[Locals Only] Anaheim's We Are the Pilots Prepare to Take Off

Flight Test

When naming your band these days, you really do have to consider search-engine optimization—or, to use a more colloquial term, Googlability. (Googliciousness? Googlocity?) If you call yourself something too mundane—like local band Years—you end up being pretty much impossible to search for online. For Anaheim’s We Are the Pilots, unless you Google using the always-helpful yet frequently forgotten quotation marks, you’ll find a bunch of results for We Are Pilots, a 2006 album by the way-different Shiny Toy Guns.

Guess which member is the "quirky" one

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• Anaheim
• Shiny Toy Guns

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Which is too bad, as the tunes of We Are the Pilots simmer with a peaceful charm. Songs such as “New Scars,” from their first full-length, Neon Atmosphere, complement thoughtful if unsubtle lyrics (“Liquor flows like a mouth of a gorge/as your stomach spews on to the floor “) with spacey, unobtrusive keyboard effects. The band manage to integrate these “experimental” elements well when they want to, but also prove on songs such as the title track—which is much more straight-forward jangle pop—that it’s only one part of a whole.

This balance feels, to use a pukey corporate buzzword, organic, which makes sense given the band’s outlook. Their “about me” on MySpace shares that one of their goals is “to celebrate the love for all things in nature,” and there’s not much about We Are the Pilots that sounds unnatural. Their approach to “business” also reflects their free-thinkin’, peace-lovin’ attitudes: They recorded it on their own and are distributing it themselves. There’s enough promise in the songwriting to suggest it could one day pay off—not that they’re necessarily concerned about such a thing.

We Are the Pilots with the Steelwells at the Continental Room, 115 Santa Fe Ave., Fullerton, (714) 273-0077; www.myspace.com/thecontinentalroom. Sun., 9 p.m. Free.
Visit We Are the Pilots online at www.myspace.com/wearethepilots777.

aching@ocweekly.com