bio/epk

Piling up lay­ers upon lay­ers of imagery, Justin Gold­man cre­ates a lyri­cal world not unlike a Dylan-esque acid trip (if Bobby wrote more songs about girls, anyway).

Fronting the San Francisco-based band Angel Island, which was formed in the Fall of 2008 and con­sists of Pas­cal Gar­neau (gui­tar), Robert Jakubs (drums), Erik Hay­hurst (bass gui­tar), and Ian Ulibarri (key­boards), Gold­man (vocals, gui­tar) lays bare his emo­tions with painfully auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal lyrics one moment before build­ing up walls of psy­che­delic metaphor to hide behind the next. Musi­cally, the sound feels famil­iar with echoes of 20th cen­tury rock and pop while ven­tur­ing into unex­pected places. A 6/8 bal­lad sud­denly shifts into nineties shoe-gazer ter­ri­tory and fin­ishes with a Moog syn­the­sizer solo that would make Linda McCart­ney blush. Not ones to fol­low the lat­est trends, Angel Island suc­ceed in art­fully cre­at­ing real music that is a refresh­ing depar­ture from gim­mick and cliché.

Angel Island’s first recorded effort, FOUR SONG EP, was released in Octo­ber of 2009 and is cur­rently avail­able as a free down­load in mul­ti­ple dig­i­tal for­mats at http://angelisland.bandcamp.com. The EP was self-produced and a short run of CD’s were printed and given away to friends and fans at shows.

Fall 2010 will see the release of HARMONY, a 7” vinyl sin­gle that will also include free dig­i­tal down­load and extra bonus tracks. The group teamed up with audio wiz­ard Karl Der­fler (Tom Waits, Roky Erick­son) in a ren­o­vated old-time school­house in Sebastopol, CA to mix the record which will be released by “too big to fail” San Fran­cisco label ShitKrys­tal Records.

Here is a sneak pre­view of a cou­ple of the new tracks:

Press docs:
PDF — Angel Island bio

Word — Angel Island bio

Press pho­tos:
Angel Island 8x10 (150 dpi)

Con­tact the band