Published: February, 2007, West Coast Performer Magazine

Sir Splendid "Lords & Peacocks"
(Rabbit Fighter)
Recorded and produced by Marcus Barron

By Michael Fortes 

The raw, garage sounds of the ‘60s and ‘70s are the hip musical references that make for bands like The Raconteurs, The Strokes, The Greenhornes and Eagles of Death Metal. Add San Diego’s Sir Splendid to that list, and someone please fax a memo to Little Steven Van Zandt!

Though a bassist and second guitarist have since been added to the band’s lineup, the sounds heard on Lords & Peacocks are the product of just two individuals. Marcus Barron handles all the guitars, keyboards, recording and production tasks, in addition to providing the album’s often distortion-laden lead vocals. Paul Chandegra meanwhile takes care of drum duties.

While all indications are that Sir Splendid is Barron’s baby, Chandegra’s rhythmic contributions can’t be ignored. The danceable groove he establishes with Barron on “Automatic Sidewalk Action” sets the loose, fun tone for the rest of Lords & Peacocks and keeps Barron’s plea of “All good people gotta get along” sounding less like a sermon and more like the ideal that it is.

Barron’s tendency toward extended arrangements at times creates the illusion of a full, four-piece band jamming in the studio. A fully fleshed out song like “Mr. Sickmeantwister,” for example, has an extended instrumental passage that never overstays its welcome or pretends to be anything other than a fun-sounding opportunity for the band to rock out. And “Curbside Killer,” with its church organ and faux harpsichord outro, sounds like prog on paper, but comes out of the speakers sounding more like a rock band having a blast in the studio.

All this and the single-worthy, riff-driven “Dumb Angel” make for a consistently pleasing, never embarrassing, fuzzy retro affair throughout Lords & Peacocks‘ 51:34 minutes of play time.

www.sirsplendid.com
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Sir Splendid is happily misleading. Take their song, “My Friend”, featuring a guitar opener that seems a refugee from somewhere in 90s radio grunge. A just slightly over-dynamic drum fill leads in and then acquiesces to a somewhat standard beat – again I conjure all that music deemed “Alternative” before “Indie” became popularized as the blanket descriptor for intelligent rock. At 25 seconds nothing sounds exceptionally different. But then everything stops to make way for a kind of stuttering beat, the vocals admitting the focal point with dynamic intonation - “She’s wasted again – my friend.” The entire song has transformed from flat and doleful to catchy, sporadic, daydreaming, just a little bit glam and very cool.

The entire album has a kind of mid-nineties nostalgia to it, seeming to borrow sound textures from Soul Asylum, Live, Civ, Pearl Jam and early Flaming Lips. But each time you feel like you’ve heard this before, you become instantly sucked into some new direction that the band entertains, some intuitive next level that overrides your hasty categorization. Flange muttering guitars break into reflective, fuzz-colored choruses (about the 1700s no less), seemingly innocuous acoustic strumming melts into near David Bowie dramatics during “Sweet Sixteen”, goes through a slacker rock out, back into a kind of T- Rex “do-do-do” chorus and then meanders around in musical no-where land, refusing to end.

There’s Southern rock sewn in, dooming serial killer anthems and choruses that croon like Damon Albarn in a Blur that might have shared a San Fransisco stage with Janis Joplin, a Ween that believed a little more in the lyrics they were speaking. Together the guitar + drum duo of Marcus Barron and Paul Chandegra make for promising beginnings towards jittery rock that seeks freedom from itself.
In “Lords and Peacocks” raw, chunky textures punctuate each track, unadorned with excessive vocal overdubs. And what could be a slightly more emotive, somewhat more dreamy Black Keys-style collaboration veers from more minimal classic rock categorization to become something still warm, something still in the works, and every bit as interesting as you’d want a freshman release to be.
Word is they have a new release in the works.
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Listening to the "Lords & Peacocks" was an interesting trip to say the least.  That's the most fun that I've had, listening to music, in a long time!  It sounds like the brilliance of the Kinks mated with the beautiful insanity of Syd Barrett and gave birth in California.  My great respect is given to a basically two man project that sounds like a multi-person endeavor.  It enhances the senses and blows the mind.  It's truly a creative masterpiece for 2006.  The instrumental and rhythmic layering alone is worth the price of admission.
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The raw, garage sounds of the‘60s and ‘70s are the hip musical references that make for bands like The Raconteurs, The Strokes, The Greenhornes and Eagles of Death Metal. Add San Diego’s Sir Splendid to that list, and someone please fax a memo to Little Steven Van Zandt!

Though a bassist and second guitarist have since been added to the band’s lineup, the sounds heard on Lords & Peacocks are the product of just two individuals. Marcus Barron handles all the guitars, keyboards, recording and production tasks, in addition to providing the album’s often distortion-laden lead vocals. Paul Chandegra meanwhile takes care of drum duties.

While all indications are that Sir Splendid is Barron’s baby, Chandegra’s rhythmic contributions can’t be ignored. The danceable groove he establishes with Barron on “Automatic Sidewalk Action” sets the loose, fun tone for the rest of Lords & Peacocks and keeps Barron’s plea of “All good people gotta get along” sounding less like a sermon and more like the ideal that it is.

Barron’s tendency toward extended arrangements at times creates the illusion of a full, four-piece band jamming in the studio. A fully fleshed out song like “Mr. Sickmeantwister,” for example, has an extended instrumental passage that never overstays its welcome or pretends to be anything other than a fun-sounding opportunity for the band to rock out. And “Curbside Killer,” with its church organ and faux harpsichord outro, sounds like prog on paper, but comes out of the speakers sounding more like a rock band having a blast in the studio.

All this and the single-worthy, riff-driven “Dumb Angel” make for a consistently pleasing, never embarrassing, fuzzy retro affair throughout Lords & Peacocks‘ 51:34 minutes of play time. (Rabbit Fighter Records)

-Michael Fortes
Perormer Magazine (West Coast)
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