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Jun 17, 2015 Talk in Tongues By Lily Moayeri Photography by Wendy Lynch Redfern

It has been less than a year from inception to debut album release for Los Angeles group Talk In Tongues. The foursome—vocalist McCoy Kirgo, guitarist Garrett Zeile, bassist Waylon Rector, and drummer Bryan DeLeon, all of whom are involved in the songwriting—recorded their first song, the well-received swirling dreamfest “Still Don’t Seem to Care” the day after they played their first gig, and released it the week after. The single, recorded at Zeile’s home studio in the satellite city of Thousand Oaks, gained traction immediately. This gave Talk In Tongues, who had formed only weeks prior to their first show, little time to get settled into being a band.

“We were just getting to know each other,” says Zeile, sitting at a trendy café in impossibly white Converse high tops and a red backwards baseball cap, and looking a little windblown by the hyper speed at which this musical endeavor has taken off. “We went right into making the record. We benefitted in a way because there’s something to be said for not overthinking it, just getting in there and doing it.”

The band’s label head and producer, Kevin Augunas of Fairfax Recordings, refined the self-titled album at the label’s studios, which took over the famed Sound City Studios (Fleetwood Mac, Nirvana) in Los Angeles in 2012. The storied space is well-suited to Talk In Tongues’ retro-leaning psychedelic rock, which shares Tame Impala’s astral-projected emotion and Temples’ mystical hallucinations—groups that Talk In Tongues are delighted to be likened to. “We love and respect both bands,” says Zeile. “I’m flattered when we’re compared to them.” In fact, “Still Don’t Seem to Care” was taken to Claudius Mittendorfer for mixing, specifically because of his work on Temples’ “Colours to Life.” The group’s musical tastes are represented by DeLeon’s Talk In Tongues playlist on Spotify, which includes Can, Blood Orange, Jamie xx, Primal Scream, and Classixx.

Despite ages ranging from 18 to 22, all members have had stints in other bands. Nothing of too much note, although Rector and DeLeon had a turn playing in the New Wave-sounding Kitten. The two replaced musicians who had split off to form Fidlar. Meanwhile Zeile started toying with recording from the age of 12 with the support of his parents, pro baseball player Todd Zeile and Olympic-medal-winning gymnast Julianne McNamara. Since that time Zeile has honed his studio skills and accumulated enough gear to fill a warehouse.

“The only thing that was a little bit of a struggle at the beginning was our live show,” says Zeile. You would never know it looking at Talk In Tongues’ gigography. To date the group has supported alt-J, Alvvays, Surfer Blood, and Phantogram, and been on the bill for festivals such as Noise Pop and SXSW. “We played one show, then we didn’t play a show again for three or four months and we had this record we had to reinterpret live. We had to become a really good live band as quickly as possible.”

Zeile’s passion for Talk In Tongues is tangible as he states, “This is the best thing I’ve ever been part of. We made a record we love.”

[Note: This article first appeared in Under the Radar’s April/May 2015 print issue, which is out now. This is its debut online.]

www.talkintonguesmusic.com