Two songs into the Living Blue’s set at Latitude 30, a gust of wind blows open the big bay windows in the front of the Austin club, letting the music spill out onto the sidewalk. As pedestrians stop to peer inside, it proves to be a nice bit of accidental promotion for the Champaign band, playing its first-ever South by Southwest gig as part of a showcase for its new label, Minty Fresh.
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The Living Blue aren’t an overnight success–they labored eight years for the right to sleep next to their amps in Texas. But since last April, when they released their second album, Living in Blue, they’ve had a whirlwind year. The band formerly known as the Blackouts won a national talent competition, got their songs tapped for inclusion in TV shows and a movie, and landed a new record deal. This week they will start recording their third disc in Chicago at Gravity Studios.
The glorified demo caught the ear of Chris Broach, singer for Braid and the Firebird Band and owner of Deerfield-based Lucid Records. Lucid released the Blackouts’ 2002 debut, Everyday Is a Sunday Evening, an energetic garage-rock pastiche that showed how heavily in thrall the group was to the Nuggets and Pebbles comps. Their 2004 follow-up, Living in Blue, was produced by Adam Schmitt, a cult figure in power-pop circles, who captured the band as it rapidly developed out of its embryonic phase. “With the second record we started to introduce some of that 60s California sound, some cleaner but more technical psychedelic things, a little folk, even some new wave,” says Prokop.
Before making the trip to Austin, the band was featured in Alternative Press as an up-and-coming act and learned that one of its songs had been picked up for the MTV reality series Power Girls. Another is slated for a forthcoming feature film called Waiting. Minty Fresh co-owner Anthony Musiala points out that while the band’s previous successes make the label’s job easier, they don’t render showcases like SXSW irrelevant. “The reason for them being down there is that pretty much outside of the Chicago-Champaign area they’re fairly unknown,” he says. “When you have a show like that, where the majority of the people are somewhat connected within the industry, it’s a great opportunity for exposure.”
