus of the Stars”). “Violet” is as restrained and touching as any song of its era, and “South Shore Drive” is intense, yet vulnerable, like so much of the genre’s classics. It’s a great song with an amazing refrain that best summarizes the potential of the group.
However, throughout 19 tracks the group is not consistent and falters instead of delivering its best. Indeed, it often opts for the less successful drowsy numbers such as “American Standard” and “Weather Forecasts and Storm Warnings,” rather than the punchy and vibrant numbers that shine throughout the disc. Though by nature retrospective CDs are often mixed bags of the intense and the bland, the good outweighs the bad on Archives. With any justice, this release should establish the Firebird Band as pioneers of a sound before it became watered down and tragically redundant.
- Aversion.com


"# 5 - The Firebird Band"

"WHO> Rising from the ashes of the dearly departed Braid (sound familiar?), guitarist/singer Chris Broach is joined by former members of Joan of Arc, Bull in China and Pilot in Hiatus

SOUND LIKE> Surprisingly, not as much like Braid as you'd think. Heavy guitars with synth flourishes and drum-machine beats, making for an intriguing electro-emo hybrid

WHAT'S NEXT> ...more touring (those Braid guys sure do like to play live). The band should be back in the studio to record an album in late spring.

SUGGESTED LISTENING>>>
"The Setting Sun And Its Satellites"
(HEADHUNTER/CARGO; www.cargomusic.com)

[TH] - Alternative Press 100 Bands to know in 2001


"LOW PROFILE - THE FIREBIRD BAND - Former Braid frontman gets austere and electronic."

What do you do when your indie-rock supergroup break up and you find yourself managing a restaurant in the middle of Illinois? If you're Chris Broach---former guitarist for post-hardcore hopefuls Braid---you turn your electro-indie-pop side project, the Firebird Band, into a full-time gig and put your career in food service on hold.

While Broach's distinctive voice and the occasional rock riff hearken back to his Braid days, the dominant use of electronics gives Firebird a far more experimental sound. Broach started experimenting with these ideas way before Radiohead's "Kid A" hit the top of the charts. "Towards the end of Braid, there were a few songs where I wanted to use a drum machine," he recalls. "But, honestly, I don't think that it would have worked with that band."

Originally started as a side project composed of Broach and Andy Hawthorne (ex-Pilot in Hiatus), Firebird have blossomed into a four-piece band with a Roland XP-50 workstation functioning as the fifth member. Though making the transition from headlining sold-out shows to starting over as relative unknowns is a daunting task for most, Broach remains confident that Firebird will succeed on their own merits.

"Kids are going to have to like us for who we are today," he resigns, "not who we used to be." ---Jonah Bayer

SOUND BITES
ALBUM> The Setting Sun And Its Satellites (Cargo/Headhunter)
HEADQUARTERS: Urbana, IL.
SOUNDS LIKE: Minimalist indie-rock peppered with electronic flourishes.
KINDRED SPIRITS: Joan of Arc, The Good Life, Braid. - Alternative Press April 2001 (OUTKAST on the cover)


"THE FIREBIRD BAND The Setting Sun and Its Satellites [Headhunter/Cargo]"

Guitarist Chris Broach's side-project-cum-full-time-band's debut was certainly not conceived with the Braid fanbase in mind. Some of the album's 12 tracks do offer tiny tastes of the Broach-led Braid songs, but overall, Firebird's a mash of gritty electronic beats, sparse, plinky guitar and atmospheric samples. The traces of postcore heritage slide in mostly through Broach's vocals, which ogfer less of his trademark shouted "Yeeah" cariety, and more of his Johnny One Note projected talking. This record will appeal more to Cure fans with a penchant for skittering indestrial beats than it will to emo-heads, but its standout moments boast elegant songwriting that most wouldn't have expected from Braid's second in command. - CMJ NEW MUSIC MONTHLY November 2000 (Marilyn Manson Cover)


"The Firebird Band - the city at night (BiFocal Media/Lucid Records)"

