Terrorbird

Their folk pop is for summers and weekends and road trips. It's for late nights in the city and parties with old friends. Family of the Year's music is a rampart, set against the times you never want to end.

It's an open-arms approach to rock that has nothing to do with exclusivity. Drawing from 90's Brit-rock, 60's folk, and contemporary American indie, the group constructs addictive, melodic pop that is, in it's broad and catchy appeal, an invitation. Strangely familiar melodies build and swell in layered harmonies, and when the chorus of voices comes in, and the drums are driving, and the band hits that hook you didn't even know you knew, it just begs for you to sing along. The songs are anthems conjuring images—open fields, open freeways, old flings that could never last. Their music contains memories that everyone, somehow, knows.

The band is brothers Joe and Seb Keefe; Christina Schroeter; and James Buckey. For each of them, home was a beach: Joe and Seb grew up off the old windswept coast of Massachusetts, where they shared a bedroom with Joe's guitar and Seb's drums and not an inch for anything else; James on the street-swept coast of Jacksonville, Florida, where as a kid he found an escape from the mini-malls in one of the country's rare and now-dead all-ages venues, where he watched the seminal indie bands of the 90s cut their teeth; and Christina on the palm-tree surf beaches of Orange County, where she grew up in the sun, not so far from Disney, and not so far from where they all would eventually meet. Thousands of miles apart; linked by oceans and a spirit you can hear in the Beach Boys gossamer of their harmonies.

In Los Angeles, they moved into a one bedroom bungalow together, and they wrote songs that were rooted in the places where they were from. They bought an old RV named Rosie. And they took their music on the road.

Because Family of the Year are a live band through and through. Long drives. Long days away from home. It's the standard story, but told with infectious optimism. James tells the tale of the meteor shower when he was driving the overnight shift after a late show in Denver—driving a straight shotfrom the Rockies to LA—when suddenly, with comets coursing across the sky, Rosie's electronics cut out on him. In the pitch dark street, with the headlights shot and the sky lighting up, they just kept going.

And why stop? Down the road is that club off the freeway, in the town where they've never been, with a crowd waiting for music, waiting to hear the band to play. It's a road that's taken them some exciting places. They've played Boston's Symphony Hall with Ben Folds and toured the US with Edward Sharp and the Magnetic Zeroes. They've shared the stage with Givers, Local Natives, Hooray For Earth, Viva Brother, and Grouplove. Recently signed to Tiny Ogre, they've just returned from their second European tour, where they've been humbled and excited to have found early success. In France, fans are showing up to sold-out shows, calling out requests, singing the lyrics to songs that, not so long ago, Joe and Seb and Christina and James were playing for themselves in an old rehearsal space in LA. In July, the band played their biggest show yet, at Les Vielles Charrues, France's largest festival. Amps towering over the crowd. Their songs carrying out over the fields.

Now, with Through the Trees out, an EP, St. Croix, due out September 27th, and a new full- length album, Diversity, slated for release in Feb 2012, Family of the Year are busier than ever and excited to get back on the American road. Though they've filed Rosie's non-operation papers in favor of the standard touring man's van-and-trailer; and though the old one bedroom bungalow, fondly remembered, will now be home, according to the circle of life, to a new band starting out in LA; still, the energy is getting bigger. For while a bit older, and unfortunately, as the saying goes, a bit wiser, too, Family of the Year are not even a little, not even in the slightest bit jaded about what a good band can do with a good night: in Los Angeles or Paris or New York, or better still, in some town off a dark freeway.