Introducing The Legal Immigrants

New York, NY (Top40 Charts) One of the first things that come to mind when you listen to music is its inherent permanence. Genres change and adapt, and bands rise and quietly disappear--but the music stays and allows us to re-live any number of particular memories like they just happened. And for Grand Rapids, Michigan-based rock group, The Legal Immigrants, this idea of music as constant moving force is what drives and inspires their own densely packed classic rock aesthetic and its subsequent twisting rhythmic branches.

The band consists of frontman Joe Bockheim, lead guitarist Ben Taber, bassist Kevin Kitsch, and drummer Marcus James. Joe started the band in 2009 with some friends and through a series of amicable lineup changes the band took its current form. Craigslist is to thank for the fellas coming together.

Drawing inspiration from bands both then and now, The Legal Immigrants found their own distinctive sound, and through this classic rock/garage amalgam, they fashioned a bridge between a particular late '70s rock production and more modern and serrated indie rock rhythms. The band boasts threesong writers, three singers, and one drummer that smiles the entire show.

Attracted to the sound that analog recording could provide, the band recorded, mixed and mastered their new record on tape, which forced them to be very tight (or loose) and exact (or inexact) in their performances. Recorded at Goon Lagoon Studios in Grand Rapids with producer Dick Chiclet, TLI promises to never make the same record twice.

Their songs are virulent and ragged but possess a certain pop foundation which gives them an aptitude for clinging to your brain for days. Sinewy guitar riffs and vocals that carry the rise and fall among the tracks, giving their records an ageless appearance, but one that also doesn't feel mired in the past.