Biography
Adel Bengo was born on December 16, 1987, and has secretly been making music somewhere in the outskirts of Jacksonville, Florida since she was a child. It began with layering cassette tapes on her parents’ broken karaoke machine until all quality was lost forever, alone with her dog and sister on summer vacations, usually sitting in the patio of a backyard that was being overrun by wildflowers, with the hum of distant prop planes overhead (they lived near a little uncontrolled airport.) The music she makes today is still young music, which can be described as lazy rocknroll/garage pop/lo-fi-alt-country-folk-punk whatever. She is usually found making these recordings in her bedroom alone, keeping the first takes even if that meant feedback, pops, untuned guitars, or any other screw ups on the master tape.
Adel began playing shows with her high school band in 2005 and made her first release under the independent record label, Discos Mariscos. It was available as a 7” called “Hoping That You’re Lonely,” recorded with her friends using an mp3 player voice recorder. They played over a dozen shows and didn’t plan for the future. After they disbanded Adel self-released a full length LP in 2008 titled 630AM, which chronicled a relationship that began and ended the previous year. The LP is literally tracklisted in the order the songs were written, and were recorded just for fun over the months, Adel playing all the different parts herself. Little did she know that if she strung it all together on a record it would become this documentation of young times, “the morning of our lives!” What you get is a coming of age story that begins selfish in isolation, and finds happiness and consolation in the past as well as the future, by the album’s end.
Her latest release is titled When You Were Young released under the moniker, XMAS. It is a collection of songs sparsely written over the course of two years, documenting a sort of life after a life, the sort of motions a person goes through after overcoming the pains of young love, realizing you’re actually going to have to deal with it for a long time, if not forever. So there is the adventure of trying to stay happy, busy, tired, strong, and overwhelmingly thankful for every experience to the point of tears, falling in love with some big nothing, some sweet nothing, rather than remaining embittered by heartbreak. There is a warmth that leaves your stereo and wraps around you, makes you lonely, and happy to have felt it it.
XMAS is a young voice strung onto endearing words. The music begs you to enjoy good times, but to enjoy your depressions, too.
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