The story goes that The Forms were created over a lunch hour at the Bay Area high school they were attending. Vocalist/guitarist James Neal approached bassist and friend, Dylan Bullard, about a talent show being held at the aforementioned school. Craving some temporal bounds to their project, the two searched about for a drummer, finally settling on percussionist Saam Akbarkhanzadeh. To add a bit of brevity to the story, the completed trio pulled of a successful performance, earned critical acclaim from fellow students and onlookers. The band members realized their life's calling: to create and perform music, evermore.
A year later, the threesome was still fervently writing music, but realized that a component was missing to their musings. A second guitar was needed to fulfill their vision, and yet another search began. After several failed attempts at procuring the desired component, serendipity reared its insightful head. Saam's brother, Sina, played bass. Sina had been a mere onlooker, lending input to the group's compositional endeavors, serving as the group's four member in spirit. The Forms made the decision to move Sina to bass, pulling Bullard into a lead guitarist position.
"Trapped by the Sun" represents the debut effort by the San Jose quartet; a celebration of rock's timelessness that is as unyielding and persistent as it is loose and familiar. What's held within the 9-song LP, is a mish-mosh of styles stemming from the individuals' musical backgrounds and perspective. A glance at the band's musical influences reveal a well-saturated platter of sounds from which to choose. However, It's the raw chemistry that Neal, Bullard and the Akbarkhanzadeh brothers display that blazes The Forms' own trail; the mish-mosh takes its own, original shape, and the results are celebratory.
The honest, stripped down sounds of songs like "Quiet Night," "The Binds" or the album's opener "Rain Rain" make a loose association with The Doors and their spaghetti western, psychedelic-surfer underpinnings, as well as the haunting, lamentations of Echo and the Bunnymen. Neal's vocals fall somewhere between The Violent Femmes and Arcade Fire on impressive tracks like "Undeclared," while The Velvet Underground feel of "Roxanne" stinks of L.A. in the 60s, with just a hint of Dick Dale caressing the guitar runs. The syncopated, 80s feel of "Ex" adds a brilliant touch, as the song begins with a reggae feel, only to morph into a retro, Brian Jones-esque jam. The album's title track has a "Bad Man Behind Blue Eyes" epic finality to it.
The Forms show that there remains a subtle art in two-chord verses, catchy guitar licks, and unconventional break-downs. The group approaches songwriting in a distinguished way, finding a nice medium between the retro, the modern and everything in between. The sultry ballads, the spontaneous feel of the bridges, the hallucinogenic lacing found around the tracks' fringes, makes The Forms sound much more like veterans than newcomers, rendering the entire set of "Trapped by the Sun" a can't miss album.
Hear "Trapped by the Sun" in it's entirety at bandcamp.
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