Satellite Business
Big Stir Records is the epicenter of LA’s indie power pop scene.
This article originally appeared in Big Stir Magazine.
There are three sides to the sunshine-y, LA-based power pop outfit called The Armoires: the band, the business, and the international community of music lovers that founders Christina Bulbenko and Rex Broome nurture like the cool and quirky older siblings you’ve dreamt of having since your teens.
With three albums under their belt — the 2016 debut, Incidental Lightshow; the recent Side Three EP, and a new album, Zibaldone, released last August — The Armoires are a true California pop band that draws as much inspiration from classic rockers like The Byrds and Fleetwood Mac as it does from punk pioneers, X, and artsy power poppers, The New Pornographers. Add in plenty of harmonies, a healthy dose of jangly guitars, dramatic viola flourishes, driving backbeats and dreamy lyrics, and their romantic vision comes into focus — The Armoires are a band of music lovers making lovely music for lovers of music.
Big Stir Records started out as a concert series, quickly growing into a record label and magazine. These days, the label boasts a roster of bands including Anton Barbeau, Dolph Chaney, Plasticsoul, Blake Jones & the Trike Shop and Amoeba Teen, among others. And those are just the full-length albums. Big Stir’s Digital Singles series has curated two-song combos by the likes of The Well Wishers, Joe Normal & The Anytown’rs, The Walker Brigade and The Forty Nineteens. Oh, and Big Stir has released a handful of compilations as well. Not bad for an Indie label that didn’t exist four years ago.
And the community? I’ll let a couple of the biggest supporters tell you about that. “Christina and Rex have provided the shot in the arm — and the figurative group hug — that the LA-area pop scene has been lacking for some time,” said John Borack, author of Shake Some Action 2.0: A Guide to the 200 Greatest Power Pop Albums1970–2017. (Borack recently joined the Armoires as their full-time drummer).
Borack is not alone in his admiration for The Armoires and Big Stir Records. “Rex and Christina have done an amazing job galvanizing pop scenes both in Los Angeles and the UK, and I am extremely proud of them,” said David Bash, founder of the International Pop Overthrow Festival.
Like a beautiful paisley flower poking up through the cracked LA concrete, The Armoires and Big Stir Records have twisted roots that blossomed into something unexpected. Asked to explain this phenomenon, Rex gets philosophical. “We’ve created a little Heisenberg uncertainty principle thing for ourselves as a band. Three years ago nobody had any reason to like our stuff at all, and today it’ll be impossible to know if anyone really likes our record for what it is or if they just feel obligated to say they do because we’re nice people who do nice things in this community! But that really falls into the category of something we say a lot at Big Stir: ‘a good problem to have.’”
Like a beautiful paisley flower poking up through the cracked LA concrete, The Armoires and Big Stir Records have twisted roots that blossomed into something unexpected.
What You Don’t Wish For
It started simply enough. Rex joined the staff at a “rock ‘n roll summer camp” where Christina’s son Ian and his friend Nate taught. Christina, who’d recently left her job as an elementary school teacher, also taught at the school. That meant Christina was nearby when Rex needed help with a student struggling to sing Blondie’s “Call Me.”
“Rex had no idea that I lived and breathed Blondie songs as a teenager, so I jumped at the chance. My brother to this day still talks about me playing piano and singing all of the songs from ‘Parallel Lines’ in our childhood home,” Christina said. “It’s one of his most vivid memories of me.”
Rex invited a very nervous Christina to a rehearsal for his band Skates & Rays (featuring The Armoires’ former rhythm section of Clifford Ulrich on bass and Derek Hanna on drums), but the primordial elements of The Armoires really came together while singing Karaoke duets. One of the bar’s owners asked Christina and Rex to join his Talking Heads cover band (“He needed a Jerry Harrison and a Tina Weymouth, as he would be David Byrne,” Christina recalls).
That project fell apart, but Rex and Christina had established an undeniable musical bond by then. “Christina has always been and always will be the guiding light of what we do and don’t do,” Rex said. “Some of our early material was drawn from my backlog of decades of tunes written before I met her, but she’d just zero in on the stuff that spoke to her as good for a harmony duo. And sometimes she’d surprise me with those choices, but I’ve long since learned that her instincts are better than mine on every level.”
It was around this time that Ian joined on drums, followed by his friend Nate on bass, with Christina’s daughter, Larysa, providing the distinctive viola lines that are a hallmark of the band’s sound to this day. With Rex on guitar and Christina on keyboards, The Armoires were born. Ian had been learning to record, edit, and mix, so he offered to engineer the album that became Incidental Lightshow.
Everything was coming together when unfathomable tragedy struck. Ian died in a car accident in 2014, the day after The Armoires played their first gig under that name. “I may never have met Rex were it not for my brilliantly talented, fun-loving, beautiful son, Ian, who is no longer with us. Without Rex, The Armoires and the music, though, I don’t know how I would have survived his loss. He’s woven into the fabric of our band and — because of how vital music was to him — gave us the courage to move forward,” she said. “His work is evident in ‘Fort Ashby,’ ‘Unhaunted’ and ‘Norma Corona, What Have You Done?’ from our first album.”
