_
This unsettling California group specializes in half-hidden songs. On “Red State,” an intense but surprisingly pretty album released earlier this year, you can hear refracted echoes of punk rants and indie-rock ballads, surrounded by crashes and whispers and electronic gurgles.
- Kelefa Sanneh for the New York Times
One of the most innovative, original bands in Los Angeles… performance-wise they just can’t be touched. Gowns were recently included on the scene-defining Live At the Smell DVD where even there they stood apart from the pack.
- LAWeekly
One of the most heart-stoppingly great live bands on Earth.
- Pitchfork Media
Gown’s debut remains original… It is accomplished in creating disquieting atmosphere through dislocated frequencies, the squalor of fuzzy mics and faltering drones switched with short interludes of haunting acoustics.
- The Wire
After listening to the album dozens of times as a whole and to every song individually dozens of times more, I believe what they produced is unprecedented, peerless, and indeed perfect.
- Tiny Mix Tapes
This band is a myth in the making.
- Kicking_K for Plan B
Erika M. Anderson plays in Gowns and Some Dark Holler: she’s an incredible guitarist, a keen and serious shredder whose work I have always been a huge fan of. She’s a bright young artistic force in California as part of the punk and experimental scenes, though she is originally from South Dakota. My friend saw her play last week and wrote to me: “To see her play live is just, mind blowing. Literally Jessica, MIND BLOWING I felt like I was watching Jimi Hendrix.”
- Jessica Hopper
In an era where indie’s fetishes have been for composure, discretion, muscle, and nice shoes, Gowns’ agenda- to make a porno about confusion- is radical.
- Pitchfork Media
Holy fucking fuck. [Gowns are] the best thing I’ve seen this whole festival, and I need to see them again as soon as possible. In the three years I’ve covered CMJ, I’d never experienced a moment remotely like that one.
- The Village Voice
Gowns strikes a fiercely unstable balance between the simplicity of ’60s folk, the risk-taking experimentalism of early American no-wave and the no-mincing-of-words directness of ’90s grunge on its latest album, Red State.
- San Francisco Chronicle
Recorded in both Los Angeles and Anderson’s native South Dakota, Red State‘s rustic, yet eerie appeal makes perfect sense. While “Cherylee” and “Fake July” evoke an agrestic touch of backwoods living with their prickly chords, mollifying string work and looped chamber static, the threesome tweak the song structures into an emotional and raw-sounding betterment of basement noise.
- Performer Magazine
Gowns’ music dares to venture into alien haunts, the eerie intersections between past and present, the strange spaces where AOR rock meets the avant-garde, places where the trio finds quiet beauty and moments of bristling cacophony.
- SF Bay Guardian
It’s not quite freak. Nor is it ambient, noise, or drone. Imprecise tags like “art rock” or “experimental” are an injustice. It’s hard to state where “White Like Heaven” comes from, and it is precisely that inability to peg it down, that makes it so compelling. Yet, I never stopped playing ‘Red State’ one through ten…Slowly, I came to the realization, not only was “White Like Heaven” an elusive work of genius, so was the entirety of Red State.
- I Rock Cleveland
a disc that feels distinctly American, a fractured folk, its tendrils wet with the violated entrails of numerous other genres, music heavy with memory and hallucination…
- Dusted Magazine
Gowns comes from the Bay Area experimental scene with a debut that co-opts the very best of noise and folky psychedelia for a very modern-sounding pop…like Sonic Youth with better lyrics (both Anderson and band-mate Ezra Buchla are fantastic writers) and a smart aesthetic editor. Best thing about Red State is that no matter how out there the get, Gowns keep it free of deadweight and artsy BS; there’s an incredible sensibility about their music that shows they know when to quit and when to back off the electro-dissonance and get catchy again. This is some shockingly new-feeling music. Outstanding.
- Risen Magazine
Gowns are from the East Bay and their new record makes me feel good about things—that experimental music can be wildly new, smart, and catchy at the same time, and that records from people I don’t know can still make my blood pump like it should…
- Adam Gnade for Asthmatic Kitty
A mess up and twisted, original dusty jewel of a record, which managed to be memorable, psychedelic and darkly charming. A ramshackle master piece that is bound to sit somewhere or another in all it’s hunched glory on my end of year list.
- Roger Batty for Musique Machine
It’s not a low fidelity album, but there’s something about its intimacy and bedroom sonic wanderings that puts it at home with early ‘90s lo-fi underground recordings…the band shows an admirable willingness to explore and not always play it safe.
- Ernest Paik for the Chatanooga Pulse
Exactly what type of band Gowns are is difficult to conclude…they’ve erected a domain where they concurrently inhabits regions of noise, rock, drone, folk and free music without tipping into any camp too deeply. A large role is also played by electronics, giving the lo-fi production a feel closer to a computer crashing than a cassette tape breaking. Gowns are the sound of the eternal discord.
- Sean Rabin for Foxy Digitalis
Crazed-but-confident narrator Erika Anderson has an epiphany that takes her from kitchen table to a suburban road trip to a meditation on desire, the cracked secrets of the universe revealing themselves in between.
- KRISTAL HAWKINS for Paper Thin Walls