"The greatest blessing in life isn't health, wealth, or longevity-- it's low expectations. This works both ways-- when others expect little of you, it's easy to achieve an acceptable result because anything short of failure will be deemed success. Likewise, when you don't anticipate quality, you're more likely to be pleasantly surprised-- case in point: The Firebird Band's City at Night.
I had deflated expectations of The Firebird Band for a reason: They lowered their own bar with 2001's lousy Drive EP. (Their more rock-oriented debut album, The Setting Sun & Its Satellites, was slightly better, but also disorganized.) The EP was such a cloudy mess that when the band didn't quickly follow it up, I figured it must have dropped off the face of the earth. Well, it turns out that the band-- a duo comprising ex-Braid guitarist Chris Broach and John Isberg-- had been holed up in studios and living rooms creating City at Night, which is a wholesale facelift and improvement... [the]material is strong and the new sound is seductive.
True to its title and cover art (on which I can see the building in which I work), City at Night is a slick, urban album that feeds off the energy of streetlights, neon signs, and cool, brisk air. It's hard to listen to half of these songs without picturing Mitsubishis speeding through downtown tunnels in silver-green monochrome, their cabins packed with well-proportioned young urban professionals going God knows where...maybe nowhere. Mechanical beats with live accompaniment do most of the heavy lifting as the band piles on synths, guitars, basses, keyboards, and vocals, occasionally hinting at punk but never quite detouring all the way. The seagull synths that announce opener "Obsessive Compulsive" set the album's midnight clubland mood. That song is one of the best here, a propulsive piece of post-disco that finds Broach in fine vocal form, somewhere between The Faint's Todd Baechle and The Fire Show's M. Resplendent.
..."Dangerous" has a stellar chorus and great vocal turn by Black, while "Los Angeles" rides a sickly sweet Rhodes vamp (sadly, into the ground). Meanwhile, the heavily filtered, almost jungle-based pop of "Can't Stop" really needs to be a two-minute experiment...
...The Firebird Band also take less-than-successfull forays into eclecticism on the acoustic ballad "Art" and the Chiba City doom and gloom of "Tokyo", which uncomfortably rub up against one another. They're not bad songs, but they don't feel at home here either.
In the LP's liner notes, the band claims this album is the first in a three-part series. Presuming the band sticks to their new electro direction, one hopes they add concision to the equation because one of the things holding City at Night back is its longwindedness. The Firebird Band have come a long way in the last three years... they're all the way there."

-Joe Tangari, November 9th, 2004 - www.pitchforkmedia.com


"The Firebird Band "the city at night" BiFocal Media/Lucid Records"

Electronic means to making music are, for most of their operators, still quite a novelty. Sure, there are DJ types who’ve been smashing bytes together for generations and a handful of enterprising indie acts whose laptronica bridged the gap between the digital and the meat world with varying degrees of success, but for the most part, bands who play instruments haven’t been quite as comfortable with the world of programming.
The Firebird Band joins the ranks of a rare few artists – most notably Blusom and Joan of Arc – that are over electronic music’s novelty.

With The City at Night, the band blends its organic and electronic parts so seamlessly that it’s downright impossible to separate the two anywhere in the mix. Where everyone from your friendly neighborhood industrial act to electroclash and dance-punk hipsters have thrown guitars on a lumpy mattress of big beats, samples and weird noises, it’s always been an uncomfortable union: Here’s the rock, here’s the techno – make sure they don’t mix.

The Firebird Band gets the metaphorical peanut butter and chocolate all mixed up on The City at Night with vast soundscapes where atmospheric electronics loom large in the background while processed noises and tweaked guitar sounds play with voices and traditional guitars without making a fuss over it. The band’s songs are so blended, layered and atmospheric, it’s nearly impossible to separate any individual elements from the song as a whole, not because of poor production, but simply because The City at Night’s songs are so tightly crafted everything must be taken on its own.

“Obsessive Compulsive” opens the album with synthetic squeaks and squawks, and then forceful beats and singer Christopher Broach’s staccato delivery quickly join it. It’s a mix of gritty, here-and-now songwriting and introspective programming that splits the difference between Kid A and Danse Macabre. In “Los Angeles,” The Firebird Band opts to concentrate more upon atmosphere, as a wall of distorted, tricked-up guitars provide little more than noise-pollution atmosphere that fogs dance-floor beats and Broach’s deadpan delivery, only to break into minimalist chunks of spooky programming. “Tokyo” sets aside much of the band’s programming for a song that’s essentially just voice and piano, with murky atmospheric bits making the minimal arrangement all the more haunting.

