Soda Lilies

Soda Lilies (Austin, Texas)

Like Flying Saucer Attack, this lo-fi garage band combine the effect-laden, undulations of shoegaze kingpins My Bloody Valentine with a loose, unhinged approach to achieve a sound they’ve labeled “alternative slackergaze.” It’s a valid description. Picture Slanted and Enchanted-era Pavement jamming with the first Lilys lineup. The band’s 2016 release Love Cemetery Tapes is far from pristine, but the imperfections only make the music more surreal. And how can you knock a band that’s weird enough to write a song called “The Bees in my Stomach are Dead and Getting Used to It”? Frontman Ryan Elmore explained his aesthetic to the site Somewherecold: “While living in Arizona over 10 years ago, I’d forget to bring in my records after a night of drinking and listening to music [on my porch]. They’d bake out there in the sun and warp and get dusty and scratchy so when you’d play them they’d shift pitch and warble and crackle and skip. That is the sound I am trying to convey through Soda Lilies.” - Bandcamp Daily

We were #15 on this list - Shoegazer Alive 9

Soda Lilies seguramente sean la formación más interesante de shoegaze abrasivo que nos podemos encontrar en la actualidad en Estados Unidos. Con sede de operaciones en Austin, la formación integrada por Ryan, Alexis, Alex y Jake da buena muestra a lo largo de sus dos referencias de que lo suyo es encontrar el ruido melódico perfecto. A través de una catarata de distorsiones de lo más férreas, que nunca pierden la vista ese carácter tan distendido reflejado en las composiciones de Yo La Tengo, el cuarteto acaba encontrando el ambiente perfecto para soltar casi a modo de monosílabos frases en muchos casos agónicas pero muy reveladoras. Así es como conservan siempre esa pulsión por no explayarse mucho en las letras pero sí atacar de forma precisa el contenido del mensaje. Una técnica que a la postre sienta genial a sus canciones para no dejarse llevar del todo por el lado pesimista que acaba rondando a todas ellas. Sus dos primeros trabajos titulados Love Cemetery Tapes y Sleep Reel dejan constancia de un afán por mostrar el máximo en todos los temas, desenvolviéndose con el empuje propio de las formaciones que entienden el noise como algo que debe de estar apartado de la densidad.
Si nos ceñimos a lo que nos encontramos en Love Cemetery Tapes, su primera referencia, en nuestra cabeza no faltarán los momentos en los que My Bloody Valentine mostraban gran vitalidad, alejándose de las estridencias y saltando a un lado más liberador. Soda Lilies logran que las transiciones entre estrofas suenen más trepidantes, moviéndose por un carácter de urgencia que provoca que siempre vayan en una dirección de énfasis y nerviosismo por expresar todo lo que tienen en su interior, unque es cierto que bien demuestran que también les gusta dejarse llevar hacia la máxima oscuridad reflejándolo en el corte final e instrumental ‘The Bees In My Stomach Are Dead And Getting Used To It’. Avanzando unos cuantos meses en el tiempo, nos encontramos con su más reciente referencia Sleep Reel, publicada en este mismo mes de diciembre. En ella, consiguen desarrollar de nuevo ese tono cabizbajo, donde hasta los sucesos positivos parecen contados desde la tristeza pero aportando una sensación de confort en este estado. Sentimientos complicados que sin embargo Soda Lilies saben como canalizarlos a la perfección en un conjunto de canciones envidiable. - Mindies

テキサス州オースティン出身のシューゲイザーバンド Soda Liliesが、7曲入りのニューアルバム『Sleep Reel』をname your priceで発表！
くすんだ音の中にある...とか書く前に、そもそも『Love Cemetery Tapes』もこんなにRawだったっけと思い聴き直してみたら、シンプルにRawでした。綺麗に録音されていたとしてもきっと楽しめるんだろうけど、やっぱコレかと。散々スイーツ食べ歩いたけど最後は結局干し芋かと。 - Niche Music

WE TOOK THE #1 SPOT!

soda lilies deliver a melted slackergaze masterpiece that is undeniably fur-lined, warm and lackadaisical. a perfect soundtrack for joyously sinking into the couch. this one has ruled my airwaves for months. - Wild Patterns

Shoegaze, at its best, alternately evokes joy and melancholy, its swirling wash of sound a tempest of effervescence and foreboding, the ups and downs of teenage romance captured in sound. The best shoegaze bands—Slowdive, MBV, Ride—have always looked toward abundant noise as a source of both hostility and tenderness. Soda Lilies, a local shoegaze trio, simultaneously upholds and modifies traditions of the genre, crafting noisey pop indebted to big-name titans like Kevin Shields and Elizabeth Fraser but also to bedroom heroes like Sam Ray and Warren Hildebrand. Love Cemetery Tapes, the best work in the band's discography thus far, bursts and sparkles with a moody grandeur typical of most shoegaze records, but it also manages to construct a deep sense of intimacy between artist and listener thanks to its lo-fi, homespun disposition. These songs feel like they were written for you, and like all great shoegaze songs, they stick with you. Total romance.


