'Ferndalian' Awesome Fest in Detroit

Oblisk guitarist Asim Akhtar spots a long-haired, yellow-shirted cyclist whizzing by his apartment.

"That guy probably has an album out, too, he's probably in a band," the songwriting Ferndale resident quips. "Any block I go down, I think I'm gonna see someone whose spitting out some music."

"I just moved here," Phantom Cats guitarist Niklaus Landstrom said. "I did not realize how large a fragment of the 'Detroit music scene' actually lives in Ferndale."

This month's F*cking Awesome Fest (FAF) at Detroit's Majestic Theatre will feature a slew of bands, many of them of notable nationwide acclaim, including Shabazz Palaces, Ty Seagull, YACHT and more, but the pillars of the lineup and many of the opening acts are some of your neighbors — if you're a Ferndale resident.

Meet a few of the Ferndale-connected bands

that thrives in both atmospheric and propulsive sensibilities of song craft, churning out a reverb-heavy tremble.

Phantom Cats is an energetic, juking punk-pop quartet with operatic lead vocals and plenty of growling feedback.

Pupils ain't prog-rock (even if its members craft their songs similarly to the incorrigibly heady jams of those arty composers) — nay, it's got a grimier and intriguingly meandering rock sound. Its throaty howls and imposing rhythms are nicely fuzzed at its edges and spiced with coaxing hooks.

K.I.D.S. was the "simple pop song" project born from the ashes of Silverghost, exploring elements of psychedelic bubble-gum struts and sun-dried new-wave grooves.

GLOSSIES takes power-pop and quaffs in a beguiling blend of baroque, surf, minimalist noise and classic indie-rock valor and spits it out via "deliberate stream of consciousness."

Here's a little more for you

Oblisk is wrapping up recording for its third LP, City Squares. The quartet caught the ear of producer Chris Koltay (renowned for his engineering and mixing work for bands such as Deerhunter and TV On The Radio) and has been piecing together a "more of an album-listening experience," Akhtar said.

"This is our first time not doing it DIY," he said. "Vocals are different, compared to me doing it in my room at 3 a.m., plus I'm not used to being around nice gear." 

The band hopes to get its LP out before the end of the year.

GLOSSIES' debut album almost got scrapped when main man Scott Masson grew frustrated with a string of botched mastering attempts. Then again, the album — having been somewhat mashed together like juxtaposing puzzle pieces of pop-song chunks — "is supposed to sound bizarre, to begin with; really explosive parts followed by really quiet parts," Masson said.

The streaming of his lyrical and structural consciousness will likely subside as Masson, originally a "solo" songwriter on this current venture, brings in a full band. "I'm giving the band skeletal songs to develop together. But this time, I wanna make a stripped-down, raw rock 'n' roll record where you can play it at a barbecue with some jocks."

Oh?

"I'm aiming for making Sports II (a la Heuy Lewis)," said Masson.

Longtime Ferndalian Deleano Acevedo had a notebook full of songs penned in the wake of Silverghost breaking up last year. He hunkered down and wrote two dozen more songs, eventually recording an EP and releasing the debut of K.I.D.S. via Detroit-based Beehive Recording Co.

The band's name is an acronym that changes almost every other time a new listener discovers it — it's up to them, Acevedo said, to make up an up-to-the-minute editorial. "Kissing In Daffodil Sun" or "Kicking It Dungeon Style" — or, here, I'll make one: Kinetic Introspective Develops Surrealism.

"I really grew as a songwriter through Silverghost," said Acevedo, who said he's looking to return to Ferndale this year after recently moving to Detroit. "There's post-breakup songs, songs about my surroundings. They're on the poppier-catchier side, since I've been focusing on melody, but the live sound is more edgy and dirty, with no synth. I wanted the live sound to be more rock or punk versions of that poppier sound."

K.I.D.S. has not yet played even half a dozen shows — but the songs, and the members, are in place, he said.

Pupils is a band that's accelerating, said Steve Puwalski, who re-emerges from a stylistic chrysalis every few months. "We're working on a full length now, but these songs are already developing a different sound, even while or before we're recording them.

"We have an EP out, recorded by Jeff Spatafora, who performs in other Ferndale bands like DevilFish and Crappy Future," Puwalski said. "But the five-song batch is more just a snapshot, an indicative sound of the birth of what this band is."

Puwalski is one half of Ferndale-set Marco Polio and the New Vaccines, a no-wave, dance-pop quartet given to grand and freaky performance art.

With Pupils, Puwalski said he can "just be the singer." Integral to Pupils' magic is the collaboration of its four members, each from very distinctive musical pasts and former bands that had bent a smorgasbord of genres.

"We're really concentrated on structure," Puwalski said. "We're all odd in our own ways, or at least willing to go along with oddness. Which is cool, there's no one songwriter, the band is the songwriter.

"We're finding something now," he added, speaking specifically of the Ferndale scene. "I feel like there wasn't really ever a real venue here, and part of me feels like there still isn't yet."

Masson, who'll be moving here next season, summarized: "Ferndale is a good atmosphere for artists in their upper 20s and lower 30s, they got over the need for the city's hustle and bustle and danger and are now starting families, trying to settle down and just really focus on art as opposed to partying all the time."

"Ferndale's a real cool community," Masson added, "and still cultured enough where, if you want, you can get authentic Indian food or go to an art gallery or nightclub, but it's not totally T.G.I. Friday's in the middle of the suburbs. It feels like a city, but it's more manageable."

Other Ferndale-connected bands to look for at the FAF: FUR, Destroy This Place and Betty Cooper. But you should head down to check out what Detroit, Ann Arbor and the whole country, and even world, has to offer as well.

For a complete listing of the lineup, click here. The event starts Wednesday and runs through Saturday.