REWIND: GENTLEMEN’S CHOICE

Every Friday, we hit rewind to visit one of our older playlists. The following is one of our favorites from the Loudcrowd vaults. Max and D.A., AKA soon-to-be-crazy-famous Chester French, dropped by our office in Cambridge, MA to play the site and chat last month. Max made some online friends while D.A. asked a lot of questions — as you’ll see in the exclusive awesome video we took. Plus, check our new C.F.-infused playlist, including three sweet jams from the group plus equally seductive tunes from the likes of Lissy Trullie and Tame Impala.

Maxwell Drummey plays many instruments while Andrew “D.A.” Wallach is the lead vocalist, and together these plucky dudes write these pleasant songs that are kind of languid and energizing at the same time. That was my fancy way of saying their music is sexy.

My father always told me to never trust a Harvard graduate, which makes sense since he went there himself (doing ROTC duty to pay for it during Vietnam era, in fact). The two dudes from Chester French not only met at Harvard, but they named their group after a sculptor. Before that sounds all high falutin’ and hoity toity, the sculptor in question was Daniel Chester French, the very American and kick-ass dude who designed the Lincoln Memorial. Though, actually, it’s still pretty high falutin’.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I was very skeptical at first about these guys. My mother always told me to never trust anyone with two first names. Though it probably doesn’t count when the person in question is not a person but rather a band, and the band is named after the person who also responsible for the  Lexington & Concord Minuteman sculpture.

My younger sister always told me that I was kind of full of shit, which means that I can finally give up this ridiculous game of starting each paragraph off like this, besides I was running out of family members. But the fact that when Chester French were seniors in college they sent out their music to everyone they could think of and it wound up being seriously dug by the likes of Perez Hilton, Jermaine Dupri and friggin Kanye West — that’s pretty remarkable.

That then these dudes’ music was the subject of a bidding war between labels run by Dupri and Pharrell from the Neptunes is almost unbelievable. I’d almost say you should take my older sister’s advice and not believe a word I’m saying — but in this case it’s true!

—DJ Yeti