"Soda Lilies captures a modern charm, creating static filled pop with heavy tones of a late night affair." - Lost in a Sea of Sound - DO512

Soda Lilies is a shoegaze, lo-fi, noise-pop band hailing from Austin, Texas. I interviewed Soda Lilies at Cheer Up Charlies in Austin, TX on January 15, 2017 at a gig with Blushing and Muff but there was a technical snafu that killed the audio file (hence the ‘sort of’ in the title). The band was kind enough to answer the questions a second time via e-mail. They answered questions about the formation of the band, their writing process, and what’s next for the band.

Hello Soda Lilies. Can you all introduce yourselves to our readers and say what you do in the band?

Ryan Elmore: Hi I’m ryan and I play guitar and sing and write/record all of the music.

Jake Rowan: My name is Jake Rowan and I play drums for Soda Lilies.

Alex Stanfield: I’m Alex and I play bass.

How did you all start making music? Have you been in bands in the past?

Ryan: I guess I grew up with a dad who always had an acoustic guitar around. I started playing that at a young age, just sort of dinking around and started taking it more seriously after highschool. I’ve never had lessons. I eventually taught myself how to play everything (piano, guitar, bass, drums etc.). I used to play in a few psychrock and jazz fusion psych bands back where I grew up in Arizona. (Sun Vs. Moon, Icy Core Of Jupiter, Everything I’ve Never Seen) Then I moved out to Austin a decade ago to get out of bands for a while to record an album doing everything myself, really lofi, and I did under the name Autocoax. I never really released it or anything. I mean it’s on bandcamp but it’s just something I show to random people.

Jake: I started playing drums when I was 13; my brother had a kit he never used and I would just hop on and play along to music. After years of doing that, I eventually formed a band with my friend and coworker at the time called smith+robot, which has been running strong for about 5 years. Last fall, I joined an Electric Light Orchestra cover band that plays here around Austin semi-frequently now.

Alex: I started playing music in high school. I started my first band when I was a sophomore in high school and I’m in several bands currently.

So, how and when did Soda Lilies form?

Ryan: I started doing Soda Lilies in 2014-15 when I was stuck in Houston for a couple of years with an ex-girlfriend, Alexis. She was the other half of Soda Lilies initially but was mostly busy with school because she’s reallllly smart. It ended up being mostly a solo project except for her doing the backup vocals on “Lazy Susan”. I just had more free time and I worked on my songs. When we moved back to Austin we started trying out drummers and bass players but our relationship had been dying and fizzled out and we couldn’t work out our differences. She has some really good songs that we never got to record and I hope she does something with them. The Album cover is of Alexis at Lovett Cemetery (her feet cover the 2 t’s).


Digital Camera
It was taken on a road when we both knew our relationship was suffering. It is ironic. Love Cemetery, a figurative place, is our entire relationship. Then I met Jake through a friend. We started jamming and pretty quickly played a show as a 2 piece at dozen street and a really old homeless guy loved us and held us by the shoulders for a really long time telling us so. Then I met Alex through some friends that live in the apartment complex where we practice (We are loud and listen to us from their porch when they smoke) and knew Alex liked the genre and we were introduced!

Jake: I met Ryan through another friend I pedicab with after expressing the urge to play music more frequently. Soda Lilies’s original lineup had just disbanded and he was looking for a drummer and bass player. Me and Ryan met up and jammed and we meshed well right away. Eventually, Ryan found Alex and we all solidified a set fairly quickly.

Alex: Soda Lilies was already formed before I came along. I was staying with someone in the same apartment complex as Ryan and we began to talk about me joining them.

Can you talk a bit about the shoegaze/dream-pop/experimental scene in Austin and how you see yourselves in that whole framework? What does the environment of Austin do for you creatively?

Ryan: There’s a really good and growing shoegaze scene here. A lot of good bands. our specific brand of lofi shoegaze (or slackergaze as coined by Michael of Wild Patterns and the band Lazy Legs, a great band) that wonders off into garage and psych and noise lets us slip in with other great scenes here in Austin. We can fit a lot of different bills.

Jake: I wouldn’t be playing shoegaze if I didn’t live in Austin. There is a thriving, inclusive, experimental scene that’s pretty open to anything you can present coherently. It allows a certain confidence when performing live as well as when we’re writing. I know that as long as I own what I do, then I can succeed in putting on a great show.

