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June 16, 2006

LOURDS tours; drummer Sarah Vasil, Transfer native, praised

Band getting rave reviews

By Courtney Anderson

TRANSFER — As if recording their first album weren’t exciting enough, LOURDS drummer and Transfer native Sarah Vasil received a “huge, huge, huge” compliment from Grammy-winning producer Ed Stasium while laying down tracks in Colorado.

“He said that in his whole experience in recording bands he’d never heard anyone come close to Keith Moon except for me,” Ms. Vasil said recently in a phone interview.

The Who drummer is Ms. Vasil’s idol and she didn’t quite believe her ears when Stasium made the comparison.

“I said, ‘Are you kidding me? Did you just say that?’” Ms. Vasil said from New York, where she and her bandmates live.

The current members of LOURDS have been together for about a year and a half, Ms. Vasil said. The band’s name comes from lead singer Lourds Lane, a violin prodigy who played Carnegie Hall at age 6 and started the Medusa Festival for female-fronted rock bands five years ago. Ms. Lane also plays electric violin, mandolin, piano and guitar in the group, which includes guitarist Gene Blank and bassist Joe Sagarese on backing vocals.

LOURDS is playing a show at Farone Brothers in Hermitage for Ms. Vasil’s hometown crowd June 23 between Cinncinnati and Pittsburgh performanes.

A 1995 graduate of Reynolds High School who got her first drumset at 13, Ms. Vasil turned down a couple of golf scholarships to pursue her love of music.

“I really, really wanted to be in a band, so I moved to Pittsburgh two days after graduation and joined a band,” said Ms. Vasil, who has also played with Sarastatic and The Drive, a group whose TLC reality show experience was covered by The Herald in July 2003.

LOURDS’ self-titled album was released by Breaking Records last month and has been getting rave reviews, most notably from Billboard Magazine.

“We’re definitely excited,” Ms. Vasil said, adding that their label is new and believes in the band. “They give us all creative freedom, which is unheard of these days.”

They’re touring regionally, and at home their stomping ground is the legendary CBGB’s. LOURDS recently taped live footage for the “Supergirl” video at The Whiskey in Los Angeles, said Ms. Vasil.

“It gets better and better every day,” Ms. Vasil said.

The ultimate goal for LOURDS is, of course, “world domination,” she said, laughing. A more immediate aim is for the band members to be able to quit their day jobs.

It’s hard for her to categorize their music, Ms. Vasil said, because “everyone says they’ve never heard anything like us before.” The only comparison people can make, she said, is usually to Queen because of LOURDS’ big, theatrical sound and shows.

LOURDS performances are “extremely high energy,” Ms. Vasil said.

“If I was in the audience and I saw this band, I’d think ‘I’d die to be in this band,’” she said.

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