New Band of the Month: Nolita View

Ding! Ding! Ding! The votes are officially in, and the band that you ‘orrible lovely lot voted to win are Nolita View. The four-piece who dish out a mix of post-punk, indie, and maybe even a little funk that stands out amongst the crowd in the current climate, clearly stood out for all you Cultured Vultures out there.

So, as courtesy for your showing them your support, they were nice enough to catch up with us for a quick Q&A. If you voted for them, here’s your chance to get to know Your New Band of the Month a little better, and if you didn’t, well, have peruse, have a listen, and see for yourself why they are our deserved New Band of the Month for September. Give ’em a like on their Facebook too while you’re at it.

First of all, hello there, how do you do, and who are we talking to?
Hello – this is Alex, I play guitar in the band. There are four of us:  Tom Northeast (drums), Mike Clarke (bass/production) and Will Jacks (guitar/vocals)

Secondly, seeing as our dear readers voted you their Cultured Vultures New Band of the Month for September (congratulations by the way), I imagine they’d like to get to know you a little better. Tell us a little bit about yourselves, how did Nolita View come to be?
Thanks for including us. A few of us had played together previously but we started as Nolita View when Tom joined. We played our first gigs last summer and have been taking it from there. We also bought our own second hand mixing desk and have been self producing the tracks that are online.

You’ve got a distinctive sound that stands out quite a bit these days, and it seems to find itself somewhere between edgy and accessible. The result of a pretty eclectic music taste and musical influences from across the board?
Yeah, I’d say we have fairly eclectic tastes, some of us more than others.  There are bands we all enjoy listening to though like Talking Heads and The Replacements who we usually cite as influences. It took me a long time but I’ve started getting into Nick Cave lately after watching the documentary on him ‘20,000 Days on Earth’. I thought that was great.  Mike and I also went to see a band called Twin Peaks not too long ago and really enjoyed that.

Having covered the getting together and the influences, what about when it comes to the writing of the music. How do you approach that? As a band? Individually? A jam-based free for all?
It varies from song to song so all of the above really. It used to be fairly individual but lately we’ve taken a more spontaneous collective approach in the rehearsal room which is usually a bit more fun as everyone’s on board from the beginning.

You recently released your single ‘Departed’, how’s the reception been to that so far? Are there any other releases in the pipeline? EPs? Albums?
It’s been really good actually, beyond expectations. ‘Departed’ is part of a 3 track EP that’s been featured on quite a few websites and played on Amazing Radio & BBC 6. You can hear all three tracks on our SoundCloud page.

Now that we’ve got to know you a little better, maybe our readers and us want to come see you, where can we catch you live? Any dates coming up you can tell us about?
We are booking gigs for the Autumn so keep an eye on our Facebook/ Twitter pages for those. We’ve written 3 or 4 new tracks already so I think the plan is to record those fairly soon and we hope to include them in the set.

Are there any bands or artists you’d recommend need checking out? Anyone you’ve gigged with? Friends of yours?
In terms of new bands, I’d recommend Ought. I think they have an album coming out soon so we’ll be hoping to see them play around then.

Finally, we here at Cultured Vultures have our very own cultured vulture by the name of Voltaire, should you find a vulture to be especially cultured, what would you call it?
We’ll call our vulture Olivier please in the hope that Arsenal start scoring some more goals.