The City at Night is an album that’s more about atmospheres and mood than song-based indietronica acts. Then again, it isn’t nearly as textured and atmospheric as albums by Radiohead or Blusom, acts infatuated by a ProTools rig. The Firebird Band definitely knows its way around a virtual mixing board, however, which makes its venture into elecro-rock an interesting one, even if it doesn’t toe the dance-punk or post-rock lines.
– Matt Schild - Aversion.com


"THE FIREBIRD BAND - CITY AT NIGHT - BIFOCAL MEDIA/LUCID RECORDS"

"What a difference three years makes. The Firebird Band's 2001 release SETTING SUN & IT'S SATELLITES was nowhere near this cohesive. After lineup changes, the band has been pared down to a duo, and they've created a seamless indie-rock/electro album that's reminiscent of something The Faint might do. This near-masterpiece only takes one ill-advised turn ("Wake Up"), where they get a little too Beastie Boys for their own good. The high points of CITY AT NIGHT come on pulsating floor-shakers like "Obsessive Compulsive", "Satellite Delay", and "Dangerous". They even get acoustic on "Art", which features the line: "You live like shit and suffer for your art—is that what you call it?" This experimentation of live instrumentation and sequenced effects is the first of a trilogy of albums. One can only hope the others will be half as good..."

-Jude Ruiz, Skratch Magazine www.skratchmagazine.com
- www.skratchmagazine.com


"Firebird Band - The City At Night, BiFocal Media/Lucid Records"

The Firebird Band is [now] Chris Broach (Braid, Life at Sea) and John Isberg (The Blackouts). Three years in the making is this record “The City At Night”, it’s an electronically fortified landmine of bass, dance, urban, and punk fused into one piece of plastic. Since their last sneak EP “The Drive” so one could have only guessed where Broach might be taking the FBB’s sound.

It’s taken a turn for the avant-garde when not compared to the earlier records. It’s good for dancing. Driving, being in “cities”, it does what it set out to be. It’s reflective, well written, and yet forceful in its dance aspects, it almost begs for the listener to keep an eye out to see them perform live.

The record starts off with the track “obsessive compulsive” a seagull synth, drum-machine dance tune that sets the pace for the first half of the disc, now, I have to admit that I feel the record only gets better as each song goes on. Some songs (especially in the beginning) of the disc can seem a minute or two linger than we need, but I suppose if it were crafted for the sole purpose of contriving white kids to dance then it actually could work near the end. My main quip with the record is the “rap” segment from the dudes in Kerbloki, it just doesn’t seem to fit, and halts the nice momentum and beat the song has going for itself. My favorite songs are last five, seriously, consecutive order too. I think its’ because they have a slightly more organic approach to them and don’t totally rely on the electronics to carry the rhythm duties, they feel more like the songs off 2000’s “The Setting Sun and Its Satellites”. This is the first record in a supposed trilogy. Lets hope that they can hone their focus and continue to shred the genre lines."

- www.crookedcamera.net

- www.crookedcamera.net


"The Firebird Band - The City at Night - "Emo vet's keys to succes.""

Jeremy Enigk, Matt Pryor and Davey von Bohlen obviously never got the memo suggesting that '90s emo icons find new life via synthesizers and adherence to the basic principles of moody '80s pop, but there's no question that Braid's Christopher Broach knows it. Riding alonside the Faint, the Postal Service and the ghost of Antaractica through the decade that featured another Bush in the White House, the Firebird Band have cooked up a demanding 74-minute ode to the evening (and apparently the first disc in a trilogy) with The City at Night. Broach suffered from undiagnosed panic attacks while writing this album, so it's no wonder that paranoia and desperation ooze out of every cold, cracked edge, perfectly complementing the industrial-strength darkwave that owes as much to Gary Numan as it does to Front 242. (Bifocal/Lucid; bifocalmedia.com)

- Marc Hawthorne - Alternative Press Issue 199 Feb. 2005 pg. 88


Discography

THE FIREBIRD BAND "the city at night" 2004 (BIFOCALMEDIA/LUCIDRECORDS)
THE FIREBIRD BAND "archives" 2003 (LUCID RECORDS)
THE FIREBIRD BAND "the drive" EP 2001 (CARGO/HEADHUNTER)
THE FIREBIRD BAND "the setting sun and its satellites" 2000 (CARGO/HEADHUNTER)
THE FIREBIRD PROJECT "feel alright" EP (mintaka conspiracy)
THE FIREBIRD SUITE "new york" 7" (mintaka conspiracy)

Photos

Feeling a bit camera shy

Bio

VIEW OUR VIDEO AT MELODIC PICTURES!

THE FIREBIRD BAND "Satellite Delay" Video

http://www.melodicpictures.com/viewvideo.php?id=24

we don't have it to put up in the video section yet, but we will VERY SOON... so for now check it out there!!!

Thanks!
TFB

you may also visit us on MYSPACE if you like:
http://www.myspace.com/thefirebirdband