Orlando, rejoice: Our C86 moment has at last arrived. A few decades late, sure, but who can even count these days? Put away the overpriced reissues and stop lurking on Discogs; your Fortune Cookie Prize is right under your nose.
Quick aside: C86 was an accidentally seminal collection of shambling indie-pop guitar goodness put together by Brit music mag New Musical Express in (yes) 1986. The cassette contained rough diamonds by the likes of The Pastels, The Mighty Lemon Drops, Primal Scream and Shop Assistants. The tape became a bit of a sensation among clued-in music fans and a bunch of the bands became legends, cult and otherwise. We can’t possibly pontificate on the future importance of The Sourdrops, but this band capture that eager urgency and cloying noise of their forefathers and -mothers.
This band does, however, have the feel of a supergroup of sorts, with members of Warm Frames and Eyelash coming together to justify their love for twee-pop and ramshackle proto-indie bands of the late 1980s. The quintet are Matty Begnaud (guitar, vocals), Kate Begnaud (tambourine, vocals), Shad Perez (guitar), KC Lace (bass) and Willie Bess (stand-up drums).
The Sourdrops have become a live favorite, drawing in local music heads with the tumbling scree of their sound, all perfect pop chords and harmonies smothered in an ocean of reverb, razor-wire jangle and youthful abandon. Their 2023 release, The Most Beautiful Demos, was a delightful mess, the vocals barely audible and the sound clipping from overloaded guitars tripping over one another and rudimentary drums, but there’s a similar spirit to Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy and Beat Happening’s Jamboree.
It’s evolution time, though. This indie outfit is ready to upgrade from that distorted demo EP of fuzzed-out love letters. This week they release a full-length, Oh So Sour, of eight songs and an intro, all recorded in “an old trailer.” This is the first time we will hear Kate’s vocals, and the innocent and carefree delivery reminds one of the wholesome “Pop Queen” by Australia’s Noise Addict and Scottish girl-groups like Strawberry Switchblade.
The Sourdrops drop the album Friday and the next day play a show that’s like a who’s who of new weird Florida: Rosary, Curleys, The Ashies, Stiff Bitches and Pamper. Time to get wide-eyed.
What was it that inspired you all to start the Sourdrops? What were you listening to that made you decide to do this?
We started The Sourdrops because we thought it would be fun to make pop music with our friends. Last year when we formed this band, we were listening to a lot of The Pastels, Tiger Trap, Henry’s Dress, Talulah Gosh and early My Bloody Valentine.
What’s the creative division of labor like in the band?
Collectively, we all add pieces to the puzzle. Most of the ideas while writing are bounced off of each other in one way or another. The recording of Oh So Sour was done in a travel trailer predominantly by Matty and Kate, not necessarily by choice but because of our busy schedules.
Locally, who do you feel creative kinship with as Sourdrops?
In our local scene there’s Über Crunch and Jumbo Jade and the Macho Men that we share a lot in common with. Also, finding out the overlap between punks and twee-heads to be quite large is cool.
Tell us about the burst of activity you have coming up Friday and Saturday. It’ll be a very busy two days for the band.
Nov. 29 is an exciting day — we’ll finally be free from nitpicking every detail of our debut album and have to live with its quirks. The 30th is gonna be a fun day playing some new and old songs alongside some of our friends’ awesome bands. It’s a good showcase of what the Florida music scene has to offer with bands from all over the state.
Is there a part of the band that’s about rejecting a very online modernity?
Yeah, I think it’s a matter of what we look up to, with a lot of our influences being from the 1980s and ’90s. Also, hand-making stuff is the way we like to do it, and it’s been done that way since the beginning. It would be cool to see more bands in Orlando release unpolished music.
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This article appears in Nov 27 – Dec 3, 2024.