Blonde Elvis are a pop band from Toronto led by Jesse James Laderoute. A fixture of the Toronto scene through his stint as the drummer in Slim Twig’s backing band and his contributions with his own projects to the city’s no wave and noise scenes, Laderoute began Blonde Elvis as a home recording project in 2013 to explore his interest in glam and psychedelia. The project evolved as he recruited a rotating cast of Toronto musicians to form a live band that quickly became a regular feature of the Toronto scene and garnered opening slots for Thee Oh Sees, Mac DeMarco, Ought, Alex Calder, Blue Hawaii, and Doldrums among others, despite releasing almost no recorded output.
In the summer 2014 Laderoute began making a more serious effort to realize the baroque pop ambitions of his bedroom demos in recording sessions with the band’s now solidified live line up. These sessions resulted in the single, “Slow Fall On Egypt,” which Pitchfork described as a collection of “Brit Invasion melodies, heavenly harmonies, bridge-crashing choruses, falsettoed middle-eights, and flute solos [stuffed] into two minutes flat, as if Robert Pollard was holding a gun to Laderoute’s head.”