Love Cemetary Tapes is this wonderful mashup of shoegaze and almost hypnotic psychedelia with a good sprinkle of experimentation. Can you talk about your approach to writing and recording on this album, especially given that lo-fi feel in your music?


Digital Camera
Ryan: Well I did the album before I met these guys and like I said I play everything on it. I recorded it in my apartment. I guess I’ve always just really liked the sound of bedroomy/demo stuff. It’s more intimate. The sound I’m going for is from something I experienced while living in Arizona like over 10 years ago… I used to live under a staircase and I couldn’t fit most of my belongings in there (it was meant for a washer/dryer) but I had access to my own patio that I made into a sort of outdoor living room with a couch and a record player. In the summer, a lot of times I’d forget to bring in my records after a night of drinking and listening to music. They’d bake out there in the sun and warp and get dusty and scratchy so when you’d play them they’d shift pitch and warble and crackle and skip. That is the sound I am trying to convey through Soda Lilies.

Alex: I didn’t help with any writing or recording. It was pretty much all Ryan. I have re-written most of the bass parts though. I feel like when I joined I brought in a lot more bass driven parts.

I like to ask bands about a few tracks specifically on their latest. Can you talk a bit about writing and recording “Ghost Camouflage (fog)” and then the very experimental “The Bees in my Stomach Are Dead and Getting Used to It”?

Ryan: Fog is really fun and garagey and on the record its really short and is supposed to just sorta float through it and disappear quickly, yuh know like a ghost. When we play it live it’s a lot longer with another verse and builds to some really noisey, multi-loop madness. Bee’s I recorded alone in one take. It’s a really emotional song for me. It was during what was the saddest month of my life, very unhappy and hopeless in the love cemetery so to speak. It was when it ended (or began? or continued?). The droning static that frames the entire piece is supposed to sound like, well, Bees.

Jake: Ryan wrote and recorded that entire tape, but I know with Bees we wanted to be able to improvise and experiment with the theme of bees. The song runs a loop in the background that gives off this sound that’s akin of a swarm of bees buzzing irrationally loud and we’re able to improvise on top of that and output this feeling of anxiety that comes and goes in waves. It’s always great to play live as an opener and really sets the mood and tone for the rest of the set. Fog ends abruptly on the record, with this effect that I feel emulates a sort of fog enveloping the remainder of the song. When playing live, I like to feel that we’re able to perform the song past that fog by playing harder and harder towards the end.

What sort of equipment do you use when playing live and, if different, while recording? What sort of set up do you use in the studio to record?

Ryan: I use exactly the same equipment live as in the studio. I write music that I can properly play live. I don’t want to disappoint an audience with a lack of texture. Well, at least knowingly, since I usually fuck up at least twice. I play a 30ish pedal board so it’s gonna happen. I switch between guitars, my burgandy mist metallic fender jazzmaster 62cs and my 96 mij fender jazzmaster that I’ve modded a lot. I gutted the rhythm circuit and built an optical theremin that I filled the cavity with. Really noisey stuff. I play through a 76 fender super six reverb amp. LOUD.

Jake: As far as drums go, I play with this big starburst orange Pearl kit emblazoned with “Chad Smith Signature Drums.” I really enjoy sharing that they have Chad Smith’s signature of approval, for what that’s worth.

Alex: I’m using Ryan’s bass gear, which has a really good tone for us. I do use some pedals to make things a little noisier. Really digging this new earthquaker distortion I got recently. I also use some chorus and a memory boy to make things wavy. I use pretty much the same set up while recording.

If you could have any piece of equipment, with no financial restrictions keeping you back, what would it be?

Ryan: I’d like an original pre-CBS Fender Jazzmaster. Really beat up. olympic white.

Jake: Really, I just need a new ride cymbal, some new skins, and maybe a smaller crash to add to it. After playing with a kit so long you grow accustomed to its particular sound.

Alex: This noise floor fuzz pedal from devi ever Ryan used to have.

So what’s next for Soda Lilies? Should we be expecting more music in 2017?

Ryan: As soon as I find the right label to work with, I want to release “Love Cemetery Tapes” on vinyl with 2 bonus tracks that won’t be available digitally. Aside from that, we have a lot of songs to work with, around 15, and always writing more. Will probably have an e.p. out Marchish and a full length by the end of the year. The focus right now is getting a local following since as far as this being an active, live playing band we are very new to the town. We will be playing a lot of shows this year.

Jakes: We want to start recording this month. We’ll be playing SXSW and we’re planning on touring during the summer.

Thanks for doing this. Any other comments you would like to leave with our readers?

