Les Biches

A ringing guitar motif announces The Mysteries, the first full-length album by the LA-based band Les Biches. As the instrumentation rises and falls against these bell-like notes, it becomes apparent that this is something tangible, something that punches through the noise.
“True animus at intervals apart,” sings principal songwriter and co-lead guitarist Keith Joyner. “So where do we start?”
We start right here. Or, perhaps, we start with the album’s cover image: a striking optical illusion in which a rock formation assumes the shapes of a human face in profile and an acoustic guitar.
Like that emerging rock formation, Les Biches is both solid and evolving. Begun as a pushback against what he perceived to be the arbitrary containers of “band” and “album,” the group initially consisted of Joyner and a rotating cast of collaborators. But over time, organically and perhaps inevitably, Les Biches coalesced into a band with a defined lineup that would record two EPs and, now, an album. And that lineup has a history. Joyner and bassist Chris Candelaria have played together for decades in the band Twinstar. And Candelaria, guitarist Dusty Starr, and drummer Kevin Pinnt comprised  of the 1990s psych-rock band Chihuahua. This shared history gives the impression that Les Biches, a relatively young band on paper, has been honing its chops since the last century. Yet there is something new and beguilingly precarious in the combination of Joyner and Candelaria with the other musicians.