209Vibe and The Record Newspaper's Aaron Davis interviews Levator

When you’ve got a name like Sky Lynn, you pretty much have no choice in life but to be the lead singer of a band. Period. Done.

Fortunately for Sky Lynn of Seattle’s Levator, she seems to have a knack for the whole frontwoman thing, in particular from a songwriting standpoint. The band’s newest album “The Biggest Waves Come at Night” seeps with the cherish and occasionally the anguish of an aged family photo album (not the digital kind you buy at Target).

“Last year was kind of a tough year – my grandma passed away, my dad got hit by a car, so I was going through all the things that that would entail,” Lynn said in a phone interview from a tour stop in San Jose, with bandmates Nate Henry and Rando Skrasek hanging out on speaker phone.

“We started the record in my grandma’s old house before the family sold it, so it kind of was a way for me to capture some of those memories and feelings,” she said. “Even though some of the songs aren’t necessarily about those subjects, it’s like my own personal scrapbook.”

Henry and Skrasek were more than happy to lend their chops to the faded edges of the band’s third record (the first as a collaboration between these three), making Levator a much-buzzed Emerald City export that’s garnering heavier radio play and filling more and more iPods these days.

Levator (pronounced like “elevator” without the e) performs at the Plea For Peace Center on Wednesday, February 18, joined by budding Manteca singer/songwriter Travis Vick, as well as Sacramento’s Sulky Darky.

Plea for Peace is at 630 E. Weber Ave. in Stockton. The show gets rolling at 7 p.m., and admission is $6 ($2 annual membership fee required).

Just give a listen to the first track on “Biggest Waves,” entitled “12:34” (and no, that’s not a rip-off of Feist’s “1234”, I checked) and you’ll probably have this as the first thought: “Woah, easy on the Pink Floyd!”

“I don’t know if it was intentional, but I could see how it would seep out; we all love our Pink Floyd,” said Henry, amid chuckling from the rest of the band. Henry green lights the beginning of the record with a primal, narcotic saxophone riff that packs hazy undertones of “Wish You Were Here.”

From there, Levator takes off on a spinning sonic siesta of Lynn’s ethereally aching vocals and raw, salt-of-the-Earth guitar licks, with Henry and Skrasek applying an intricate rhythmic landscape.

It’s what a Pink Floyd record might have sounded like inside Hunter S. Thompson’s head whilst driving through Barstow, on the edge of the desert – but before he reaches bat country.

They’re also the kind of band (that doesn’t play ska music) that reaffirms how much of an enigmatically powerful instrument the saxophone can be when correctly applied in rock music.

“I’ve been playing (sax) for over 20 years; I kind of gave it up for a little while, when all my friends started playing in bands,” Henry said. “I was like ‘screw this, I can play the sax with you easier than I can learn another instrument.’

“I kind of forced it on them,” he added, again met with laughter from the band, further demonstrating that nothing this band does appears to be “forced” at all.

BAND WEBSITE: www.myspace.com/levator.

Click here for actual Site