Bill Gillim is one of the last people you’d peg as a man who would work in the vibrant, warm air of a falsetto. He and Justin Hawkins of The Darkness and Freddie Mercury share few similarities, though the three might share some thinning hair if Gillim didn’t choose to cut the situation off at the pass by going with the tightly shorn look already. He’s not at all flamboyant, just modest in a plain white tee-shirt and jeans, not form-hugging cat suits or chest hair exposing girlie shirts. He’s a guy with above average deepness to his regular speaking voice, throwing you into a tailspin when “Other Girls” kicks in. Putting voices to faces has always been a no-win situation. Enough superficiality already, this Brooklyn band is more than a voice – even if it is a soaring and distinctive one. They evoke a mood of drunken revelry before it gets too sloppy. They evoke a stance of lady-loving for the sake of the goodtime feel – the Sam Malone take on the fairer sex, not the Biggie Smalls take. The day we recorded this session – July 28th, a Saturday afternoon as temperatures outside breathed fire – was a busy day in the Quad-Cities as the area celebrated the legacy of jazz great and hometown boy Leon Bix Beiderbecke (a heavy influence for Miles Davis and Louis Armstrong) with a seven-mile road race and a jazz festival all named after the man who played the cornet with a coolness that has been admired through the decades since Bix passed at the age of 28. Tigercity brought a different kind of cool here that weekend and played it with some untrustworthy synths, which shorted out and fuzzed all over themselves at mere touches. So, what’d we do, we fixed them up good. Brad broke out the soldering iron and went to work all MacGuyver style on the synths in question. We now have four friends for life. Also of interest to the band during their visit was spread about St. Vincent in the newest issue of Filter magazine. – Sean Moeller

First song
Other Girls (Tigercity) [3.49MB] [1306 downloads]


– original version appears on Pretend Not To Love
We set out to make a concise rock influenced pop song with an exaggerated look at the fantastical NYC nightlife. We were actually trying to write a song for our friends STYLOFONE, and this one popped out and we were like, “Uhhh, we’ll take that one.” “Other Girls” is the third track on our new EP Pretend Not to Love, which was just released on iTunes.