When we put up Music Go Music's first 12", "Light of Love", the band was shrouded in mystery and a protected by several dozen layers of ABBA references, but they were on Secretly Canadian, a label we've come to respect for many reasons. Our curiousity led us to write a story on them in the Issue 56, which you can read after the jump, in which we not only discovered that they were somewhat normal but also like vegetarian nachos. Small world. They are now releasing their second single, and there is hardly a hint of ABBA, just gigantic riffs, chugging rhythms and a little bit of disco. Or as one of their mom's says in the story, "“the overture in a ’70s musical that I missed but would have loved.”
Story Eric Ducker Photography Matt Mallams
The first time Music Go Music performed live was in 2006 at the Eagle Rock Music Festival in Los Angeles. They played the three songs they had and frontwoman Gala Bell wore an orange jumpsuit with rhinestones and genie pants that she bought off eBay. There are a few pictures of the show on their MySpace page, but they’re all too dark — the faces obscured, the orange jumpsuit not looking as fabulous as I’d imagined. Music Go Music have not performed since. “It has to be the perfect situation. I want it to be amazing. I want to have outfit changes for each song,” says Bell. “I have to have champagne. Music Go Music doesn’t slum it.”
These statements may come off like Linda Evangelista’s infamous “We don’t wake up for less than $10,000 a day” quip, but there are some caveats I probably should have mentioned earlier. Bell and keyboardist/songwriter Kamer Maza are the aliases for two members of an LA indie rock band they don’t want named, and Music Go Music is their fantasy pop project with pseudonymous guitarist and bassist Torg. They will put out three three-song 12-inches this year, released in the order they were recorded. They begin with a bright-eyed Scandinavian sashay and end with a ten-minute Mediterranean disco romp featuring programmed drums, making detours along the way into rainy day ballads and guitar infernos. The cumulative effect plays like the
greatest hits of dance saviors that never existed, or as Bell’s mother described it, “the overture in a ’70s musical that I missed but would have loved.” And indeed, they probably should only be performed from inside an aquadome at the bottom of the Caspian Sea, or at least during a summer-long residency in Ibiza.
There is an impulse to dismiss the band as a guilty pleasure side project, but that would ignore the attention to craft in the songs — not just in the production, but in the lyrics about “love’s silver haze” and the faded scent of jasmine. “I think it’s the opposite of an indulgence,” says Maza. “It’s about traditional song structure and not putting the bridge after the first chorus or whatever. With the other stuff I do, I don’t care about those things.” And while I originally hoped to get into a big theoretical talk with Music Go Music about the role of persona in modern music and how everyone is basically playing a part, I soon realized I was eating vegetarian nachos in a family-friendly Mexican restaurant by Target with a couple who raise their own chickens and that we hadn’t even really talked about goddamn Abba yet.