Music

The Airborne Toxic Event

About This Incoming! Artist

When the Airborne Toxic Event took the stage at Spaceland in Silver Lake on January 31st of 2008, the 400-capacity venue was a madhouse. It was the final night of the band's five-week residency at the legendary Eastside venue, and all that month they were busy self-recording their first full-length album at a friend's home studio.

For the past week their song, "Sometime Around Midnight," had unexpectedly been played again and again on KROQ, the biggest rock radio station in the world. The highly respected Indie 103.1 had suddenly started playing it too.

It quickly became the most requested song on both stations, despite the fact that it had no "chorus" or "hook." The song was essentially a poem set to music describing the desperate inner monologue of a man seeing a lost love at a bar with someone else. One critic described it as Leonard Cohen backed by the Jesus and Mary Chain.

At the time, the band had no label, no manager, no publicist, no radio promoter, and no distribution. In fact, both stations were spinning an un-mastered mp3 of the song, barely three weeks after it had been recorded.

That night onstage, the conversation between singer Mikel Jollett and guitarist Steven Chen went something like this:

Chen: "This is really fu**ing strange."

Jollett: "Yes. It is."

The Airborne Toxic Event are neither icons, nor saviors, nor pop stars, nor disinterested hipsters. They're just a group of friends traveling from place to place, playing oddly redemptive songs, written during some oddly painful times.