ODESZA bucks Seattle’s grunge-town reputation

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      For reasons that have everything to do with a lineage that stretches from the Sonics and Jimi Hendrix to Kurt Cobain and Pearl Jam, the city of Seattle has always seemed like a hard-core rock ’n’ roll town.

      At no time did this seem more true than the late ’90s, when the hallucination generation staged a major pop-music palace coup across the rest of North America. From New York to Chicago to Vancouver, guitar bands were suddenly on the outside looking in, the clubs ruled by turntablists and synth jockeys falling under the umbrella of “electronica”.

      Strangely, our neighbour down the I-5 seemed unaware that the landscape had shifted. If you found yourself in Seattle at the tail end of the Clinton era, the guys all had tattoos and Lucky 13 wallets with chains, while the girls’ tats were accessorized with thick glasses and dyed-black hair. It wasn’t Carl Cox and Kid Koala who ruled the city, but the Murder City Devils.

      And what does all this have to do with ODESZA, an Emerald City duo that’s just released a pretty incredible EDM record titled My Friends Never Die? Well, let’s just say that getting the recognition that group cofounders Harrison Mills and Clayton Knight richly deserve wasn’t easy, especially in the early days.

      “Seattle has a history as a rock town—although right now you could kind of say that it’s an indie-folk town,” Mills says by cellphone from a tour van that’s winding its way to San Diego. “And they all have this vibe that’s kind of grungy. When I was growing up, though, I didn’t really listen to much music at all other than what my parents were listening to, which was old funk and soul music. Then my brother started getting into really niche-market music like Radiohead. From there, the Gorillaz introduced me to hip-hop, which led to really loving trip-hop. Eventually, I sort of fell in love with electronic music.”

      It’s this last genre that best works as a discussion point for My Friends Never Die. More specifically, the EP’s five songs seem like immaculately crafted artifacts from a time when phat pants were high-fashion and Sonar was the hottest club in Vancouver. Get ready to fall hard for tracks that mix spine-shakingly distorted bass lines with carpet-of-stars synths and soaring soul-sister vocal loops. “Without You” makes one want to bust out the glow sticks and tangerine sunglasses and book a week in Ibiza, while “If There’s Time” works an exotically banging vibe that suggests a raging superclub in Bangkok.

      ODESZA didn’t start out on the big, bold, and shiny tip, with Mills and Knight initially specializing in downtempo electronic music.

      My Friends Never Die was made mostly on the road while we were playing,” Mills reports. “They were songs that we would play live. When we were doing the downtempo stuff, you could tell that it was hard for audiences to really get into something that was so slow. We wanted to do harder-hitting tracks to see how the audience would react, and the reaction was really good.”

      So good, in fact, that ODESZA is now proving to the world that there’s more to Seattle than rock ’n’ roll, not to mention Fleet Foxes, the Head and the Heart, and the Cave Singers. The two musicians have been all over the major-festival circuit, scoring invites to heavy-hitting showcases like Coachella. They’ve also racked up thousands upon thousands of hits on SoundCloud and are in the middle of a tour whose shows are selling out well in advance.

      “All this has been a complete surprise,” Mills offers. “I mean, we didn’t expect this tour to be as great as it’s going—we thought maybe we would sell out two or three shows, including our hometown. We really had no idea.”

      ODESZA plays Venue on Thursday (April 10).



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