Mirror Pal

"Let me tell you, this lineup is pretty damned good. I've had the privilege of not only seeing the headliners, Mirror Pal, play a few times, but also hanging out with them. The one thing I can definitively say about the entire band is that they let their music reflect their love of life, and it comes out as a beautifully correlative sound from independent directions. These guys do nothing short of jam you out into the dance floor. They make a sound you have to feel. So if you had anything to do on the 16th, you might want to change your plans and come see an amazing show. It's way cheap, and probably one of the most talented set of local bands in one place that you'll see all year.

This entire lineup will undoubtedly prove to rock out your night in a stellar fashion. So come chill with us at Backbooth on the 16th, and rejuvenate your life. If you haven't experienced the allure of any of these bands, you can check out any of their myspace's and see what they're all about." - CFLBARS.com

Talk about regeneration. On May 2, at a Back Booth–hosted battle of the bands, I was told that one of Orlando’s best all-around bands, Summerbirds in the Cellar, had broken up. For years, the Summerbirds stood as one of the most complete indie-rock acts around, equally adept at studio polish and blistering live shows that were so honed and ready for large venues that they opened for R.E.M. at SXSW. This city has always boasted a deep roster of potential heirs to their throne, but none displayed the kind of bigger-than-life presence needed to fill their shoes.

As if on cue later that night, the eventual winners of the months-long round of battles, Mirror Pal, took the stage and shoehorned their way into Tyson Bodiford and company’s sneakers. Fronted by Drew Yardis, who steers his stentorian quiver expertly through the choppy fervor of Mirror Pal’s reverb-heavy weightlessness, the band performed with the gravitas of natural-born rock stars. It was an unexpected twist in their relatively short history and left me slack-jawed – a feeling that remains after having experienced their debut LP, We Are.

As the title suggests, the album is a statement of identity; Mirror Pal’s intermittent demo tracks over the last couple of years have swung wildly from trip-hop to twee pop to everything in between. They’ve landed on a room-filling kind of atmospheric rock that incorporates everything they’ve been toying with and takes it for a long walk.

We Are’s opening track, “What About Plan B?,” is the rocker with breathing room that their tightly produced live show has always begged for. Yardis sets his Jeff Buckley yowl on a rocket ship toward outer space and the results are both rousing and chill-inducing. “Shoes and Socks” and “Caught in the Trees” settle comfortably into a rainy-day groove that transitions nicely into the album’s halfway milestone: an overblown orchestral break with the appropriately pretentious title “Spectrum/Pulse/Patterns: A Message from Andromeda.” If the band at the reins were any less eccentric, the instrumental would come off as self-indulgent and doom the album. Mirror Pal’s spaced-out sound often demands an obsessive control over mood, and it’s a credit to the band that they’re bold enough to maintain it.

We Are’s second half slows to an introspective crawl that remains just as fascinating as the rollicking first half. Songs like “The Night the Stars Counted Us” and album closer “The Itch” riff with a swishing melodic sensibility and commanding contributions from the excellent musicians behind Yardis. The band misses a golden opportunity, though, on the more stripped-down experiments “Can You Try?” and “Watch This.” These are a couple of fantastic, straightforward rock compositions that require an equally raw Yardis, but the production never eases off the layers of effects on his voice. There are times to strap yourself to that rocket ship and times to let yourself fall to the Earth, and if there’s room for improvement anywhere on We Are, it’s in developing that free-falling courage.

As a whole, however, We Are announces Mirror Pal as a force to be reckoned with – locally, and possibly on a national level as well. It’s the walking-the-walk record they needed to make Orlando’s A-list, and they’re nearing the top. - Orlando Weekly

"Mirror Pal considers their music a candidate for the forgotten genre of "Other" first and foremost, followed by alternative and ambient. This collection of subtle misnomers could be more easily identified in the category of "Avant Garde," or quite simpler - "Art unlike anything you've ever heard of before." Now that's music that sounds attractive. During their brief existence, Mirror Pal has enlightened Central Florida of the appeal of abnormality by dousing the Orlando music scene with a dash of originality and creativeness. Needless to say, their song "Effection" could be mistook for a Radiohead tune, which is a sign of their mass appeal to the artistic underground. Their style is so individually ambiguous that I have heard a fan describe them as "Incubus meets Circa Survive." Judge for yourself." -Rock For Hunger

- Rock For Hunger Fest Website

"Mirror Pal's indie rock impressed me with its patient ambience, their paranoid fretboards begging to hitch a ride on the gelled light beam from a stadium stage rather than bouncing back at them from a dozen ass-soaked barstools The Jeff Buckley countertenor of singer Drew Yardis leads Mirror Pal's rabbit-hole tracks: the foreboding trip-hop "When These Walls Are Down," the sarcastically midtempo "Shoes and Socks" ("This sidewalk ends on this first floor/Just write it off like you don't care/'cause you don't"), which devolves into a minor-chord nightmare of clutter and primal cries, or the Kid A anxiety of "Hands Behind Your Back" ("I give out/I give in/What you took from them isn't that which you intend")"- Orlando Weekly - Orlando Weekly