On the cover of Feeding People's debut LP, a lifeless pink lady with blue nipples is sprawled out over a three-eyed rainbow-colored lion and a blue devil with blood spilling out of its mouth over a row of tiny jagged teeth.
Heavily psychedelic and incredibly strange, there's something about this painting that's just not of this world, which also describes the music produced by these kids from Orange County, who play this Saturday at the Eagle Rock Music Festival.
Feeding People founders Jessie Jones and Nic Rachman met at the Cornerstone Church in Anaheim -- "Christian, evangelical, and evil!" as they describe it -- where they played in the Sunday School band before Rachman got kicked out of his grandparents' house for getting a pot ticket and having a bad attitude.
Six years later, they linked up again and hit the OC coffee house circuit with bassist Louis Filliger, organist Jane Riech, and drummer/artist Mike Reinhart, whom Rachman met chasing wild chickens all over Yorba Linda. Now they play hard and dark psychedelia -- informed by a deep love of Black Sabbath, acid revelations, and brushes with the devil -- for Highland Parks' Innovative Leisure label, home to Nick Waterhouse, Hanni El Khatib, and Freddie Gibbs.
The band's first recordings were produced by Chris Alfaro of Free the Robots, and earned Feeding People a rare opportunity to perform at Low End Theory with Thom Yorke. They were written for acoustic, but recorded on electric by Reinhart in a single take in his parents' tiny walk-in closet. "It was really hot, and we could barely fit the band in there," Reinhart said. "We pretty much duct taped everything where it needed to be." Ten gritty tracks from this session made it onto their first LP, released two weeks ago on Burger Records.
On album opener "Native," nineteen-year-old lead singer Jones channels Grace Slick at her most primal. She growls, "When I sing my native tongue it sounds like the Devil is dancing over me." But it's bassist Filliger who's got the most experience with demons. He describes one particularly haunting encounter to me after Feeding People's record release show at the Continental Room a few weeks ago.
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