Echo Park Band Gets It Right in Los Angeles

New Zealand singer-songwriter, Bradley Hanan Carter (pictured second from left), 33, is founder of Los Angeles sextet, NO which is celebrating the launch of its debut album El Prado with a tour at legendary West Hollywood club Troubadour.

Formerly of Grammy Award-nominated Steriogram, Carter started the Echo Park-based band in 2010. According to Los Angeles Times reporter August Brown, the new LP is “a moody but assured indie rock album about finding second chances to get it right in LA”.

“El Prado is a record about a time and place in LA,” Brown writes. “Yet the neighbourhood it evokes is different now than it was at the time [NO] wrote it. Echo Park rents are all but unaffordable for broke rockers. Young bands today are faster, drunker and scuzzier, or they aren’t bands at all – they’re laptop projects that emerge with fully-formed hit singles. Like the dance-punk coming from Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the early 2000s, El Prado documents a slice of a neighborhood’s musical life just as it’s becoming something else.

“‘We’ve got friends all around the world now, but there would be nights where I’d sit at home and be like “Man, I’ve got absolutely no friends tonight,”’ Carter said. ‘Eh, it is what it is. We really live here and never aligned ourselves with Echo Park to be fashionable or anything. We have a photo of Taco Zone on our album cover, but I’m sure if we started the band now the record would be about us living in Boyle Heights or something.’”

Original article by August Brown, Los Angeles Times, March 8, 2014.

Photo by Genaro Molina.