Turn Me On: The Record Company

For his latest entry in our Turn Me On category, KCSN 88.5 FM’s Jim Nelson profiles the Record Company…
Three seconds.
That’s about all it took.
The unrelenting, circular bass line that sends The Record Company’s Off the Ground into a sick, deep groove, got me in about three seconds. It could have been the slide that bassist Alex Stiff employs to stylistically connect his nine repeating notes, or perhaps it was the whole of that indefatigable circular riff that got me, but even before drummer Marc Cazorla and singer/guitarist Chris Vos join in I was hopelessly hooked.

Vos was “trying to capture a Hound Dog Taylor-esque sound on the slide guitar” when he added his “old junky lap steel guitar” to Off the Ground. A full year before its national release via Give it Back to You, their debut full-length CD, Off the Ground began getting noticed from its use in a spring 2015 Miller Lite commercial.

Started in Stiff’s living room in LA’s artist-friendly Los Feliz neighborhood, The Record Company doesn’t make you dig excessively deep to find their main influences. It was John Lee Hooker’s and Canned Heat’s 1971 double-disc Hooker ’N Heat record that initially prompted Vos to write some songs for the trio to record, and the frontman will cop to carrying plenty of blues in their songs, with an early rock & roll vibe. “We aim to make the speakers move with our recordings.”

Four-plus years after Vos, Stiff, and Cazorla first played together they still create all their music in the same living room where they first hung up a few mics and went for it.
But they long ago busted outta Los Angeles in a big way; thanks to a pair of early EPs The Record Company have already played the Montreal Jazz Festival, Milwaukee’s Summerfest, the Quebec City International Summer Festival, and the Harvest Jazz and Blues Festival, and they’ve shared stages with B.B. King, Grace Potter, Trombone Shorty, Buddy Guy, The Wood Brothers, and Social Distortion, among others; their recordings, meanwhile, have been heard in multiple commercials, and TV shows like Shameless, Nashville, and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation; and now that Give it Back to You is out The Record Company is all over the airwaves too.

In fact, three seconds was about all it took for stations in the Adult Album Alternative radio format to make Off the Ground one of the nation’s most-played songs.
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Links
Official site: https://therecordcompany.net/
Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/therecordcompany/tracks
Video: https://therecordcompany.net/news.html#video