Armada

Armada are a powerful four piece cranking out soulful indie rock from the bleeding heart of Los Angeles. Brain meets brawn with sharp, earthy lyrics wrapped in classic, rough-and-tumble songwriting. This is what might happen if Spoon, Wilco, and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club threw a pool party with Queens of the Stone Age scoring the water ballet. This past year saw the placement of EP opener “Beautiful Heat” on CBS’s Blue Bloods, enough votes to snag Deli LA's June 2012 “Artist of the Month,” spins on LA's Star 98.7, Viper Room residencies, BalconyTV antics, a Facebook fan explosion approaching 10,000, and a growing number of packed houses from LA to San Diego to San Francisco as a result. Armada topped it all off with the completion their first full-length LP, “Paper Ghosts,” which has sharks on the cover and enjoyed a digital and vinyl release on August 28th. As HereInAid.com puts it: “Armada impressively displays their versatility as story-tellers with an eerie lyrical narrative that could be best described as a blend of She Wants Revenge and Queens Of The Stone Age puréed with the textured vocalities of one Billy Joe Armstrong.” Singer and primary songwriter Cody Page’s vintage, California-bred charm wanders from Bright Eyes honesty to 90’s bombast to the kind of gravity spinning around band like the White Rabbits. Put another way: “Page wants you to hear his opinion and leave you knowing exactly where you stand, without needing to shout at you. It shows a maturity that you just don’t get with some other emerging bands at the moment.” - SmokinCharlieBrown.com Page’s path to songwriting started with musical parents and snowballed into an English degree and punk band tooth-cutting at Stanford University. Page’s informal musical history cuts nicely with drummer Eddie Core’s muscular style, honed over years spent globetrotting military bases with his family and performing in jazz bands throughout Europe and the American Midwest. Los Angeles Music Academy eventually caught and released him just in time to link up with Page as he returned home from foggy San Francisco. Jeremy Gruber, on the other hand, made a break for it by shocking his classical musician parents with a move from Jersey to LA to pursue a degree in music at USC. Two bands and a lot of bonding over Nine Inch Nails and Tom Waits later, Gruber was ensconced as Armada’s not-so-secret low frequency weapon. Rob Calhoun hails from North Carolina and cooks shrimp etouffee almost as good as he plays guitar. Rob is a Southern gentleman with the requisite Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix and Allman Brothers Band running through his veins. A lifelong love of music began with violin in the 3rd grade, a Christmas guitar at age 12, and a degree in film scoring from Berklee. The boys came together neatly in 2009 over a shared love of Kurt Vonnegut and a desire to inject brainy twists into the the type of rock & roll they all grew up on. What they ended up with is indie rock that keeps its feet in this decade while preserving all the big songwriting payoffs that defined its ancestors. When not shamelessly promoting the “Paper Ghosts” LP, you'll find Armada being loud in an evil laboratory across from a hot dog stand in the middle of West Hollywood. Indie rock for thinkers and dancers