If you don’t like Jail Weddings, you don’t like music. The L.A. 10-piece takes all the whimsy of ’60s-era pop and doo wop, and fuses it with a ragged, punch-drunk swagger that’s pure rock & roll. Katya Hubiak and Jada Wagensomer’s angelic harmonies flank charismatic front man Gabriel Hart’s belted vocals while the band backs them with a wall of sound that would make Phil Spector proud.
The last time Jail Weddings came to town, they played a blistering set at the Casbah opening for helmeted oddity Bob Log III, and the show was one of the most exciting in San Diego in recent memory. If you missed it, fear not — the band will bring its soaring sound to the Soda Bar on Oct. 29.
The San Diego stop is in support of Jail Weddings’ debut full-length, Love Is Lawless, set for release next week as well. The album is a vivid dissection of a broken Hart — loneliness, self-loathing,and pessimism are all prominent — but the frontman’s wry humor and the band’s sugary sound make what could have been a bitter pill to swallow go down easy. The result is one of the year’s most exhilarating and infectious records, and an assured statement of purpose by one of L.A.’s most compelling groups.
Needless to say, Jail Weddings will have plenty of great material to play at their Soda Bar show, so don’t miss it. Mrs. Magician and Dreamboat will open, and you can buy your tickets here.

-Chris Maroulakos

Jail Weddings have taken on the burden of being the 10-member-deep spokespeople for this unique musical atmosphere. With the end of his post-Starvations project Fortune’s Flesh, singer/guitarist/songwriter Gabriel Hart has gathered like-minded adventurers (including fellow members of The Starvations, Flash Express, The Sun, Grand Elegance, Terrors, plus some noteworthy newcomers) to round out the line-up of his new outfit, which has mastered an updated take on the darker side of the ’60s pop/R&B/vocal corner with the unshakable swamp-punk leanings The Starvations were known for, all combined with the sheen of a certain grandiose mean-streak mutant torch song drama.

Amanda Jo Williams, Sweaters and Jail Weddings @ the Bootleg Theater.
There’s plenty to like on this local bill. Amanda Jo Williams laces her starry-eyed country with weirdness, and Sweaters rock with a familiar sort of comfort, thanks, largely to the soulful keyboard orchestrations. Headliners Jail Weddings have a new album, “Love Is Lawless,” and cause an old-fashioned ruckus. A 10-member band, Jail Weddings fleshes out its ’60s-era garage rock sound with call-and-response vocals, and arrangements that swing and vamp with equal fervor. The Bootleg Theater, 2220 Beverly Blvd. Tickets are $10.

There’s a way, way, way over-the-top passion (“unbridled,” as the rock critics would say) about Jail Weddings, that 10-person community of souls under the stewardship and throbbing warble of singer Gabriel Hart. The band’s buoyantly bombastic teen-trauma anthems run roughshod over that long-forgotten ’60s sound where Roy Orbison wailed like he was hurting so bad he was, well, he was just about ready to die! (Then there was Scott Walker’s after-the-fact kind of hurt, where he sang as if straitjacketed in a padded cell.) Jail Weddings’ brand-new Love Is Lawless (White Noise/Tru-Vow) is like that, to the 10th power – just such a big, fine mess of weepy, quavering, hiccupy hurtin’ hurt, plowed through with a way-tough punk rock theatricality and welcome good humor.

- John Payne

Took a minute, but there on the dusty shelves in the Buzz Bands archives is a copy of the Starvations’ 2003 “Get Well Soon,” whose dark bar-band swagger sounds pretty good to this day. The Starvations died of hunger back in ’05, but singer-guitarist Gabriel Hart, thankfully, lives on, even if his music seems to be aging in reverse — judging from “Love Is Lawless,” the debut album from his new outfit Jail Weddings. Abetted by female vocalists Jada Wagensomer and Katya Nadia Hubiak, Hart channels some Carl Perkins on this collection of kitchen-sink ’60s pop. The music is still boozy to the core, and I’d hate to pick up the bar tab for Jail Weddings’ 10-member ensemble, but in a time everybody seems to be rockin’ you back, you could do a lot worse.

