During the moments I spent with Matthew Correia, Spencer Dunham, Miles Michaud and Pedrum Siadatian, the four members who make up LA’s blistering new talent the Allah-Las, one thing was for certain – the quartet like the Rolling Stones. A lot.

“Why do I like the Stones so much? Where do I start,” Pedrum says. “I’d like to return to this question tomorrow.”

Eventually, Siadatian talks about how they changed with their environment, how they innovated music. When we all sat down for an interview during SXSW, the environment was intimate. Just a bunch of the bands friends, sitting around a fire at the house they rented in North Austin, with good food and booze.

Mid-interview, Spencer’s phone goes off.

“His ringtone is Matthew McConaughey playing bongos,” Pedrum laughs.

Miles: McConaughey, I love that guy.

Pedrum: He’s a free spirit man.

Matt: He is his Dazed and Confused character.

McConaughey playing the bongos is reminiscent of the music Allah-Las create. Free and loose with riffs that allow you to move your body, sway to your ears vibrations, get lost in the melody of the music. The longevity of Allah-Las seems to be infinite. We talked of the tour they just finished in Russia, the name they’ve chosen and the controversy that’s stirred around it and what’s next for the rising young band. 

Kristen Blanton: How was the bands name Allah-Las developed?

Miles: We had been trying to come up with names for a long time.

Pedrum: I was to dig up those old emails of us sending back and forth lists of names. Oh man, “The Florists.” Spencer had a really funny one.

Spencer: I had some bad ones.

Pedrum: We all had really bad ones but they felt representative of us.

Matt: “Hidden Gypsies.” Spencer had like, “Pillow Fight” or something like that and I had something like “The Holy Barbarians” which is too epic sounding.

KB: So who came up with Allah-Las?

Pedrum: We were listening to a lot of Middle Eastern garage stuff.

Spencer: Miles came up with the name.

Miles: When I thought if it, it sounded like a good name “Allah-Las.” It rolled off the tongue and to me it was interesting to mix this word “Allah” that has a very loaded feeling to it. It’s a word that a lot of people carry a lot of emotion with and to mix it with something like “las” and make it sonorous, it makes you think twice to how you feel about the word Allah. It appealed to me for that reason I suppose.

Matt: It also reminded us of the Shangri-Las and the Las, two different bands. I think we pull from those eras a lot.

Miles: We’ve had negative responses. There’s been a lot of hate generated from our name having the word Allah in it.

Pedrum: Yeah, mostly in YouTube comments. We’ve seen like, “I’m going to bomb your house.” Verbatim it was like, “I am pleased to bomb your house.”

Matt: They’ve also just said, “Change your name.”

Miles: I really think it’s good to open that line of dialogue. Hopefully if people think it is so offensive to them, the only way that is going to be bridged by a mutual understanding of, “Yeah maybe your offended by us using the word Allah, but at the same time we have our own beliefs and we believe that these words should be freely used.” Only with that kind of mutual understanding will any kind of conflict be resolved.

Matt: These big schemes weren’t thought of at the beginning of course. We wanted to have a name so we knew what we were going to call ourselves at some Halloween show we were playing.

Pedrum: Initially we just thought it was clever. That was it. But now we’ve attached all these other things to make it as epic as possible.

KB: You had mentioned yesterday how LA is in the name. I thought that was interesting.

Pedrum: L.A. is in it a lot actually.

Matt – There’s a place in L.A., it use to exist actually, called the Gardens of Allah and it was a place that Hollywood celebrities, like Fitzgerald use to hang out there. Now it’s a mini-mall, but “lost-Angeles” things, themes like that corresponded to the kind of music that we make.

KB: Your lyrics are heavy in spaces but the music is so free and up. Is this a cathartic move?

Miles: When we were writing songs, it wasn’t just anyone person. It was all of us writing together. The music we were coming up with, probably courtesy of Pedrum, was of a certain type. It was a lot groovier than maybe fit the type of lyrics that I paired along with them but our songwriting process was simple. We would get together and start playing riffs, then build off of that. The music was always very upbeat because that’s something we all appreciate but the lyrics were something that reflected what I was feeling at the time. Though it didn’t correlate directly with the music maybe that’s for the better.

KB: How old were you when you picked up the instrument you play now?

Pedrum: I got my first guitar what I was in seventh grade.

Miles: I got my first electric when I was 10, 11.

Matt: I started playing drums with these guys actually. Spenser’s dad sold me his drum set. I’d never played drums but I thought I could play drums. I don’t know much about drumming. I still have a primitive style.

Spencer: I played guitar when I was a teenager and started playing bass when the band formed because there was no bassist.

Pedrum: Some of the riffs are Spencer’s riffs even though he’s the bassist. “Vis-A-Vis” and “No Voodoo” are his riffs.

Matt: We also all like vocals, we do a lot of back ups, and it’s something we enjoy.

KB: That switch up that you do. Matt you sing and Miles plays the drums.

Matt: Yeah I sing one song, one of the first songs that we started playing. “Long Journey.”

Pedrum: Spencer also sings one song on the album, he sings “Vis-A-Vis.” He wrote pretty much everything for that song. And Miles wrote pretty much everything for “Sandy.”

KB: Where do you want your sound to go?

Matt: I think as long as it’s what we want it to sound like then it’s right. If we like what we’re doing than that’s fine. I couldn’t understand anybody not doing that. I guess that’s just a rule of thumb thing. We want it to sound like something we would listen to.

Pedrum: And we don’t want to necessarily say, “We want it to sound like this,” we just want it to sound like something we’re proud of and that can’t really be put into a specific genre because we haven’t necessarily made it yet, you know?

Matt: What we like is always getting added on to and changing a bit. It might not be much but it’s always evolving with different sounds that we’re hearing right now and things we uncover from the past.

Miles: I’ve found that the one thing that is continuous throughout our music is that we are only happy with things that we would want to hear outside of ourselves playing them. That’s the final criteria for us. If we don’t like it, forget about it, it’s done. Sometimes it takes us some time to get something we really like but when we do, we know it’s right.

KB: Are you working on new material?

Pedrum: Yeah, we worked on a single before we left for Austin. We need to finish mixing it and we have more recording we need to do before the end of the year. It’s a matter of finding the time. We’re going to Europe in a few months.

KB: And Reverberation, all week I’ve heard you guys talk about it – tell me about it.

Matt: For the rest of the year we’re going to be going on tour with the Black Angels in the U.S. and then we’re going to Europe in May playing Mediterranean and Scandinavian cities and we’re going to be working on our podcast, Reverberation. It’s a weekly podcast we share and take turns doing with a rotating cast. Well, about four or five of our friends, some play music some don’t. And that’s our year.