Mikel Jollett is quickly becoming a very well-travelled musician. Simply going through his shopping list of intercontinental stops – “Japan, South Korea, Ireland, Slovakia” – makes the intrepid explorer in me envious. Though, his upcoming destination surpasses them all in sheer majestic value.

“Tonight, we drive to Cleveland.”

Calling from a place a bit closer, yet still relatively far, from his hometown of Los Angeles, the frontman for The Airborne Toxic Event sounds nonchalant about his day-long interviewing schedule. He talks casually about how 5000 Japanese fans sing along to his music and the nature of playing small shows. On their debut Australian tour for Gosford’s Coaster Festival, he’s learned how quickly a band’s name can grow.

“We played around Los Angeles a lot. But even before then, we sent some MP3s to some bloggers. So at the first show we played, there were a couple of hundred people. Within a few months, we were already playing to around four, five hundred people!”

The Airborne Toxic Event boasts a grandiose sound that stands somewhere close to Arcade Fire’s orchestral pop, with heavily delayed guitar riffs and the screaming falsettos of Jollett. Single Sometime Around Midnight sounds like U2’s return to smoky clubs from years of stadiums.

The band themselves come from a different scene from what you’d expect; they’re not from Brooklyn or downtown LA. Instead, they’ve come from East Los Angeles – in their subjective opinion a more open community musically.

“Everyone sits in with everyone else and one week you’re playing guitar for one band. The next week, you’re doing their sound, y’know. It’s a very close-knit group and there are just so many bands. There’s a real sense of this being an explosive place because there’s so many people making music.”

He starts to talk about some of his favourites from the scene, including The Henry Clay People, who he describes as “What would happen if Bruce Springsteen and Pavement got into a fistfight on-stage.” Whilst in a good mood, I direct him to a slightly more divisive topic: the scathing 1.6-scoring review they received from Pitchfork and their subsequent open-letter response. He looks back at the issue with much more of a level-head, yet he stands his ground firmly.

“We just didn’t understand the animosity. We thought [the reviewer] was confused with another band. We’d gotten a few bad reviews, but most reviews we’d gotten were really, really positive. A lot of – œCD of the Year’ kind of whatevers. And there were definitely one or two people who were pretty irked by it. But they weren’t mad about it. This guy, it seemed like he had an axe to grind.

“I remember saying to myself: – œWhat’s he so pissed about?’ But now, I see he was madder at an idea. I mean, he saw that we were on the radio and wore black and he decided that we were a certain type of band because of that. He must’ve thought we were from the downtown LA scene, like No Age, which is much more noise rock and experimental. But we’re just not that – we’re more classic indie rock. He also thought we were on a major label and we weren’t.”

With that said, he takes a stab at the website’s editorial policies for allowing such things to be said. “It was sort of irresponsible for Pitchfork to publish something without fact checking. It’s like Fox News.”

Nevertheless, Jollett remains adamant that the critical reception to The Airborne Toxic Event is yet to affect his band. In his words, he still takes any review – positive or negative – with a grain of salt. “It’s sort of like if you woke up this morning and someone said, – œHey, you look really handsome today!’ You feel good for five minutes then you go on with your day. Similarly, if someone gives you a bad review, it’s sort of like someone saying, – œDamn, you look really shit today!’ You can’t worry too much about what people think one way or the other.”

One clear sign of Jollet’s resilience is his eagerness to record new material with The Airborne Toxic Event. “We have all these songs, and we can’t wait to put them down on record. There are a lot of different ideas and a lot of different sounds. We’ve been playing a lot of it live, and the audience has really been feeling the energy in these new songs.”

You can catch The Airborne Toxic Event at the following shows in September.

Wednesday 9 September – East Brunswick Club, Melbourne
Thursday 10 September – The Zoo, Brisbane
Friday 11 September – Oxford Art Factory, Sydney
Saturday 12 September – Coaster Festival, Gosford Showgrounds