Saturday 23 June 2012

Please Step Out of the Vehicle

A long, long time ago (I can still remember), back before they were shit, I interviewed Hutch Harris and Kathy Foster from The Thermals. Indeed, it was the first band interview I'd ever conducted after a missing dictaphone had put paid to a rendezvous with Wolfmother the previous week. (Considering most of the questions I'd prepared for the Aussie band were along the lines of 'Do you know Mowgli from The Jungle Book?' and 'You all have very similar hairstyles – did this have any bearing on your decision to form a band together?', it was probably for the best.) Midway through the conversation, in a surely misguided attempt to impress Hutch and Kathy with my knowledge of their local music scene, I dropped the name of Portland's Please Step Out of the Vehicle. Their drummer immediately laughed and left the room. "What was that about?" I enquired. "Oh nothing," Kathy replied. "He just really hates Please Step Out of the Vehicle." I know now that man was an idiot.


So obscure, Please Step Out of the Vehicle have never been photographed in the wild; the only indication of what they look like is this artist's impression (or rather, so often do they change their composition around frontman and lone constant Travis Wiggins, he told me I was best off using the drawing). An indie pop band with a strong emphasis on experimentation, bleeps and bloops are rarely far from the strum of a guitar or the blast of a trumpet, with Wiggins joyously yelping his way along. What's more, Travis is a good guy – he said I could share with you as much of the band's music as I wished. I'm a good guy too though, so instead of taking advantage and uploading their entire back catalogue, I've decided to limit myself to 'We Will Go Everywhere (Part 2)' from Sleeping Right and the Best in Homeopathic Magic. It's fairly typical of that album's sound, and over the years has genuinely become one of my all-time favourite songs.


Please Step Out of the Vehicle – We Will Go Everywhere (Part 2)

MySpace: www.myspace.com/cosmiclordz
Soundcloud: www.soundcloud.com/psootv
Sleeping Right and the Best in Homeopathic Magic is available from Lucky Madison, where you can also preview the rest of the album.