From the MaxSounds Vault…

Birdy Bardot – The Casbah, San Diego – Feb. 24, 2016

I won’t pretend to know how all the members of local super-group, Birdy Bardot, are interrelated.  It seems that every San Diego musician of note is in at least 3 bands and this group has collected many of them together. I do know that the creative duo in the group are Birdy Bardot, who also sings for the New Kinetics, and the indefatigable Al Howard, who must be in at least 27 bands including: The Heavy Guilt, Midnight Pine and Black Sands, and more…

I have wanted to catch Birdy Bardot ever since I read a great feature on them late last year in CityBeat magazine.  It was only after reading that article that I went to my first New Kinetics shows and I was curious to know how the same singer would front both the frenetic garage rock of The New Kinetics and the retro/psychedelic influence promised in the CityBeat piece. 

It turns out that Ms. Bardot handles both styles with ease and though there is not a lot of overlap in sound, she does seem to lose herself in the songs in both configurations.  Where the New Kinetics are all about raw, relentless energy, Birdy Bardot is a much more restrained affair.  Though the group does let go and rock out, like on the track “Hearts and Smoke”, it’s really just enough to provide a contrast to the soulful, torchy atmosphere created throughout the rest of the set. 

The 7 pc band (which is a lot of players on a pretty small stage) creates a sound and mood on stage that mixes a lot of influences without ever camping out in any one style.  There are touches of the blues, hazy psychedelia, retro-60′s pop and even some alt-country.  Mixed together, Birdy Bardot – both the band and the singer – put on a fantastic show and will clearly be a mainstay of the resurgent San Diego music scene, and hopefully can find a way to break out and receive more national, and even international, attention.

Check out Birdy Bardot and her label-mates at Redwoods Music/Birdy Bardot