October 30-November 5, 2003

music

Welcome Back

NEW TRIP: (l-r) Ostrander, Morpurgo, Lyons and Bernstein put their best foot forward with Welcome to the Middle. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

Longtime Philly rockers get another shot at the big leagues in Laguardia.

by A.D. Amorosi

Laguardia is an anomaly given today's glut of goonish garage bands and strutting new new-wavers. Its members are old friends, deliciously melodic songwriters and tautly wound instrumentalists. They turn chic, sleek electronica into a growling guitar-garage for a raw, glistening sound. When you hear Welcome to the Middle (Republic), you might think The Who meets The Cars or Blondie meets Nirvana. You may not think of Dandelion and Trip 66, the two prominent Philly bands from which Laguardia draws its genes.

Oh, the incest thing? jokes bassist Mike Morpurgo, 32, of Laguardia's hillbilly lineage. I claim responsibility for being the inbreeder. Morpurgo was in the righteously rugged Dandelion from its 1989 inception. Drummer Greg Lyons was in the mischievously melodic Trip 66. Both bands were on Sony, and Lyons often found his band opening for Morpurgo's.

Dandelion split in '96. The Trip split in '97, says Morpurgo. Sometime during all this, several Trippers started the raucous pop-leaning Ty Cobb, a band Josh Ostrander joined as keyboardist about the same time drummer Lyons was leaving it. Guitarist brothers Ryan and Lee Bernstein joined. Then Lyons came back and Ryan Bernstein left. But by 2000, they were Laguardia anyway. If you don't get it -- you ask them.

It's a nice family affair, says Morpurgo of his Bucks County brethren.

Nothing really has changed except the hotels are a lot nicer, says Lee Bernstein.

And our haircuts got cooler, adds Lyons.

Laguardia seemed obvious, says Ostrander, 23, of making the band. We made beautiful music together. We're four guys with good taste, no egos, no attitudes. We checked all that at the door three years ago, he says.

But I do hate the fact that they are all so damned young and good-looking, says Morpurgo, stifling a chuckle.

Tunes like Butterfly and Cuba -- found first on Laguardia's self-released EP -- survived from the band's 2000 start to find a place in Middle's mix of raging power chords and shimmery keyboards and its subtle balance of balladry and balls-out rock moodily maintained by producer Brad Wood (of Tortoise).

Making Middle the way they wanted means Ostrander's lead vocals have an up-front presence. He calls the approach clean, dry, no effects -- an attempt to reproduce their gutsy live show on tape. I hate going to see a band who can't play its songs the way I'm accustomed to hearing them on record.

Every detail of Middle was considered in preproduction, a lost art of record-making that maps out the pacing of its moody melodies and graceful grooves. That's the best part of being in a band, says Ostrander of the way songs he wrote were screwed with and honed in the studio.

The hermetically sealed roar and savage electricity is more reminiscent of Wood's take on Tortoise, not dullards like Liz Phair or Sunny Day Real Estate. But it's Laguardia's momentum of absolute abandon that makes Middle. The track-creasing improvisation of Ostrander's accordion on Bull Ride, Wood's saxophone on Sleepover, the drum-only backing for Butterfly and tricky key and chorus changes on Holy Ghost and Duct Tape give the album the feel of a live and loose rave-up. Rather than discuss or describe the heartache, vindictiveness or vindication behind Sensation or Sex, or Laguardia's overall use of surprisingly soft sounds on ballads like Bull Ride and Cuba, Ostrander is secretive.

I won't go into lyrics, what they're about, where they stem from, why we did what song a certain way with a certain softness. That's private. What he will say is that his favorite song on Middle is Butterfly -- a high-school-written tune familiar to old fans but whose tones and tunefulness changed in its current recording. I was really sick of playing that song, he says. But we wound up finding a new way into it, something dark and spooky. That totally saved that song for me.

Along with reinstating old Trip 66 beats for new tunes like Roseanna (That's for the die-hards amongst our fans, says Ostrander), Laguardia has made a debut disc that shouts out to its own once-major-labeled past, while it introduces their oldest listeners to something mischievously melodious and mirthfully moody.

Laguardia plays Thu., Oct. 30, 9 p.m., $10, with The Starlight Mints and The Preston School of Industry, The Khyber, 56 S. Second St., 215-238-5888.