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OKP: Tell me about “Crimson Revival.”
OKP: Tell me about “Crimson Revival.”

First Look: The London Souls Give Psychedelic Rock A Fresh Coat On "Crimson Revival" [Song Premiere + Exclusive Interview]

Lenny Kravitz, Grace Jones, Lauryn Hill, Lion Babe, Thundercat, SZA & More Rock The Afropunk Festival 2015 in Brooklyn, NY.

The London Souls Photographed by Eddie Pearson for Okayplayer.

Until last night, The London Souls had never actually performed in London. Born and bred within New York City’s rich musical culture, the duo comprising guitarist Tash Neal and drummer Chris St. Hilaire cut their first record in their namesake city, but plugging in and performing for an English audience was crossed off their to-do list only hours ago. An American band with a British name--yes it’s a small surprise. But then it only takes five minutes with Neal and St. Hilaire to realize that the group has a talent for knocking down expectations.

The band’s journey began in an early-aughts Manhattan, ground zero for a much-hyped rock renaissance at the hands of The Strokes, The White Stripes and Yeah Yeah Yeahs. But for Neal and St. Hilaire, things go much deeper than that. Growing up, home collections of jazz and Spanish folk were guiding their sonic journeys and at school the hip-hop of the mid 1990s was opening their minds to even more rhythmic possibilities. “So by the time rock and roll reemerged in the early 2000s, we had already found what we wanted to do,” St. Hilaire said.

What they were doing was writing more and practicing harder than anyone else around. Neal and St. Hilaire first met in 2002 while still in their teens and quickly recognized a shared commitment to the music. Songs came quickly, as did other bandmates, but since at least 2008 the heart of The London Souls has been the guitarist and drummer. “A lot of clowns ‘figured their lives out’ while they were with us. We just kept at it,” St. Hilaire said. As the years passed the duo honed their craft into a strain of blues that sways beneath delicate vocal harmonies and a keen sense of melody. The two men have spent most of their adult lives together as a band.

Now, The London Souls’ dedication is paying off in spades. Neal and St. Hilaire have formed a bond that players twice their age rarely reach and the band’s live show is like a fire—bright, hot and unpredictable. Neal flirts back and forth between rhythm and lead guitar lines, channeling both Jimmy Page and the gypsy verve of Django Reinhardt. St. Hilaire, for his part, is a bombastic, airtight drummer who’s somehow found the ability to croon out delicate vocal lines even as his hands are busy bringing his instrument to the brink of demolition. The London Souls play the hell out of their songs, but never show off or strut. The band is living proof that under all of rock’s image obsession and past its half-baked revolutions, there’s still some real music to be found.

On a blustery spring day in New York City Okayplayer sat down with with The London Souls to talk about their inspirations, frustrations, and wild stories from the road. Click through to get familiar with the two souls that make up London Souls--and get to know their muscular psychedelic sounds via the Okayplayer premiere of their infectious song "Crimson Revival."

Lenny Kravitz, Grace Jones, Lauryn Hill, Lion Babe, Thundercat, SZA & More Rock The Afropunk Festival 2015 in Brooklyn, NY.

OKP: Where did the music start, for you both?

Chris St. Hilaire: I think we just listened to people who are good. When I was learning how to play drums, I figured out that the drum set was something I’d like to utilize to express myself. So I asked “Who’s good at that?” It wasn’t about what was cool or trendy. Who are the good people at this instrument?

I’d listen to jazz drummers like Buddy Rich, Elvin Jones, Max Roach—they inspired my hugely. I kind of got into it through some of the rock and roll drummers. I’d listen to Ginger Baker and John Bonham and there was something about their playing that held more.

And I went into that and pursued that and dug deeper and found he was inspired by these jazz and funk drummers. The Meters and James Brown. Then I thought “Who are they listening to?” And just followed it further back and arrived at people like Elvin Jones and Max Roach. That, to me, tapped into the root of what drumming is at its best. As an expression. That’s still what inspires me to play.

Tash Neal: For me it was about playing guitar when I was a kid. My parents are musicians. There was music in my house and I just heard every kind of it and had an appreciation for it. When I was growing up in the neighborhood there’d be Spanish music playing, and it had rhythm. I listened to hip-hop as that was happening in New York in the '90s. By the time of the rock and roll reemergence of the early 2000s—unfortunately that was when we were teenagers.

CSH: We had already found what we wanted to do, musically, by then. We’d found our voices and thought “That stuff’s kind of wack, compared to what we like.” We were already writing songs and digging into melody and harmonies.

OKP: As musicians, you seem more focus on building up your sound than scaling it back.

TN: And that’s what, for us, is the idea of us playing together. Playing as a duo. As a musician he trusts himself on the drums and I trust myself on the guitar. It’s a matter of expression—we don’t need to add to that.

OKP: Can you describe your writing process?

TN: It’s always been about expression through the song. It wasn’t a formula thing. We’d hear all sorts of great songs from people like Hank Williams to obvious cats like Carol King and Motown. Great songs.

CSH: I think it starts—the songwriting process is such an intense thing. It has to start from the simplest possible thing. The melody and the changes. Usually one of us will have a song and foundation for it written already. And then when it comes to tracking it, for the last record, we built on it based on our tastes and feel. But the song was already there, it’s not like the song was made in the studio.

So it was there either on piano or guitar—one of us would just show the other the basic idea. And we love rhythmic ideas, we love hip-hop rhythms and funk syncopation. Taking a very melodic idea can be the foundation of it, but the track itself might evolve into something extremely rhythmic and syncopated and layered.

TN: When we were kids coming up we’d already heard all of that. The resurgence—when we get compared to rock bands post 2000s, that resurgence for me was of something from the '80s, but the '90s had had hip-hop. And people started ignoring the other aspects—it just wasn’t swinging.

