Grungey, gnarley, super catchy and reminiscent of Beach Boys if they had any edge, Death Birds Surf Club’s tunes are steadily making waves in RVA’s music scene if you’ll excuse the pun.
Grungey, gnarley, super catchy and reminiscent of Beach Boys if they had any edge, Death Birds Surf Club’s tunes are steadily making waves in RVA’s music scene if you’ll excuse the pun.
Now signed to the local Crystal Pistol Records label (Dharma Bombs, Saw Black, Pete Curry) the trio, which happens to also include Curry, along with Adam Weatherford (Guitar/Vocals) and Ashley “Bean” Weatherford (Bass/Vocals), formed just two years ago and have just released their debut album, Transmission of Stoke.
The six-track cassette is out now and is unabashedly surf rock. And lyrically, takes us back to our teenage days of skating and days spent catching waves and its nostalgic as fuck. The tracks on the band’s Bandcamp page encompass this with some punk thrown in as well. All of this can be attributed to Ashley and Adam’s teenage years growing up in Danville, Virginia.
“I got into music through my skater friends. Some who played instruments for a few years before me,” AShley said. “I learned a lot from those guys, my parents got me my Danelectro (my prized possession) when I was in 10th grade. We started skating and playing music out of boredom. Punk was the first thing that I really gravitated too, but through punk shows and skateboarding the world kind of opened up to me.”
For Adam, he used his free time while working at a gas station to hone his musical chops.
“I spent a lot of time practicing chords and singing old Beck tunes,” Adam said. “That’s where I really put in my time to learn, getting paid minimum wage to skate and play guitar. Bean, my brother, was also playing guitar and learning a lot of Chuck Berry songs. We were listening to so much music too. All of our friends at that time in Danville, VA were into discovering good music so it kind of naturally grew around me.”
The brothers have been playing solo music for years and were also in a band together while living in Danville.
“Bean and I were in Double Helix together back in the Danville days with our bud Robby who now drums for Humungus and The You Go Girls,” Adam said. “Deathbirds is kind of an extension of that band. Double Helix had a song about skateboarding and also a punk vibe. “We started The Deathbirds Surf Club project while living in San Francisco and only really played one show at a Taqueria in the Mission District.
That previous experience has helped to influence the band’s current sound according to Ashley.
“It affects the song writing because we are familiar with each other’s style of playing, our voices are used to each other and work well with each other,” he said.
Having previously been in a band may have affected their current sound, but the lyrics and content all seem to stem from their favorite childhood-and current-pastime, skating and surfing.
Adam first learned to skate on the patio of his parent’s house, down a country dirt road, in Pittsylvania County, Va.
“When I got a little older my Dad made Bean and me a little kicker ramp,” he said. “We skated that thing until it broke in two. During high school my best friend was really into skating and I had kind of lost interest in it a bit. He and his Dad built a quarter Pipe in his drive way and he had learned how to ollie. We had ramps in our basement and all of our friends had halfpipes and stuff.”
Ashley added that music and skating were always linked for them growing up.
“Skating in a warehouse downtown Danville while bands were playing, skating backyard half pipes blasting Misfits, Dead Kennedys etc, skate videos introduced us to all kinds of music, all of our friends after a while were skaters and musicians.”
The track “Halfpipe girl” on their bandcamp is a perfect 90s grungey product of their environment and its very catchy.
After college, Adam and his wife moved out to San Francisco in 2010 because of its, well as Adam would put it, “radness factor”, which is where he struck up a love for surfing.
“One day I was at the beach and watched these guys surfing long boards on really clean waves. It was the most magical thing I’d ever seen a human do,” he said. Total NorCal vibe with mountains, big waves, sun glowing through the fog. I had to try it. I borrowed a friends wetsuit and board and after figuring out the fundamentals I was hooked.”
After investing in his own board and hitting the waves any chance he got, he convinced his brother Ashley, who was living in Richmond at the time, to move out to the city.
“All I wanted was to start surfing,” Ashley said. “I moved to SF, bought a wetsuit the first day and me and Adam started down the long road surfing and it became our obsession. Still is.”
The two still surf at Virginia Beach and Hatteras, but music is currently their main gig. Adam and his wife moved back to Richmond to be closer to their families which is how he and Ashley met Pete Curry, their future band mate.
You might know Curry by now or seen our coverage of the local fuzz pop musician. RVA Mag first told you about the man behind the jangly guitar riffs and droning vocals with his debut solo album, Advice on Love, last fall.
“I met Pete how I meet all my best Richmond friends, on a porch in Oregon Hill. The You Go Girls played our first show ever with the Welcome Hips, Pete’s old band. Pete joined The You Go Girls (4/6 of the band are old Danville friends) we started hanging out and it wasn’t long before we were talking about starting a surf project,” Ashley said.
The brothers showed Curry some of their previously written material and from there, Death Birds Surf Club began to take shape.
“When I started to play with them, I using my crappy drum kit that I recorded Advice On Love on,” Curry said. “For me, it’s fun to play with them, and they have this long history together of skating and surfing.”
Adam and Ashley handle most of the songwriting, and because surfing and skating was so instrumental in their lives, the brothers say they couldn’t help but make art out of it.
“I couldn’t help but to write songs about surfing and the ocean and what not,” he said. “So yeah we were pretty determined to make a surf album. The songs may not fit neatly into the “surf” genre, but surfing was definitely the inspiration.”
They’ve released four singles, none of which are on the current cassette, on their Bandcamp page that give you a surfy, poppy, punk taste of you’ll get with their debut.
Death Birds Surf Club recorded the album in July in the basement of Saw Black of Crystal Pistol Records, who also recorded Dharma Bomb’s album in the “Bird Dog Basement.”
“We recorded everything in one day but we spent some time mixing, Scott Lane from Rhe Congress tackled the mixing,” he said. “There was one recording we made on my crappy cassette machine.”
Curry said the highlight of the recording process was laying down the track, “The Swell.”
“We had a bunch of beers and were pretty high at that point so it was really fun,” he said.
You can grab Death Birds Surf Club’s new cassette, Transmission to Stoke, for $7 here.
