http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2010/03/best-of-whats-next-a-weather.html
(click here to listen to Everyday Balloons while you read)
Hometown: Portland, Ore.
Album: Everyday Balloons
Band Members: Aaron Gerber (vocals, guitar), Aaron Krenkel (guitar), Lou Thomas (bass), Sarah Winchester (vocals, drums)
For Fans Of: Iron & Wine, Sun Kil Moon, Feist
“I’ve never really been interested in storytelling,” says Aaron Gerber, the co-frontman and songwriter for Portland quartet A Weather. “I tend not to like to hear people tell stories. I much prefer a dialogue between two people than one person telling about a thing that happened to them.”
This kind of dialogue is just what we find on A Weather’s sophomore LP, Everyday Balloons (out now). Gerber’s deep whisper is met by the airy croon of drummer/vocalist Sarah Winchester, the pair’s melodic pillow talk exposing the glory of the mundane, the soft beauty of the ordinary. Avoiding melodrama at all costs, the record is marked with the subtleties of everyday life: its quiet questions (“Oh my word, is it enough? All my words, are they enough?”), fears (“If the routines will fail I’m worried that I will fail as well”), encouragement (“Hey don’t sweat the little stuff”) and simple affirmation (“You’ve touched me and that’s enough”).
Gerber’s understated poetry offers a peek into the bedroom in which he holed up one Portland winter to write the record. Though grounded in specificity—in bobby pins and underwear and alarm clocks and lint—the lyrics’ images are quilted together to make a record that could have been written in almost any bedroom in any apartment in any city. Its details are your own, or anyone’s.
“I like songs or poems or writing where you feel like there’s something real going on but you don’t know what it is,” Gerber says. “ […] That’s what I’m trying to do.”
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