I appreciate the rock & roll thing and I like the resurgence to an extent. It felt great to see the Strokes and think about having bands again. But anything having to do with melody is great. And I don’t want to disparage that. But at the same time they were talking about deep influences and I didn’t hear that in the rhythms. I did not hear James Brown or Astrud Gilberto, or that musicality within these artists.

OKP: Take us even further back, then.

TN: Well, when I was 14, I had been already playing guitar for a few years. I didn’t know about classic rock— I grew up in a household with the Temptations playing. My parents had listening to loads of Marvin Gaye. Then I heard Nirvana and thought “Oh, that’s cool.” And I liked the fact that it’s rhythmic. That spoke to me, but nothing else about it did.

After that I found out who Hendrix was, and I thought “Shit.” I knew how people were. You couldn’t be black and have a guitar without being called Jimi. It was “Hootie” first, in the '90s. That’s how people are. And then it was Kravitz—whoever the most non-threatening Black guitarist is at the time.

I knew that at 14. So I knew I couldn’t play a strat, because I didn’t want to appear like that. Now, nothing much has changed.

OKP: How do you feel that black guitarists get pigeonholed today?

Lenny Kravitz, Grace Jones, Lauryn Hill, Lion Babe, Thundercat, SZA & More Rock The Afropunk Festival 2015 in Brooklyn, NY.

TN: Well I still get “Voodoo Child!” yelled at me at shows.

CSH: It happens all the time.

C: Because I’m black and I play guitar and I might have some soul.

OKP: Tell me about “Crimson Revival.”

TN: It started with a good melody and always seemed like a good song. It hasn’t gotten old—that’s how you know.

CSH: It’s a simple tune, but the melody is cool and the chorus harmony is great. Putting piano into the end was a cool texture that we hadn’t originally thought of. Rhythmically it’s kind of a Beatles kind of thing. That’s some Ringo Starr thing. It all comes from that kind of rhythmic of rhythm and blues. The song itself it could have been arranged any way and could have worked.

OKP: You’re only two guys with four hands and two voices. Do those limitations feed into your songwriting process very much?

CSH: I don’t think it affects the songwriting at all, but it does affect our live interpretation of it. If we have a song that wasn’t written in a duo format but we bring it to that, we make the most music we can with that.

Musically where we’re coming from is informed by so many layered things. Thing come out with using our basic instrument. We’ll think on how we can put a horn line into the vocal parts. That limitation affects how we interpret the songs, but it doesn’t effect the writing. In the studio you can go endless places to it. The writing happens on acoustic guitar and piano a lot.

OKP: What are your best touring stories?

Lenny Kravitz, Grace Jones, Lauryn Hill, Lion Babe, Thundercat, SZA & More Rock The Afropunk Festival 2015 in Brooklyn, NY.

CSH: Well, we went from Honk Kong to Shenzhen, a city in mainland China. Because of all the immigration issues getting across we had to get visas. We had a chartered bus to get us across. No guide and the driver spoke no English at all and was driving like a maniac. At the festival we play he crashes into a car that has an infant in it. So we need another way to get into the festival because the police show up and it’s a total fiasco.

We get to he festival and it’s sweltering hot and we set up for soundcheck and the stage is on an island in the middle of a lake. We had to walk across a catwalk to get to the stage. But it was cool, we played the show as a duo and people were across the lake on the grass flipping out. The response was incredible. We didn’t have our own gear or ideal stuff, but we were just playing our asses off and people understood and got it. Then in the third song a freak monsoon rolls in and completely soaks the stage—and almost electrocutes us.

TN: We realize we have to run off the stage...

CSH: Cymbals are blowing away and we’re on a lake. We pack up and we get across the catwalk into a little artists’ room. WE make it there and it’s everybody who was at the show, and it’s like the record stopped.

Soaking wet Chinese people come running at us freaking out. We get approached by this guy who’s representing the mayor of the city. He said that he wanted to meet us and was checking out the festival when it poured. They have him cordoned off in a little corner, we walk over and meet he mayor of Shenzhen—a city of 10 million people. The press is there and it’s like “American Band Meets Mayor of Shenzhen,” and he’s got a translator because he doesn’t speak any English. And then there was a whole line of young Chinese girls waiting to take pictures with us. One mother comes and takes a photo with her infant child. Meanwhile we’d never been there before but they loved that we were an American band.

Then we went and partied in a local Shenzhen club as the only non-Chinese people. They had a local band playing covers with Hawaiian shirts and B-52 haircuts. Weird hip Chinese people—gamblers and armed guards.

TN: I got wrapped into a blackjack game, and I didn’t know it was real money.

CSH: This old Chinese gangster sponsored his games and said “You’re going to win me 1000s of dollars!” But I kept losing and thinking he was going to kill me. But the first time I won he hugged me and I was shouting “I fucking love you man, we did it!” He was yelling in Chinese. It was great.

OKP: Where’s the road ahead taking you?

CSH: All over the states. We might go back to China in May. Trying to make more music—we’re always writing but we’re excited to make more records. We’ve been touring with these new songs already, so we’re excited to move on and get these out and keep going.

I feel freedom in how quickly and musically we could work as just the two of us [when a 3rd member left a couple years ago]. I’m excited to continue exploring that and making more records. We haven’t had that much time to do it. I’m proud of it and I love what we did, but I’m also ready to try new stuff. There’s so much that we’ve tapped into and just haven’t yet explored fully, musically. I think it’s more about potential with us now.

TN: Everytime we hit the stage, it’s an opportunity to be musical. I prefer to be play in the moment, inspired to follow something new. That’s the beauty of it all.