White Like Fire comes back strong
White Like Fire, the Pittsburgh power-pop band that made its way to SXSW last year by winning the SonicBids JanSport Battle of the Bands, is back this week with a new EP, “Wait the Night Out,” that sounds as radio ready as anything that comes out of this city.
In fact, it’s hard to imagine a label not being able to turn “You Gave Up on Me” into a hit. It even comes with a video shot in the snowy woods that has them looking like Mumford and Sons.
White Like Fire has roots in Shippensburg, where brothers Tyler and Blake Clawson grew up, but it started in an Oakland basement in 2010 when singer/bassist Tyler was in his freshman year at the University of Pittsburgh.
The band released its first EP in 2012 and followed that last year with “Apocalyptic” and the trip to SXSW.
Since then, they’ve been busy. They wrote 100 songs over the summer and then went into the studio with Jason Shaffer at Full Tilt Recordings and Kyle “Slick” Johnson, whose engineering/production credits include Modest Mouse, Joey Ramone and Rogue Wave. They also went from a trio to a quintet, adding Hammond organs, farfisa, mandolin and other instruments.
“We were inspired by gospel/folk artists from Appalachia — Kilby Snow, Osborne Brothers — to explore what makes their music so haunting and emotive,” says Blake Clawson. “At the same time we got really into the Zombies, The Animals, Tommy James and the Shondells and other groups from the early to mid ’60s that were inspired by the same numbers, and fused that sound with Soul and rock ’n’ roll.”
“You Gave Up on Me,” he says, was intended as a song “defiant to those who have given up on all of us” and the goal was “capture raw emotions held by raw people [on] raw instruments.”
White Like Fire has two more videos, for “Crimson” and “Stand Off,” coming soon, and on the marketing side, the band has partnered with LA PR firm The Planetary Group, and the Pirates and Root Sports are using a song they wrote for them in the opening sequence to many of the broadcast home games.
White Like Fire plays the Smiling Moose, South Side, at 6:30 p.m. Friday with Cold Fronts, Made Violent and William Forrest. Tickets $10; all ages.