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"Vensaire's video for "If" finds the Brooklyn five-piece soundtracking a man's hallucinogenic journey across time and space, through melting buses and star-studded valleys. It's confusingly contemplative, like a tab of acid in your afternoon tea." -- Ezra Marcus, Noisey
"Vensaire's video for "If" finds the Brooklyn five-piece soundtracking a man's hallucinogenic journey across time and space, through melting buses and star-studded valleys. It's confusingly contemplative, like a tab of acid in your afternoon tea." -- Ezra Marcus, Noisey
Vensaire is the band for a world where bands don't matter. In a culture lived on the internet and spoken in tongues of allusion and reference, the idea that a "band" in any traditional sense could be important is frightfully outdated. But this is the very void Vensaire was conceived in. Their music, a mystical concoction that spills over you in a wave of joy and longing, not only makes you dance, but ushers you along the path of reflection and growth. In this vein, Vensaire is the synthesis of five unique and disparate personalities three years in the making. Their debut will finally see the light of day with the concept album Perdix: a sweeping story of discovery and adventure based on Homer's Odyssey that crosses four continents before penetrating to the very heart of creation itself.
Vensaire formed in late 2011 between friends Alex LaLiberte (vocals/guitar) and Widowspeak's Robert Earl Thomas (guitars/vocals), whom first met while attending NYU. LaLiberte's childhood friend Hunter Hawes, Oberlin-trained drummer/percussionist Alex Jacobs, and Landlady co-founder Renata Zeiguer joined the two by the spring of 2012, when Vensaire was asked to play SXSW, without a recording to their name. The band returned to New York to continue recording their self-titled EP, which was released that September. On the strength of those five songs, Vensaire was able to entice Grammy winner Scott Colburn (Arcade Fire, Animal Collective, Prince Rama) into staying with some of the members in their Brooklyn apartment to record their first full-length album. Waiting patiently in the wing since 2012, and now ready for an April 15 release, Perdix is a finely crafted debut fusing Western pop and indie-rock with a wide range of international folk influences (the band has a large exotic instrument collection, including sitar, tablas, erhu, guzheng, and lots of percussion instruments from Zeiguer's father's home in Argentina and her mother's home in the Phillipines).
Perdix in some ways calls to mind the producer's discography. Vensaire aptly employs samples and electronic drums to augment the vocal and instrumental melodies at the heart of each song. What sets the band apart, however, is the complexity and variety of it's compositions. "See I'm You" builds from the reversed sample of a friend's voice into an anthemic pop gem. "Porteño" rides the exuberance of Spanish-style guitars and "Song 6" revels in gorgeous Asian-inspired strings. "Rose Cottage" is perhaps the most indicative of what Vensaire is capable of: a three-movement creation that rises above the simple looping structure of most sample-based songs, slowing to a delicate acoustic middle section before climaxing in resounding group vocals. Perdix ends as it began, allowing the record to be looped ad infinitum- yet another example of Vensaire's clarity of vision and execution.
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