Eyes Lips Eyes Final Show

A couple of weeks ago, the band Eyes Lips Eyes announced their final show, which is Oct 4th at Velour. This has brought a lot of different emotions from me. I am related directly to the band as the guitar player Spencer is my brother and the lead singer, Tony, is my cousin. It was always really cool to have a band that I really enjoyed the music of but also that I knew and was related to. It made the experience very exciting and it didn't help that a lot of the music that they created was fun and the shows they played were some of the more energetic and fun shows I've ever experienced. I'd love to go through the the beginning years when Elizabethan Report was just Spencer and Tony and on through the middle years and on to the end. This is just a short biographical view of the band from my perspective.

 Elizabethan Report was created as joke almost. Tony wanted to start writing as a sort of a college writing project for a class he was taking. Tony was 22 and Spencer was 18, just fresh out of high school in 2002. Already in a band himself, Spencer, an already phenom at the bass wanted to improve his guitar skills. I had received an acoustic guitar for Christmas several years previous and had never used, so Spence scooped that up to use. Spencer and Tony came up with their first song, "BYU Accousa-rock" to play at parties. This was in mockery of the number of
mediocre acoustic-rock BYU bands that littered the area at the time, the use of an acoustic guitar to woo women at parties, and to poke fun at some at BYU's honor code rules. This grew from one song to a few songs with Tony writing all of the lyrics and Spencer writing all of the melodies on the guitar. Tony's lyrics were often morbid, poetic, with a lot of alliteration involved, with odd phrases and words.  Spencer's melodies were fast and aggressive to fill all of the space with no bass or drums.  One song, named "Brassy Fist" had a fun, mellow melody throughout the song until the finale when it erupts into a hardcore death-metal rock ballad growling and yelling at the crowd and then stopping and exclaiming "love" at the end which seemed to always.  My favorite among the early writings was Invasive Orange and Carolina's Cut as the songs seemed to be more lively and a cut above the rest.  Watching Spence play the guitar on Carolina's Cut live at break neck speeds was a sight to see.  As with a lot of live performances, songs are sped up and I couldn't believe he could play and strum so fast.  I was always amazed.


 Instead of just singing, Tony decided to add another element, which was to get in people's faces and make them as uncomfortable as possible. I remember a specific party that was held at my parents house which involved a bunch of my married friends. Spencer and Tony showed up and decided to serenade the group with a song or two. This was a pretty conservative group that wasn't really excited to have Tony licking their faces and grinding up on them. The room had 15 or so people to begin and by the end of their second song the room was empty except for me. There was a lot of apologizing afterward, but I loved it.

 -To be continued-