Jail Weddings singer, guitarist and svengali Gabriel Hart spent the early part of the 2000s rejiggering the Gun Clubbed greaser anthems of his first band, the Starvations, through a couple line-up and name changes and some solo stints, along the way making some of the most underrated, moody garage rock of the decade. Partly due to those frequent changes and infrequent touring, his LA-based acts have remained a bit of a connoisseur’s delight, the kind that if you know them, you love them, but you’ll be alone in your admiration.

It’s not that Hart doesn’t have the songwriting chops or high melodrama in his poet’s lungs to match the Arcade Fire-ings of the increasingly Spector-ish indie rock terrain that gets a lot of play in, like, TV teen soap operas and lame dysfunctional family indie flicks. It’s just Hart’s sonic sensibility has always wallowed in a scruffy, sullied sadness that doesn’t lend itself to a gaggle of multicultural models prancing through a perfectly set-designed loft party or Target ad.

But here, on Jail Weddings debut full-length (after a few singles), Hart begins with a brief, sparse, slow-burn orchestral crescendo that feels more like a closing credits theme—perfect for Jail Weddings’ intentions of moving on from the gutter to the, well, secrets-buried backyard. The duet, “When We’re Together,” shifts the album into gear with a peppier pathos, a la some Neil Diamond–penned ’60s go-go kick. Hart lets the girls take the reigns on “Tough Love,” making like Nikki & the Corvettes gone sashaying over a termite-bitten boardwalk ’round sunset. Another kind of chase happens in “Somebody Lonely,” with Hart yearning towards a girl-group vibe ambling just ahead of his pace down a rainy street. There’s a lot of yearning on Love Is Lawless, but also a bolero’s bravado that, for all the broken hearts, dead lovers, faraway hopes, etc, can stick it out ’til the last dance.

For a cat that most likely broods awake at night, well past tipsy and figuring what to do with the trumpet in the mix the next afternoon, there are bound to be over-reaches. “Eavesdroppin’,” a lonely lament that lyrically calls for his lone voice and one sax wailing, could use some back-up vox to flesh it out—until tamborines and gal-vox rush comes flowing out and into the next tune, “Staring at the Stars,” a fine dramatic, horn-hopped tale about over-acting. Hart does still have a tendency to elongate his verbiage, fumbling his enunciation at times, but now has swell swelling femme “whoa-ohs” to weave the dented hearse back onto the right side of the blurry dotted lines.

And it really isn’t until the very last tune, “The Impossible,” that Hart and company grasp for that maudlin kitchen sink and overload the orchestral proceedings—not unlike a good opening credits theme—though 50% of it is still just vocals. The band is really adept at dropping in horn, piano and string bits that don’t sound too ostentatious. Somewhere Willy DeVille is smiling….

One would think there’s a Cinemascope epic or heist-gone-wrong B-yarn—or at least a CW drama—out there just waiting for Jail Weddings. Still, more Johnnie Ray than Jeff Buckley and more Detour than Douglas Sirk, Hart and his comrades may remain the connoisseur’s enamored secret.

-Eric Davidson

Haunted George and Jail Weddings opened, with the latter warming up for their record release show at The Bootleg on October 22, which will certainly feature a heavy dose of songs off the forthcoming Love Is Lawless. If you’re new to their old-timey-fused-with-new-timey brand of rock, you can check out the ten-piece’s latest video for “I Thought You Were Someone I Knew”, or my personal favorite, “I’m My Own Doctor”.

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This weeks Beat Of The Week is brought to you by Dan Falvey of FatCat Records.

Whilst bands like Vivian Girls heralded a new wave of acts influenced by Phil Spector’s song writing and production techniques, there have been very few that have sought to truly encapsulate his famous wall of sound and the densely layered, lush vocal melodies of the groups he produced. Enter Jail Weddings who actually sound like you might expect a Phil Spector produced band to sound if he could only man the mix desk from his own jail cell; dark, paranoid and fucked up but with all of the pop sensibilities that make 60’s girl bands such as The Crystals essential listening even today.

It would, however, be wrong to see them as simply a kitsch throwback band. I first heard of Jail Weddings in an interview with Cedric Bixler and whilst the musical output from the two frontmen is obviously very different, Gabriel Hart, the vocalist and songwriter for Jail Weddings shares the same desire to take risks as the Mars Volta man in both song writing and performance style. With lyrics so honest they make you cringe in recognition of times when “encounters like this one ultimately end with a kick in the nuts”; a line taken from one of my favourite songs of the last five years, their debut 7” “Somebody Lonely”. It’s tale of lonely desperation and sexual frustration in a downtown LA bar and it sounds like a coked up Roy Orbinson fronting the Shangri La’s for a soundtrack to a lost Martin Scorsese film.

