Whether an independent band needs to coin its own genre or
create an entirely new brand of music to get noticed, making it in
Los Angeles is no simple venture. But the members of Bedroom Walls
seem to be coasting through it and having a great time.
The somber, dreamy quintet’s second album, “All Good
Dreamers Pass This Way,” was released this May and has led
the band to a July residency in the Los Angeles venue Tangier
Restaurant and Lounge as well as El Cid, where the band’s run
ends on Tuesday. The band is characterized by a mess of sound
inspired by Pink Floyd-meets-shoegaze, coupled with vocal
harmonization reminiscent of Elliot Smith, which results in what
frontman Adam Goldman calls “romanticore,” a trademark
unfamiliar to the L.A. music scene.
“I coined it as a joke and I never thought it was very
clever,” Goldman said. “I always thought of us as this
rigorous minimalist ensemble. My roommate’s girlfriend would
listen to us practicing and she would say, “˜You guys are too
romantic for that.’ I was kind of embarrassed until I
realized just how romantic our music was.”
Goldman once joked that the point of Bedroom Walls’ music
was to make people sad. Although the throbbing, minor-key-driven
guitar textures and somber music invoke feelings of loneliness
(embedded in one’s bedroom sheets, reflexively), he denied
being consumed by it.
“The truth is when we made this record I made sure that
each sad song had sweeping epic moments,” Goldman said.
“Hopefully when you have your headphones on and things are
going down, for a moment you get excited. It’s not just
sappy. I think part of it has to do with a kind of maturity.
Sometimes I would describe romanticore to people as a place you go
after you’ve taken off the training wheels of emo music and
you’re more comfortable with your melancholy.”
While the band’s sweeping, bittersweet pop music may have
made an impression with the arrival of its debut album in 2003, the
initial buzz dwindled in the surge of bands coming up in
independent music circles in Los Feliz and Silverlake.
“When the first record came out, KCRW pushed it really
hard. Then dance punk and retro happened and I immediately felt
like we were obsolete for a little while, like we didn’t make
any sense at all in this town,” Goldman said. “Then it
passed. All these bands broke up and I don’t know what
happened to them.”
The members of Bedroom Walls, however, did not deviate from the
sound they had initially conceived, plowing through Los
Angeles’ mutability with their self-assigned genre label.
Goldman is quick to point out the benefits of the band creating its
unique trademark, not the least of which is a longer
shelf-life.
“It was a slow build,” Goldman said. “Here in
L.A., bands start and two weeks later they’re the hottest
band in town, they get signed, and you never hear from them again.
Keeping to our own music is beneficial for us because we’re
not part of a scene that fades. When the trend is over it
doesn’t affect us at all because we don’t sound like
any of that stuff.”
While Bedroom Walls will be wrapping up the last week of its
residency on Tuesday, along with fellow bands Let’s Go
Sailing and Whispertown 2000, Goldman sees the experience as a
validation of the group’s ability to freely experiment with
new styles of music.
“It’s very low pressure,” Goldman said.
“You do your residency for a while, introduce people to new
stuff on the album, and you catch up with people. I feel like as
far as the L.A. indie rock scene goes, people don’t need any
proof of our music at this point in our careers. It’s like
playing at your home base.”