Solo Clique

"Noodles and noodling have starved a lot of bands to death, of course: the classrooms at the Guitar Institute of Technological Technique are dizzy with musicians who couldn’t ever play anything with any meat on it. But Solo Clique are fortunately all self-taught suburban bedroom devotees—bassist Mike actually learned his instrument from his cool older sister—with about a decade of constant individual rehearsal for each of them. That gets them musicianship, not showoffmanship—a cockeyed take on pop that pointillates cute and catchy chord progressions into super-calculated technical workouts, making a Kinks open-chord chorus into a Can-style Krautrock curlicuealongside racks and cabinets containing the chord changes, off-time start-stops, flip-flop countermelodies, descending contrapuntal retardissimo choral alignments and punctuation marks for every verse that get put together like a moon-module each time Solo Clique needs to play a song. This Orange three-piece started out as an instrumental—maybe post-instrumental, since they didn’t sound anything like Ennio Morricone—exercise in the early 2000s, but that wasn’t using up enough brainpower, so they changed and changed and changed, dialing through about a hundred songs and tightening down into probably the poppiest head band in the county: harmony and melody at the limit of technique and attention-deficit, the kind of jittery little songs that’ll warm hearts and computer chips both." -O.C. weekly (chris ziegler)