Las Vegas Weekly

October 6, 2008 · 7:51 PM

Acoustic Strip gig leads to record deal for Left Standing

By Allison Duck

Photo: PAZ Photography

It’s the stuff that local rock dreams are made of. A local band plays a local show and ends the night signing their names to a recording contract. It never happens, well, almost never.

It started when the folks at Tom Kat Records took a liking to unsigned Vegas band Left Standing. After seeing them play once, they came to watch Left Standing’s Las Vegas Weekly-sponsored Acoustic Strip show at House of Blues a few weeks ago, and then everything fell right into place. “They brought the contract and wanted to sign right there on the spot,” said band manager Json Alles. “So we signed the contract out in front of the stage there at the House of Blues. It was great.”

Left Standing are the latest local group to get signed and join an elite cast of Vegas bands like The Cab, The Higher and Escape the Fate who have all been gaining attention on a national level. The alt-rock quintet has been playing together since 2002 and names The White Stripes, Ben Harper and Ryan Adams among their musical influences. Now that they’ve signed with Tom Kat Records with distribution by DSN Music, Left Standing will be hitting the studio this weekend to start work on a new album, the first of two on the Tom Kat label per their two-album deal. The album was originally slated to come out in January of 2009, but it was pushed back recently to allow the band to record with their engineer, Matt Brewig, who had received some good news of his own when The Killers asked him to join them on tour. They’ll begin work on the album at local recording studio Up Front Studios and will wait for Brewig to finish the album when his commitment with The Killers is completed.

Guy W. Giuliano, president of Tom Kat Records | DSN Music has nothing but good things to say about the hometown rockers. "Left Standing is well known and respected in the Vegas music scene, now we're going to give them a platform for a global audience," The group will return to the House of Blues for another Acoustic Strip performance on November 13. In the meantime, they plan on keeping their day jobs as they focus on the task of recording.

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