Next Thursday, April 9, the Disco Biscuits will bring a show to San Diego that promises to please everyone from Deadheads to ravers with their original sound and stimulating light shows. The Biscuits are fresh off a huge winter tour with crowds growing exponentially along the way. Before that, the group took a four month hiatus that grounded the self-proclaimed "traveling minstrels" but had them staring at their calendars. They jumped right back into it all this December with their annual Caribbean Holidaze festival in Jamaica followed by an impressive five-night New Year's run at the Nokia Theatre in Times Square. The spring tour, which starts in San Francisco on April 3, will keep up the momentum of what has been described as "awesome, one of the best tours ever" by keyboardist Aron Magner.
Along with fresh energy, this tour has seen the introduction of many new songs, which have had mixed reactions among fans. "Most people just want to hear the songs they know and love," Magner said. "As much as we enjoy playing our songs, we have to keep pumping out music. It's our responsibility."
Despite the nostalgia for old favorites, fans have been responding very well to the new music. The songs are a product of a return to the studio for the first time in years. The band is currently working on an album that will be given a release date in the near future. The Disco Biscuits are "in a phase where creativity levels are just sparking. Marc and Jon [the bassist and guitarist respectively] are writing for the sake of writing and pumping out some phenomenal tunes," Magner said.
Over the past six months, they have introduced eight new songs that will not be on the album, and are rounding out the edges on the 14 more that will.
The studio might seem to be strange place for the jam band, whose performances feature long, unbroken sets with songs that can be played mixed up or backwards and are connected by improvisation or "jamming." However, the decision to do so was the catalyst the band needed to make more music. Magner describes the move as a "new evolution" in which they are starting to incorporate sequences and samples and capture the power of what can be done in the studio. At the same time, "you can utilize all the studio tricks in the world - you can blast speakers into the streets and record it from there, you can have a full boy's choir behind you, you can record it any way you want - it's still just the four of you playing," Magner said.
And the four of them are definitely doing something right. They are in their second decade together, a feat Magner describes as "spectacular, miraculous and unbelievable…We play music that we love to play and that we love to listen to, and thankfully there are tens of thousands of fans out there who do too."
They started out playing for a tiny community at the University of Pennsylvania in 1995, and over the past 14 years have accumulated tens of thousands of followers. Last summer, at the seventh annual Camp Bisco, the group headlined every night of the three-day festival and shared the stage with the legendary Snoop Dogg. Other popular bands such as MSTRKRFT, Lotus, The New Deal and 2020 Soundsystem also attended. This year's festivities will take place in upstate New York in July, and the lineup will be announced within the week.
Magner, currently on his first break since early January, is excited to come to the "left side…These shows are going to be different because we haven't done a full California tour in years."
The band usually travels around the East Coast, making it hard for fans out here to get to shows and even harder for the group to expand its fanbase nationally. It has been over two years since the Biscuits were in San Diego, and the group plans on a celebratory return. So get yourself to the House of Blues next Thursday for an exhilarating show that guarantees a good time.
