Jesse Cohen may now reside in Brooklyn, but anyone with fond memories of Laundry World is a College Park man deep down.
Jesse Cohen was born in College Park and raised there for the first five years of his life. While memories from that early childhood time are hard to come by, Cohen certainly remembers going to Soaps Laundry, which he used to refer to as the “laundromat pizza place arcade,” and is now known to all of us as Laundry World. But after moving to New York 10 years ago and starting up the electro-pop-rock duo Tanlines with his friend Eric Emm, Cohen now has a bit more of a traditional indie-rock home: Brooklyn.
“As much as I agree that the Brooklyn music thing is a cliche, and as much as I’m one of the bands that doesn’t understand how to talk to a journalist about it, I definitely think that it is a part of why we continue to be able to play music now, and it’s something that I’m definitely grateful for,” Cohen said. “Coming up in Brooklyn … there were a lot of places we could play; there were a lot of shows, and there were a lot of opportunities.”
Cohen and Emm certainly took advantage of those opportunities, as Tanlines is now on a national tour that has taken them from Austin, Texas, to New Orleans to New York and, this Friday night, to Washington at Black Cat.
The duo released their debut full-length album, Mixed Emotions, in March and quickly gained praise from tastemakers such as Pitchfork, Stereogum and The A.V. Club. The album balances heavy electro-pop synthesizers and booming drum beats with more traditional indie-rock melodies and guitar chords, creating its own unique fusion of dance and rock music. It’s all far more thoughtful and layered than the music you hear on the Top 40, but it’s also got an indisputable element of pop to it.
“Accessibility is just built into what I think is good about music,” Cohen said. “There’s some great stuff that is just stupid and fun, and there’s some great stuff that is just avant-garde and really mind-blowing, but the things that we have a most meaningful relationship with manage to be both things at once.”
Cohen and Emm released an EP titled Settings in 2010 that built buzz in the Brooklyn music scene. Specifically, Cohen said, a song called “Real Life” became “the first song we ever played where we performed it and people kind of sang along. And that sort of changed things for us … because we saw we wrote songs that people connected with. And we wanted to write more songs like that.”
The two have developed a “sibling relationship,” Cohen said, with shared experiences, beliefs and senses of humor but different overall personalities and music sensibilities. This blend has become a defining aspect of Tanlines’ image (the album cover is a black and white shot of their faces), and it’s a primary reason they decided to tour as just a duo, without a backing band of any kind.
“We ultimately decided that right now, we want people’s first impression of us to be this thing that we had been doing for a couple of years basically in and around New York,” Cohen said. “For better or for worse, people will either enjoy it and accept it, or they’ll be like, ‘These guys stink — they run a lot of samples and tracks.’ But I think it’s the most honest and pure way to do what we do. And I think there’s always time to expand that format.”
Cohen has tried to build the band’s identity on Twitter — Tanlines’ tweets are almost entirely composed of jokes and behind-the-scenes pictures, along with the typical self-promotional concert announcements. He understands that developing a personality for the band is crucial to gaining long-term fans.
“You want the songs to stand on their own because 90 percent of the people hearing the music won’t have any idea who’s making it and who we are,” he said. “But in terms of building a relationship with the fan base over a long period of time, I do think it’s important to get as much of our personalities into the mix as possible. And to have a really open relationship with the people who listen to our music.”
Tanlines plays at Black Cat on Friday night. Doors open at 9 p.m. Tickets are sold out.
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