The Laws Have Changed
There is no good way or right way to grieve, but the studio and stage have long provided sanctuary for heartbroken musicians. So The Armoires did what musicians do — they played a tribute show for Ian and just kept going, doing more shows and finishing the record they’d started with him. “It seemed imperative,” Rex said. “In truth we were lost in haze of grief and booze and who even knows what else. We made awful mistakes, we worked with the wrong people, and somehow a year and a half later we mysteriously woke up on stage in England with a record under our belt and a whole new context to what we were doing.”
Along the way (while playing typical LA “spaghetti-on-the-wall bills with all the ‘how many people can you draw on a Wednesday’ stuff,” Rex said), The Armoires caught a glimpse of the music scene they’d been searching for in the form of the International Pop Overthrow Festival. To say that Christina and Rex were inspired by what Bash had built with IPO would be a massive understatement.
“That’s how Big Stir Live was conceived. It was to be a monthly gig, where if you showed up for the first band and stayed a little longer, you’d find that you wanted to stay for the next band and the next, and probably go home excited afterwards because you’d found your new favorite band,” Christina said.
Their concert series evolved over the next year, but not fast enough for Christina and Rex. They wanted to celebrate the artists they’d met and their growing scene. The solution was Big Stir: The First Year.
“We were lucky enough to bring people together for the common goal of a great night of power pop, pop punk, garage rock, jangle pop, art-infected pop and more, only to find that through the compilation, it was bigger than just the monthly gig,” Christina said.
Big Stir Records Is Born
Christina and Rex may be at the center of The Armoires/Big Stir Records universe, but they have no problem sharing the spotlight. While many bands would have released their own album as the label’s debut, Big Stir instead introduced the world to Therapy by Plasticsoul (led by Steven Wilson, who was instrumental in helping to get Big Stir started, and more recently produced Zibaldone). That was followed with Joie di Vivre by The Condors, featuring Flipside Magazine co-founder Patrick “Pooch” DiPuccio who suggested that Big Stir also launch a magazine.
Christina and Rex, in typical risk-taking fashion, decided to give it a try. “We had no idea where Big Stir was heading at the time and have no idea how far it will go, it just all sort of evolved organically. And, wherever it leads us, we pour our blood, sweat, and tears into it every step of the way. The learning curves have been pretty brutal, though, because it’s all happened so quickly…but we’re more than grateful for what we’ve learned through trial by fire,” Christina said.
Given the rapid growth of Big Stir Records, it’s a minor miracle that The Armoires have continued to play shows and record themselves. The musical partnership between Christina and Rex — and their shared determination to keep the whole operation afloat — is at the core of their impressive output.
“My favorite thing about writing with Rex is that we both come from an appreciation for story and character-driven songs. My background was in theatre and I love diving into what makes a character tick and the telling of a compelling story,” Christina said.
It’s a mutual admiration society. “I love everything about working with my favorite singer in the world. But it’s the back and forth of nailing down the specific lyrical turns of phrase and the harmony parts that makes me the happiest. I’m enormously proud of that,” Rex said.
Their dual lead vocals and harmonies are signature parts of The Armoires’ sound, drawing inspiration from Lindsey Buckingham/Stevie Nicks, Exene Cervenka/John Doe and Neko Case/AC Newman (although Christina says they’ve often described their sound in a much more colorful way: “It’s as if Fleetwood Mac and R.E.M. fucked in an elevator and The Armoires were born.”). If that seems like a wide range of vocal influences to draw from, the band’s musical palette is even more diverse.
A few of my personal favorites from their impressive catalogue include the 60s-via-the-80s groove of “Caterwaul” from Incidental Lightshow; The Byrds-y jangle of “Anemone!” from Side Three EP; the countrified Robyn Hitchcock vibe of “Pushing Forty,” or the psychedelic English pop of “McCadden,” both from Zibaldone.
The stylistic diversity of “Pushing Forty” and “McCadden” is a good representation of the hard-won evolution the band captured so perfectly with their second full-length album (which also includes Rex’s daughter Miranda playing bass on a few tracks — talk about a family affair). Zibaldone is a big leap forward for a band that’s always been comfortable taking risks, so it’s appropriate that they gave their sophomore effort a name that means “heap of things” in Italian.
“With this one we had the bedrock of our live band and the knowledge that the weird stuff about our band was what ‘worked.’ So for better or worse we didn’t pull any punches or do any second-guessing of the material based on outside white noise. It’s pretty punk-rock in a sense that’s more ideological than sonic, and there are a lot of extreme choices we chose to go with because that’s the point of it,” Rex said.
It’s easy for an interviewer like me to rattle off his favorite songs, but much more difficult for the people making the music. Asked separately to pick a single Armoires song that best represents the band’s sound, it’s very telling that Christina and Rex both landed on the same track. Also worth noting that it’s a song that previously only appeared on compilations, but got an official release with Zibaldone.
“It’s called ‘Alesandra 619,’ written for my niece and encapsulating a gig experience while staying with her in San Diego,” Christina said. “It has all of the elements that we were striving for as a band — jangly guitar, soaring viola, a driving, yet sympathetic rhythm section, sunshine pop harmonies, and a psychedelic bridge. It’s simple, yet complex at the same time… kind of like the band itself.”
“’Alesandra 619’ is the sound of us totally shedding any concern about what anyone else thought we should do and doing what we wanted, and finding out that it was both easier and better received than what we’d tried before,” Rex said. “Think less and just do it. We’ve kept to that ethos ever since.”
Think less and just do it. That just might be the secret to Christina and Rex’s continued success with the band, the business and the growing international community. And it’s just like them to share it so freely with the rest of us.
