Givers gives more than Cajun

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      For whatever reason, Louisiana has never had a reputation as a hotbed of pop music. For every Better Than Ezra success story, there’s been a seemingly never-ending parade of Cajun and blues acts, many of them (Buckwheat Zydeco, BeauSoleil) having gone on to achieve iconic status. As for the underground, it seems you either specialize in sludge metal (Soilent Green, Crowbar), or you don’t get beyond the city limits of New Orleans.

      That Givers’ debut album, In Light, isn’t aimed at either the ’bangers or the Cajun crowd is a tip-off that the members of the band were off in their own little musical subworld growing up. As a result, they were on each other’s radars long before they began playing together. Reached at home, singers Tiffany Lamson and Taylor Guarisco suggest that their long-standing mutual-admiration society also included their future fellow Givers: drummer Kirby Campbell, keyboardist William Henderson, and bassist Josh Leblanc.

      “I remember seeing Taylor for the first time in a high-school battle of the bands,” Lamson says, her voice carrying just the slightest Louisiana lilt. “It was awesome. I was totally impressed—he was playing bass back then. Later on, I remember seeing Josh, who is now our bass player, play trumpet at our university music hall. I was blown away because he was such an amazing trumpeter, as well as a guitar player.

      “All these people that I’m playing with now are people that I’ve respected for a long time,” she continues. “It’s a small community of people who are our age and playing what we are playing, as opposed to just Cajun and zydeco music. So you run into them a lot.”

      Givers started out as a bunch of friends jamming, and then were forced into making their live debut before they were really ready. When a friend managing a New Orleans bar found herself without an opening act, she strong-armed Guarisco, Lamson, and company into getting together and hitting the stage.

      “When we got the call for that night, we started phoning people, like, ‘Who would be the funnest people to play with tonight?’ ” Guarisco remembers. “ ‘Tonight’ ended up becoming the next three years.”

      It didn’t take long for Givers to build a following from there, the group quickly developing a reputation for its sweat-drenched, thrilled-to-be-there live shows. That exuberance translates brilliantly on In Light, which effortlessly distills power pop, calypso, vintage soul, tower-of-power funk, and synth-strafed rock ’n’ roll into one insanely infectious package.

      Looming large on In Light is the shadow of Afrobeat, a genre that’s been all the rage the past couple of years with buzz bands like Vampire Weekend, Casiokids, and Fool’s Gold. It’s splattered all over “In My Eyes” and “Meantime”, both of which would fit right in between Franco and the Kasai Allstars on a tropical-themed mix tape. Funnily, it was Louisiana where Givers learned to love Afrobeat, proving that it’s not all Cajun all the time in the creole state.

      “There’s an amazing world-music festival [Festival International de Louisiane] that happens in Lafayette once a year,” Guarisco says. “It’s got the most incredible music from West Africa and Senegal and the Mauritius islands, everything that’s amazing and beautiful about West African music, and always with the biggest stars. There’s people like Salif Keita and Bassekou Kouyate. We all appreciated that music growing up, but we were never in bands where we’d be up for trying it out. Now we’re in this band, where there are no rules.”

      Except, evidently, making sure you don’t sound like every band that’s ever plugged in on Bourbon Street.

      Givers play the Media Club on Monday (September 5).

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