Brandon is the Creative Director at Habitat. This basically means makes a lot of the pretty pictures, videos, marketing or promotional materials you see in real life or on the internets. You can find him on Facebook, Twitter and Faked Potatoes where he lives vicariously through himself and the internets.Each track on IG’s latest, Paddywhack, isolates the atomic essence of the pop song, replicating that perfect moment ad infinitum until the warm tides of melody, of rippling organ, of submerged synth bass, of falsetto oo’s have surrounded and engulfed you—feel flows more Mesmer than Brian Wilson. It is music so compact and honest and perfect that I witnessed it transform the beer-sticky, sweat-humid, furniture-deprived living room of the Lexington house venue appropriately christened “Crib Death” into a Gothic cathedral: a chiaroscuro of sound and feeling that is nothing short of holy, redemption for all of us High Life-swilling lowlifes. Yeah, he’s that good live.
Scores of blogsick youngsters self-consciously burying half-written Spector-rips ‘neath reverb plugins are missing the point: what makes great bedroom pop great is truth. True vulnerability. True loneliness. True heartbreak. And, as long as we’re messing around with overdubs, it certainly doesn’t hurt to have a truly preternatural ear for vocal harmonies. Friley has nothing to prove, ‘cuz it’s all right there. The idiot glee—a code for eternal youth.
