Tribeca

"When I began writing these songs, I was living with a group of chess-playing graffiti bombers in an old recording studio across from a garbage incinerator in Brooklyn. Under those circumstances, the city literally makes an impact on your style," recounts Dave English, one of three songwriter-vocalists for Los Angeles-based Tribeca.
"First and foremost, we’re a group of songwriters whose goal is to create interesting modern pop music. We share a love for the eclecticism of groups like XTC, so our style shifts gears a lot. We’re all about sonic variety-creating multiple layers that reveal themselves over time with repeated listens."

Tribeca’s debut album, INCIDENT AT THE METROPOLIS, is an ambitious collection of compositions that disregard the prevailing trends in adult-oriented alternative music, juxtaposing wistfully upbeat Australian jangle-pop with jazz-rock that hasn’t been so convincingly out of its era since Sting’s DREAM OF THE BLUE TURTLES. The three songwriters engage in a game of one-upsmanship that finds cohesiveness only in unpredictability and the centrality of the keyboard, used schizophrenically from densely clustered harmonic pads to atonal grooves. Lyrically, the classic conflicts of urban history are contextualized in the lives of the storytellers-rich vs. poor, capitalism vs. socialism, art vs. commerce are the intellectual ghosts haunting emotional façades of identity and relationships.

Matthew Gaskins, multi-instrumentalist savant of the trio, studies sitar under Ustad Imrat Khan and is responsible for the albums’ two epics, "Hueponica" and "Two Days After (My Attempted Suicide)," which upon hearing, prompted drumming demi-god Vinnie Colliuta to liken him to an "urban Zappa." Previous appearances at South by Southwest yielded a cult following for Gaskins’ genre-bending 53 Large Men in the late 90’s. "We wrote rebellious, weird stuff, and that core of originality still guides my writing," says Gaskins, "but there’s an emotionality to it now that didn’t exist before when it was just off-beat melodies and rhythms."

Kerry Chicoine's buoyant compositions, meanwhile, add power-pop exuberance to the mix. Through the 90's Chicoine sowed the seeds of LA's underground pop scene as co-founder of NotLame recording artists Receiver (regulars on the International Pop Overthrow circuit up through 2003), as well as lending various music skills to LA pop mainstays Cloud Eleven (aka Jiffipop) and The Dons. Chicoine also released, via Top Fuel Records, a solo album entitled "Sweet", as well as providing contributions to various compilations including the forthcoming A TRIBUTE TO XTC: KING FOR A DAY.

"And then ‘Hueponica’ brought us all together," Dave continues. "I got about 30 seconds into an Internet stream of it before I called up Matt and told him we had to do this together. You just don’t hear people in the pop world writing modern variations on the Steely Dan style—it shows a certain fuck-you attitude towards the prevailing trends, a preoccupation with good music regardless of style. A few months later I heard Kerry executing these long, involved acoustic guitar themes at a Silver Lake coffeehouse gig, passed ‘Hueponica’ to him, and he was hooked."

As for the LP’s title-"The thing that united us was coming of age in one metropolis or another, where there’s so much of the best and worst of everything seemingly at arm’s length that your ambition becomes difficult to manage. But most of what you see is behind glass and it takes a while before you really have the resources to know what you want and how to get it."

See/hear more at www.tribecamusic.net