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Three Lives
Author Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club, Invisible Monsters) opens his paean to Portland, Fugitives and Refugees, by quoting another local author, Katherine Dunn (Geek Love):
“Everyone in Portland is living a minimum of three lives.”
It’s that kind of attitude, that kind of expectation that’s made the Oregon city a magnet for musicians of all genres, especially Indie Rock. It’s why Stephen Malkmus, Johnny Marr, Isaac Brock, Britt Daniel and so many others call Portland home. You can be a serious, working musician…and a stay-at-home dad, or an energy efficiency expert…or a dentist. Here, having a day job doesn’t turn your passion into a hobby. Both are respected and treated as equals.
“I like my job and have a lot invested in it,” Little Beirut’s singer Hamilton Sims says. “Honestly though, it enables me to make music. The worst thing I could think of is being a dentist where I worked hard all week with no outlet for creative expression.”
Guitarist Edwin Paroissien agrees. “I spend a lot of time thinking about our music and the endless quest to refine and improve it, ” he says. “It’s a compulsion, but a totally natural one that I’m ok with. Despite all the things I may have going on, many of my other interests end up being eclipsed by music. ”
The members of Little Beirut approach their time dedicated to the band with an non-jaded attitude that’s refreshing to see amongst rock ‘n’ rollers. The gratitude they have for still being able to pursue music seriously despite where they’ve come to in terms of lives, families and, careers is immediately apparent when discussing their band. “And the fact that you actually can be here and make a living as a musician, or whatever?” adds drummer Alex Inman. “You forget that you can’t do that everywhere.”
Being a Band in Portland
Picking up their name from an off-hand slight from former President George H.W. Bush, who called Portland “Little Beirut” after a visit to the city was met with massive protests, the four-piece is not what you might expect from the center of the Indie Rock universe.
“One of the things I tell people when I give them the album is to expect it to be a pretty big fat pop record, because that’s something that stands out here,” says Sims. “We’re not avant garde, we’re not trying to weird you out.”
Yes, Fear of Heaven is a big fat pop record…in the best way. Lush with melodies and choruses you can sing along to in your car, Little Beirut’s third album shows a band coming into its own. More raw and direct than 2008’s critically acclaimed High Dive, there’s a swagger and confidence in its embrace of the elements that make you remember the song, not simply name check the influences. The Posies-esque guitar drive and Nada Surf reminiscent harmonies that marked the last effort have not been ditched, but the orchestration has been stripped down here making a confident statement and allowing the songs to shine through.
It’s clear from the first track that Little Beirut has built their foundation on a respect for the bands that elevated pop music beyond what’s merely popular. These are songwriters who grew up on college radio listening to REM and the Smiths, and Fear of Heaven is filled with gorgeous potential hits devoid of any sense of irony or apology for what they are.
Tapping the Talent Pool
High Dive, garnered stellar reviews from USA Today, The Big Takeover, Under the Radar and many others—as well as cracked CMJ’s Top 200—and this time around the band decided to enlist much of the same team. Fear of Heaven was recorded, mixed, and aided in production by Jeff Stuart Saltzman (Death Cab for Cutie, Menomena, Stephen Malkmus, Sleater-Kinney).
“Jeff mixed High Dive,” says Paroissien. “But this was definitely a step up for us to work with him more closely from tracking through the end.”
Little Beirut soon learned that Jeff Saltzman was a force to be reckoned with.
“I remember this one very simple guitar line that I would never have thought twice about and laid down in one take,” recalls Paroissien. “He made me play it maybe 15 times to get the right laid back, behind the beat feel. I was playing it fine technically, but the point was not to. It took me a while to get that.”
It made for some long days in the studio but the results elevated the entire band’s performance and contributed to the confidence you hear on the album.
“That’s his strength in a nutshell. He’s one of those guys who really has the end in mind from the beginning, and every part that’s added, every decision from choice of mic down to the sound of the snare, is a calculated means to the end.”
Also on board to co-produce was Portland singer-songwriter Chris Robley, sometimes known as “the Stephen King of indie-pop.” “Chris is the coolest guy and we have a great working relationship with him”, says Inman. “Essentially we use him as a writer would an editor, and we bounce our songs off him when they’re in their infancy to get some interesting feedback from an outside opinion.”
Chuck Palahniuk was smart to quote a talented friend in the opening to his love letter to Portland. It’s a city where the creative community works together and supports each other and turns out the best music in America today…oh, and it just so happens that much of the Portland creative community are Sims’ patients. It would be fun to say exactly who, but hey – that would break the Hippocratic oath.
