Features

Spotlight: The London Souls

On Tuesday November 9, The London Souls will join Alberta Cross on a Rocks Off Concert Cruise presented by Cameo Gallery, John Varvatos and Relix.

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If you live in the New York City area, you’ve had ample opportunity to see The London Souls over the past two years, which is to say, you’ve been able to watch them incubate. If you don’t, then get ready: with a full-length album (at last), national touring plans (at last), it’s time for the trio to spread the fuss.

And it’s quite a fuss. Tag them as funky R&B, groovy blues or throbbing garage rock and you wouldn’t be wrong, but you wouldn’t be completely right either. One way to think about the trio, whose members are all younger than 25 and whose name nods to the homeland of its many ‘60s and ‘70s musical heroes, is as a groove-driven hybrid of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Sly & The Family Stone and the raw, early Led Zeppelin—with all of the soul, guitar acrobatics, rhythmic horsepower and sonic heft that this implies.

“I’d been talking to [drummer] Chris [St. Hillaire] about starting this band and I’d lined a gig up downtown,” recalls vocalist/guitarist Tash Neal of the band’s 2008 founding. “We hadn’t even played together, so we went over a couple songs over the phone. It was an awesome show.” He pauses for a moment before turning to bassist/falsetto crooner Kyoshi Matsuyama to say, “I think it was an awesome show?”

“It was,” confirms Matsuyama who joined the group via former guitarist Tom Cumming. “But I didn’t even know Tash before I got there. I think he thought I was the sound guy. But soon we were playing, and we were right there: ‘Do you know this song? Do you know that song?’”

St. Hillaire chimes in, too: “I was rummaging through my basement the other day, and I found a VHS tape of that show. It was an awesome show. It was our very first show, at Kenny’s Castaways [in New York City].”

All three live in New York now, but Neal is the true local—a Manhattanite from birth. St. Hillaire hails from Sharon, Mass., near Boston’s South Shore, while Matsuyama is from Huntington, N.Y., on Long Island. St. Hillaire and Neal already knew each other before forming the band, but it was actually the band’s former fourth member—guitarist Cumming—who provided the initial cohesion having known Matsuyama as a schoolmate. After Cumming left the band, The London Souls briefly thought about replacing him but soon decided that a power trio was the way to go.

“We changed a lot, arrangement-wise,” St. Hillaire says. “It was kind of the same roots, but more guitar-driven, and a lot of harmonies. I think it’s aggressive now.”