Brett Callwood
sym fera Tag Team Jim James and Radiohead: The two men of anonymous, atmospheric, electronic rock project sym fera told us about their respective love for Jim James and Radiohead gems.
Member 1: Jim James is more known for his work with his band My Morning Jacket than his solo stuff, and I’m a huge fan of that band. But this one album he released on his own, “Eternally Even,” is just special, even compared to his other solo stuff. He (and producer Blake Mills deserves to be named here) stumbled upon this totally original sound that, to my ear, he hasn’t come back to before or since. It’s just this anomalous musical moment that makes me wish he would craft a whole new side project around that album. He found this way to be organic in a way that sounds straight up time-traveled from the ’60s and early ’70s, and at the same time, he’s got these electronic elements, these synth sounds, and these voice effects that are so clearly from the modern era, so clearly in conversation with artists from the past five years. And it just works, it’s a perfect marriage of sonic landscapes. Jim James found a way to use totally synthetic sounds that nonetheless blend so well with real drums, real bass guitar. Specifically, he uses the bass as a lead melodic instrument, which you so rarely hear. Bass was my first instrument, and my main one for a long time, so this album just hits a deep part of my heart.
(ATO/CAPITOL)
This album has been a massive inspiration to the way we produce the sym fera stuff, and selfishly I gatekeeped it for a while because I didn’t want any of my friends to get inspired by it too.
Member 2: I hesitated to list a Radiohead album because, let’s face it, there’s a nation of artists that owe their entire sonic identity to this band. Often imitated, never duplicated. It’s almost a cliche at this point to list them as an influence, it’s like a ’70s rock band saying they’re into The Stones. But you just have to give it to them. Half of the bands on Pitchfork, whether they admit it or not, have wagons hitched to the Yorke-Greenwood train. I don’t think you get a James Blake, Billie Eilish, Ry X, Jens Kuross, Bon Iver, Low Roar, Moses Sumney, or any of that experimental, spooky, dramatic, falsetto-heavy stuff that I love without Radiohead blazing the trail.
(PARLOPHONE/CAPITOL)
This album in particular to me was the bridge between their two disparate sounds, from ’90s alt-rock into genre-less, electronic and orchestral scores. OK Computer gets most of the credit for that transformation, but Hail always had the gold medal in my mind. “There There” is, in my opinion, as close to a perfect song as I’ve ever heard, and “Scatterbrain” has brought me close to tears more than once. My fascination with this album as a kid made me look into their influences, which caused me to discover Jeff Buckley, and so many other artists I never would have given a chance without it. When they began to slide away from their early rock angst in favor of strings, orchestras, synths, beauty, and apocalyptic terror, I was all in. I was in a lot of straight-ahead rock bands before sym fera decided to go the route we’re in now, and Hail to the Thief was the first album I heard that showed me it was ok to stray outside of the genre box in which I was trapped. They showed me it was ok to be weird, to write songs about something other than sex and love, and to dare to aim for an epic emotional scale, even if your voice is as soft as a whisper.
sym fera’s recent single “little things” is out now.
And the “11/8 (Remixed)” single is also now available.
Originally written by Brett Callwood for The Village Voice, LA Weekly’s sister publication.
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