It’s a bright spot

Music Row
By Brian Rademaekers

Over the last year, The Cobbs have emerged as one the best Philly live acts, a reputation bolstered by their recent national tour with Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. The band’s 2007 self-released album, Sing The Deathcapades, a psych-tinged garage-rock homage to late-night debauchery, proved that the five-piece has the chops for the studio, too.
Now it looks as if the creative minds behind The Cobbs are further enriching the local indie-rock scene via Sunshine Recorder, a side project by drummer Chris Coello.
In Sunshine Recorder, Coello swaps his usual duties in the rhythm section for a role as the lead guitar, songwriter and vocalist. To date, Coello has largely featured himself in the half-dozen or so Sunshine Recorder tracks on tape, but playing live with him are Cobbs front men Paul and Ryan Cobb, Michael Prince (of Bottom of the Hudson) on guitar, and Chris Doyle.
Given that Coello has been recording his own songs since his early teens and headed the rock three-piece Deaf Tiger, a Cobbs offshoot was in some ways inevitable.
In his latest incarnation, the Northern Liberties beat-master stays true to the loose-garage spirit and blissful haze of his previous and current projects, but also heads into some newer, freakier territory with Sunshine Recorder.
As the name might suggest, Coello generally ups the Love Factor in his recordings with Sunshine Recorder, channeling ’60s-style dreamy pop psychedelics superbly on numbers like With You — a wandering song filled with lush ambience, rhythmic chanting and pleasantly blurry guitar work.
Others, like Comedown all Around, take the psych weirdness a bit further with a dose of shimmering guitar worthy of Animal Collective spliced with occasional and murmured vocals drifting in somewhere behind all the happy noise.
Those tracks aside, other releases from Coello show that a narrow Sunshine Recorder sound has yet to be defined.
Scarecrow, a soft ballad wrapped in affectionate warmth and carried along by incessant keyboard plunking, contains a far more concrete singer-songwriter implication. No Sugar is a hard-driving thrash more reminiscent of the dark, edgy garage rock of The Cobbs and evokes a wholly different range of emotions than Sunshine Recorder’s dreamier pieces.
However Coello chooses to dish out his medicine, though, he displays a taste for cool, addictive rock with many intriguing layers to peel back. In this sense, the Sunshine Recorder project is yet another testament to Coello’s unfailing creativity and his ability to express it beyond The Cobbs.
With any luck, both bands will continue their forward momentum and keep injecting the Philly scene with their energetic creations.
This Saturday will see Sunshine Recorder play their debut show at the Khyber in Old City, with more dates set for this spring. In the meantime, Coello is working toward boiling down his homespun tracks, cleaning them up, and shopping for a label.
While this band is just starting to find its way and taking those formative steps, look for plenty more goods to come as 2008 unfolds.
Sunshine Recorder will also be sharing the stage with Gildon Works, a Philly five-piece that has worked in the studio with The Cobbs on past albums. Their mix of harmonious vocals and luxuriantly crafted backdrops make them perfect allies for Sunshine Recorder at the band’s first show. ••

Check it out . . .

Who: Sunshine Recorder
What: The latest project from Cobbs drummer Chris Coello.
Where: The Khyber, 2nd and Chestnut streets, Old City.
When: Saturday, March 1, at 9 p.m. Tickets are $8.