In performance Hart’s whole body shakes like Elvis’ hips in the early years and he contorts his voice like an exorcism of the angst evident in his songs. He is backed up with the sun-drenched harmonies of the devastating duo Jada Wagensomer and Katya Nadia Hubiak, and a wrecking crew of a band that look and sound like they formed a tight bond over a night discussing each other’s previous misdemeanours and felonies.

Jail Weddings debut album “Love is Lawless” is out on the 26th October on White Noise/Tru-vow on CD/LP/Digital and I’m pretty psyched for it. My only wish is that one day the “Phil Spector/ Jail Weddings California State Prison Session” can happen. Now that would be one hell of a marriage.

(Sorry.)

Jail Weddings‘ 2009 EP, Inconvenient Dreams, has spent the last few months in constant rotation at the Owl and Bear offices, waiting defiantly for a new record to oust it from its spot at the top of our playlist. Picking up where Phil Spector and his wall of sound left off, Jail Weddings fuse doo wop, rockabilly, and soul into catchy, theatrical pop. It’s a disarming and seductive combination, which is why their EP has been getting such frequent play.

But now, at long last, an album has toppled Inconvenient Dreams from its throne, and wouldn’t you know — it’s another Jail Weddings record.

Set for release on October 12, Love Is Lawless is the Los Angeles band’s debut full-length, and it contains all the ballroom waltzes and barroom brawls we’ve come to expect. From the sublime “I Thought You Were Someone I Knew” to the cathartic “Somebody Lonely,” Love Is Lawless is not only a passionate tour de force, but a rollicking good time.

Lead singer Gabriel Hart was kind of enough to share his top influences with us (in no particular order). We’ve done a lot of Poetic Memory features here at Owl and Bear, but this has to be one of the most fascinating and revealing ones to date. Check it out, along with the video for “I Thought You Were Someone I Knew,” below.

2007: A wonderful woman I dated confessed to me after the first JW show that she wished “everyone in the club would go away so she could rape me”. This made me feel warm inside. I have been trying to clone that moment ever since.

Antonin Artaud – The Theatre and Its Double: His best known collection of manifestos that sought to sever the barrier between audience and performer. Contains one of my favorite quotes of all time: “And if there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames.”

1994: A mysterious white van that most likely had undercover cops inside had been spying on me and my friends all summer. It would pull up to where ever we were loitering and we would see a camera flash through the tinted window of the passenger side, as if we needed a reason to be even more paranoid than we already were. One day we were walking up to our friend Mitch’s house and we see that van coming right towards us. As it snapped another picture, it also ran over Mitch’s cat that was crossing the street. Like a fish out of water I watched it go through its death throes while doing its best impersonation of a blood fountain. This was the first time I saw something die right before my eyes. It made me realize how precarious life is and re-affirmed my hatred of authority.

2001: At a Chuck E Cheese somewhere in the Valley, “coming to” out of a particular alcoholic blackout, in which I found myself standing in front of a skee-ball game surrounded by a crowd of shrill, screaming children cheering me on. Still to this day I have no idea how I got there, but these kids loved me because I was just hucking the balls overhand into the holes and winning hundreds of tickets which they were grabbing greedily as they came out of the slot. Shortly thereafter I was escorted out. This moment ushered in my acute fear of youth.

2006: Finding out my girlfriend of 4 years had left me for another man, her unflinching excuse, “But Gabe, I WANT A FAMILY!!!” This made me realize that I indeed just could have been anybody, and that our unwavering instincts in our DNA sometimes trump anything sentimental.

Johnnie Ray: Reminds me that no matter how weird I look doing it, I am doing exactly what I am supposed to be doing.

The 10-piece Los Angeles band combines The Supremes, The Temptations and Elvis — and breaks all of their hearts. The sound is doo-wop and malt-shop bubblegum pop with a darker, gloomier outlook — something that would’ve brought kids to tears on American Bandstand. It doesn’t match the feel-good manifesto of The Shakedown. But the music is too damn good to miss. Plus, with 10 bodies on stage, it’s less a show and more of a party — the one all the kids who didn’t get picked to dance attend. – MAX PLENKE