Ryan Elmore: NO! - Somewherecold

5th Place out of over the 100 albums to even make the list - DKFM Radio

No ranks, just the top 40 - When The Sun Hits

Soda Lilies - Love Cemetery Tapes
Songs strung out with an almost de-tuned quality. Soda Lilies captures a modern charm, creating static filled pop with heavy tones of a late night affair. Sounds fall thick, like time has destroyed the magnetic tape, wobbling in and out of clarity. The energy of Love Cemetery Tapes burned so deeply, no matter how old, the cassette spools still spin. A composition that makes you think about how creative musicians are today.

Love Cemetery Tapes takes eight tracks to the grave. Vibrancy of sounds compressed in times crypts and smashed apart to spill on new listeners ears. Like the band Flipper crossed with Jesus and the Mary Chain, there is an enthusiasm heralding to pioneering new genres. Guitar strings loose and buzzing on the frets, raw drums driving sense and reason, making the entire project move through ghostly light. The soft styled vocals almost whispering as to not stir the spirits of the past. If you have read many of the posts on this site, my bias is towards the longest track "The Bees In My Stomach Are Dead And Getting Used To It". The only track without vocals, droning instruments taking on there own decaying form. Like really good fiction, hard to tell if this brand new or if Love Cemetery Tapes was found in buried in a thirty year old box of tapes.

Soda Lilies is from Austin, Texas and they joined forces with Rok Lok Records out of Long Island for this cassette release. Fifty tapes released in October of 2016. Currently available from the Rok Lok Records bandcamp page. Also Soda Lilieshas shows coming up if you are in the Austin area.
March 12th @Wake The Dead San Marcos, Texas and March 17th @ SXSW - Lost In A Sea Of Sounds

Soda Lilies closed the night with gigantically epic walls of sound, feedback, and no holds bar surf pop structures. As Ryan, the principal mastermind behind Soda Lilies, describes his sound, it’s definitely slackergaze. There is a DIY, almost garage band feel to the whole endeavor and it’s glorious live. Ryan plays the guitar like a man on a mission to blow out the speakers, with layers of looped sounds building to gigantic walls of sound. In the midst of the walls, he breaks into these incredibly placed surf-pop riffs that give shape to the louder more raucous compositions. Jake and Alex play fast and loose, holding onto the beat and the melody, but only just such. There is a sense that everything is about to go over the edge but, holding back just enough, it never really does. It’s controlled mania and it’s brilliant. They played a number of tracks off of Love Cemetary Tapes with a few tracks from a prior release as well as something new.

The Bees in My Stomach are Dead and Getting Used to It (Love Cemetery Tapes)
Honey Wire (Love Cemetery Tapes)
At Night (Love Cemetery Tapes)
Not Like Honey (Live Recordings from The Mouse on the Motorcycle World Tour)
Alyson (new)
Lazy Susan (Love Cemetery Tapes)
Let Me Sleep (Live Recordings from The Mouse on the Motorcycle World Tour)

Their brand of lo-fi, garage band aesthetic with the My Bloody Valentine surf-rock is a killer combination but it really is a treat to hear live. Love Cemetery Tapes is a great album but I recommend you see them live. They take the tunes to a whole other level. - Somewherecold

In recent years the shoegaze label has been adorned by many bands and while appropriately falling under that umbrella whether it is modern recording techniques, cross pollination of other music styles, different types of effects pedals employed I have found that very few of these bands really capture the sonic aesthetic of the bands that made me fall in love with the genre in the first place. That is where Austin, TX based Soda Lilies succeed is that the sounds captured on their cassette "Love Cemetery Tapes" hearkens to a time when the sounds of My Bloody Valentine and Swirlies were defining a genre. "Love Cemetery Tapes" is eight tracks of hazy, tremolo bar bending waves of distorted guitar sounds mixed through awash of driving drums and layered, hushed vocal breezes. The sounds that Soda Lilies make evoke a warm feeling not only in the nostalgia of bringing the listener closer to a shoegaze-y experience of yore but because the sounds ebb and flow in such a manner. "Love Cemetery Tapes" is limited to an edition of 50 white clamshell cassettes packaged in a numbered full color j-card. - Rok Lok Records

http://whenthesunhitsblog.blogspot.com/

Have been played on:
When The Sun Hits #43
When The Sun Hits #45 - When The Sun Hits (Radio Show)

Our Single "Lazy Susan" was played on air twice - The Reverb

"Some of the coolest bent guitar work I've heard in a while" -Oliver Ackermann (Shared on his bands page our single "Lazy Susan")

yeah yeah its small time press but meant a lot to us and got us quite a few new listeners :) -