Hamilton Sims – Vocals, Guitar
Edwin Paroissien – Guitar, Vocals
Alex Inman – Drums, Vocals
John Hulcher – Bass
Recent Press
Nearly every song on Fear of Heaven, the third album from Little Beirut, sounds to me like it should be on the radio. Their melodies sparkle and sheen with tightly composed arrangements, immaculate production, and consummate playing. —Portland Mercury
There are few local bands that I can imagine getting more serious play on alt-rock stations across the country than Little Beirut. —Willamette Week
[Little Beirut are] fast establishing themselves as, possibly, the next biggest band from the indie rock universe – Portland, Oregon. —Rock n roll Report
Portland’s Little Beirut are earnest power-popsters, creating tight, deceptively simple and lightly orchestrated up-tempo and midtempo indie rock that shimmers, shakes, soars and sings. —Portland Tribune
…there is way too much passion, beauty and talent on display for the powers-that-be to not notice them. —Stereosubversion.com
… Fear of Heaven has all the charm of an indie record and all the appeal of a pop album. —411 mania
The second album from this Portland rock quartet holds no limit on catchy choruses and if pop is the oddball genre in Oregon than this little CD will stand out like a sore thumb. —Greenshoelace.com
Little Beirut’s third release may spring them up and out of the underground, landing hard in your lap with originality. —Delusions of Adequacy
[Fear of Heaven] finds the band planing down the Posies-like guitars that characterized High Dive and investing in arena-sized hooks. —My Old Kentucky Blog
Little Beirut posses that wonderful quality you yearn for in a band: restraint tempered with a sense of when to let loose; hooks that can come from a line of vocals or a guitar riff; a rhythm section that sets down a hard backbone of infectious beats. [They] should be heard farther and wider away from the Pacific Northwest, so get to checking them out, pronto! —News4uonline
…Fear of Heaven, [is] an astral album stuffed with shoegaze tones, hypnotic bass lines, and of course, lots and lots of unabashed pop. —Absolute punk
Portland-based quartet Little Beirut has created the perfect soundtrack for a warm summer evening with their third album, Fear of Heaven. —Performer Magazine
“Seductive”, “Melody”, “Sharp hook”, “Groovin’” – this album does them all in abundance, but the clever trait that Little Beirut have is that they know how to present them in a manner of different ways. —Sea of Tranquility
On this killer album, the quartet from Portland displays a Supergroup sound channeling the vibe of an amalgamation of Coldplay and Death Cab for Cutie, with less Hollywood production and more outright musical talent and execution. —Sovereign Sound
Fear Of Heaven is the third album by Portland, Oregon’s Little Beirut, chock full of gorgeous indie rock songs…A superb album, it provides indisputable proof that a band can be successful without the members needing to give up their day jobs. —Revolt
On their third record, Fear of Heaven, Little Beirut continue to make fearlessly big pop songs. They’re the kind of shimmering, catchy rock band that won’t fit in at all with the faux-expansion of fuzzy chillwave, but they have a sound that’s sturdy enough to outlast that kind of movement. —Pop Matters
“Listening to the music of Little Beirut is like living in a world where people remember the music of the ‘80s through the lens of R.E.M. and The Smiths rather than through that of neon, hair metal, and various New Wave one-hit-wonders. Or better yet, imagine the sort of music that Keane, Travis, and Coldplay might make if they were honestly cribbing from The Cars, INXS, and Oasis instead of making soppy, milquetoast versions of the retread tracks U2 has written in the past decade. —Dryvetyme Onlyne
Press from High Dive
Ambitious….I gravitate to bands that take big swings at the plate; the bonus is that [Little Beirut] connect most of the time. —Ken Barnes, USA Today online
This little Brit-inspired pop gem has quickly become one of my favorites of 2008. Stunning guitar hooks fill the album as do catchy choruses that are memorable from the very first listen. —Big Takeover Magazine
Major labels, come running. —Under The Radar
This is an album clearly crafted with precision, with its consistency being something of a rare entity in the realm of independent alternative-rock. A startlingly consistent release that relies on both accessibility and pure melodic infectiousness to create an experience that is hard to rival in contemporary alternative-rock. Once the radios get a hold of tracks like “Belle de Jour” and “Love During Wartime”, I don’t see much stopping them. –Obscure Sound
[Little Beirut] sculpt their rock and roll into a pristine, hook-heavy weapon that is primed for an assault on the FM airwaves. It’s hard to ignore songs with such addictive choruses and the genuineness in the voice of singer Hamilton Sims. It’s a record that does not disappoint. —The Portland Mercury
A self-assured collection of sweeping, melodic pop gems, the record also tackles complex subjects in innovative ways and marks the band as one to watch. —The Portland Tribune
In a musical atmosphere that is so heavy with mediocre bands promoting fellow mediocre bands to fill the radio waves with an amalgamation of homogenous song[s?] and whose albums contain a monotonous string of songs that sound so much alike that it could easily be one long track, it’s refreshing to see a self-released album garner so much attention….High Dive seems to embody the Portland-raised band’s surroundings. Each track different from the other; one song meets the listener with a bit of an edge, another with a touch of the “crunchy”, a few more with the naiveté of raw emotion and most of all, High Dive ends in rain. —Static Multimedia
[Little Beirut] are not to be slept on. Soaring melodies mixed with intense, pounding guitar-driven rhythms make it impossible to overlook this band. High Dive is one of my favorite surprises of 2008 thus far. —My Old Kentucky Blog
A minty fresh, yet strangely shoegazing sound. Just lovely. Get ‘em before The Hills does. —Stop Okay Go
[High Dive] will stay in my stereo for some time. It is too damn full of beauty and possibilities for me not to want to search it for new things with every listen. 9 out of 10 —Skyline Press
High Dive [is] a great little pop gem….A wonderful pop/rock album with some amazing hooks. This is one of the best debuts I’ve heard in a long, long time. I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw this band going places quite quickly. —Music Emissions
Little Beirut thinks big. Such elevated songwriting craft, with its emphasis on melody and difficult subject matter, is a valuable commodity in the realm of indie rock. This unlikely combination almost guarantees the band a place on year-end best-of lists. –There Stands the Glass
Give them a try…if you aren’t convinced, just wait a few months. They will get big sooner rather than later. —Neufutur Magazine
Little Beirut has a great sense of melody, they keep the hits brief and it sounds really good. Not glossy, mind you, just good. —Willamette Week, Local Cut
