Smokey Brights have been steadily growing out of the mossy Pacific Northwest city of Seattle forover a decade. The band, formed by friends working together at a pizza restaurant, has roots inSeattle’s DIY punk, songwriter, and psych scenes. Through the group’s four LP and three EPreleases, you can hear Smokey Brights’ sonic branches stretching through 70’s prog, synthy newwave bops, fuzzy 90’s anthems, and intimate indie storytelling. You can also trace the lives andromance of songwriters Ryan Devlin and Kim West who married a few years after the formationof the band. The couple’s entangled approach to songwriting and melody has yielded aremarkable amount of original, genre bending music. Nick Krivchenia’s steady, stylish drummingis the backbone of the Smokeys’ sound, while bassist Luke Rägnar adds low end bounce as wellas a third harmony to Ryan and Kim’s melodies. The band’s music has been featured in film,television, video games, and podcasts. They’ved toured throughout the US as well as the UK andmainland Europe. Their most recent releases, 2023’sBroken TooEP andLevitatorLP, bothlanded on iconic radio station KEXP’s top 90.3 records of the year.
The Weather Machine
Ask a fan, and they’ll tell you The Weather Machine is best known for their over-the-top theatrical live sets. The Portland-based rock group started cutting their musical teeth 2013, at a time when the city was coming off a folk-revival wave and craving more indie rock. The Weather Machine flourished in that environment, building their folk story songs into plugged-in rock anthems. It’s brought the band a long way, and by 2016 they had already toured the US and Europe and opened up for acts like The Alabama Shakes and Cold War Kids.
But what exactly does The Weather Machine sound like? The Portland Mercury compares them to The Kinks and Paul McCartney, while an Italian publication preferred Hey Marseilles as a reference. The truth? This band is hard to categorize… which is a big part of the appeal. After releasing a stripped down, reflective debut record, their sophomore full-length album Peach took the group into the realm of power-ballads and anthem-rock. Their latest record, The Pelican, was written as part of lead singer Slater Smith’s side project with Oregon State Parks to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Oregon’s Beach Bill. The songs feature The Weather Machine’s current roster, as well as some of Smith’s favorite musicians from around the region. The dreamy story album plays with extremes, and while it’s on the whole tamer than The Weather Machine’s past work, it seeks to shocks listeners with jarring, exploratory musical interruptions throughout, representing a new phase of experimentation for the band, and a sign of good things to come.
Since emerging on the scene in April ‘13, The Weather Machine has been featured on Buzzfeed, OPB’s Think Out Loud, The Oregonian, the Portland Mercury, Willamette Week, and many more international and US-based publications. The band worked collaboratively with Oregon State Parks and Oregon Film to release their first music video, which debuted on acclaimed actor Rain Wilson’s video blog SoulPancake and was later rereleased online through GoPro Cameras. Its current members are Slater Smith, Luke Hoffman, André Zapata, Noah Bernstein, and Tim Karplus.
