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Rising: Fool's Gold

Photo by Emily Shur

The L.A. band Fool's Gold is built around two frontmen, Luke Top and Lewis Pesacov. Pesacov also plays in Foreign Born, and the loosely structured band sometimes includes musicians who have played with We Are Scientists and the Fall. Looking at those names, you'd expect Fool's Gold to be something very different from what they are. Fool's Gold isn't an indie rock band at all. Unlike, say, Vampire Weekend or High Places, they don't play American music with an Afropop influence. Rather, it's Afropop with a slight American influence.

Fool's Gold's self-titled debut, due September 29 from IAMSOUND, is just as liquid and joyous as the records that inspire the band. The Israel-born Top sings in Hebrew more often than English, and for those of us who don't understand the language, it's got the same impenetrable, otherworldly ring as the Afropop that the band loves. Top claims that the band started out playing barbecues and backyard parties. The band's music is as sunny as those locations would suggest.

Pitchfork recently caught up with Top to talk about the band's stew of influences, their experiences playing parks without permits, and their place in indie's current wave of Afropop-cribbing bands.

Pitchfork: How big of an influence does African music play in Fool's Gold? It seems tremendous.

Luke Top: [laughs] It's definitely a huge part of what we're influenced by, for sure. Lewis [Pesacov] and I co-write the music, and we both have a pretty deep love for global pop music. So when we started thinking about the band, pretty informally at first, we thought about incorporating some of the music that we love into our own playing. Some of that was African music: soukous music, East African music, Ethiopian music, Eritrean music, Touareg desert blues music. We run the gamut of different sources of world music that we're into. But yeah, I'd say it's a pretty big part of what we're driven by. It's not exclusively what we're about, but we're definitely influenced by that stuff.

Pitchfork: What else plays a role?

LT: Well, both Lewis and I are pretty interested in pop music in general. Being who we are, growing up in Los Angeles and the U.S., we have an innate love for American pop music-- especially Talking Heads and R&B, soul music. Lewis is into hip-hop. We both just love pop music in general, American pop music. The hope is that we found some kind of middle ground with our own upbringing and our love for this other type of music. But really, when you think about it-- I don't know if you're familiar with the Ethiopiques volumes, but lot of music from Africa is influenced by Western music as well, which is really interesting to us. I love Mahmoud Ahmed and other kind of Eastern music influenced by Western music. Like for instance Tinariwen, which is a Touareg group, are kind of playing American rock-style guitar. And then we take what they do and funnel it back through here, through our innate pop sensibilities, and continue the musical exchange that way.

Pitchfork: So you see it as kind of an international conversation that you're a part of?

LT: Essentially, yeah. Most music is overlapping, so at this point, it's hard to say or pinpoint exactly what the ratio or the balance is. Everyone is taking from each other at this point.

Pitchfork: How many languages do you sing in?

LT: I just sing in Hebrew and in English. Mostly Hebrew these days. But that's about it, just two.

Pitchfork: Why mostly Hebrew?

LT: When we started playing at first, Lewis and I went on this trip together up in northern California. We were up in these mineral springs, and we started talking about trying to play this music together. When we started jamming really informally, I just started singing in Hebrew, and it just seemed like a natural, organic compliment to the sound we were making. There wasn't too much thought to it at first, but my friends were really supportive and didn't think I was completely nuts, so it just developed from there. I got really excited and inspired to write in Hebrew. I was born in Israel, so I have the language built into my system. I haven't really exploited that side of myself very much, so this band opened up a lot of doors for me. Singing in Hebrew is one of the things that kept on going from the beginning.

Pitchfork: Lewis is in Foreign Born, and you've got a bunch of people playing with you who are in a lot of different high profile bands. How do you balance all that out? Are you going to be able to go on tour?

LT: Absolutely. It's no small feat logistically, but somehow we've been really blessed with people who've stuck with us from the beginning. They've kept coming, and I feel really lucky to have that situation. At first, when we started really informally playing, we said whoever wants to come play with us, come play with us. We'd do backyard parties, barbecues, birthday parties. And people just started coming. Eventually, the ones who were most interested in it just stuck around. Luckily, they're all extremely talented. It just works extremely well.

Pitchfork: You said birthday parties. Do you mean kids' birthday parties?

LT: No, we were hired a few times to do adult birthday parties. They'd find a park or something to have a party in, and they'd hire us to play for two hours.

Pitchfork: You can get away with playing in parks in L.A.? You don't have to have permits and stuff?

LT: Yeah, L.A. is pretty awesome in that sense. There's lots of little pockets of areas, little community centers and forgotten patches of grass that you can take over for an afternoon if you want to. There's this one park that we played in called Spiraling Orchard Park. It's in Echo Park. There actually wasn't any power, so we had to borrow the neighbors'. The neighbors actually put out an extension cord from their house into the park.

Pitchfork: You didn't short them out?

LT: Nope! [laughs]Pitchfork: Has there ever been any blowback from having the same name as a record label?

LT: There's been some really, really minor confusion, but not much, surprisingly. It's been really cool. We haven't had any problems. Maybe a couple of confused people down the line, but very little problems with that. It's a label, and we're a band, so it's a different beast. And their stuff is so different; we're so different.

Pitchfork: Are you named after the Stone Roses song? Where does the name come from?

LT: [laughs] No, we're not. The name just came up one time. We were all driving through San Francisco-- me, Lewis, and a couple old friends of ours-- and this girl was talking about how she came upon a bunch of fool's gold in the ocean somewhere. We just thought it was really funny at the time, the name. It just stuck. There's really no deep reasoning behind it. I sometimes tell people that it's a joke on our band. We're not African, so we're not the real thing.

Pitchfork: There's been a real wave in the last couple of years of American indie rock bands with strong African influences. What do you think of them? Do you see yourselves as part of that?

LT: [sighs] I don't really feel like we're a part of that. I can't really speak for anyone else, but I don't really see ourselves as part of any lineage of what's happening in American indie rock or anything. We've been doing this band about three years or so now, and Lewis and I have been listening to world music our whole lives. So I don't know. It's coincidental, if anything. But if you listen to our music alongside some of the bands you're maybe thinking about, there's definitely a big difference. I can't think of another band that's drawing from so many different sources at the moment, in terms of incorporating African styles into pop music.

We're really devoted to lifting up this music and exposing this music to the world. So it's more about that than taking recognizable cues from styles and putting them into the mix for the sake of it. We're really inspired, and we see ourselves in this music, for whatever reason. So when it gets filtered through us, it's a very natural expression. There's really no thought about where we're standing in modern indie rock.

Fools Gold: Surprise Hotel

"Surprise Hotel" video: