Amelia

In many ways, Portland band Amelia is the second coming of a band called the Flatirons in which guitarist Scott Weddle, drummer Richard Cuellar, and bassist Jesse Emerson all played -- until Emerson was fired and the Flatirons subsequently squabbled themselves to pieces. Its members went their separate ways, until Weddle, who had been working as a session musician in LA, began playing and writing music with Teisha Helgerson, a dusky-voiced torch singer who'd previously worked primarily in R&B. Things were going so well between the two of them that Weddle contacted Cuellar and Emerson and asked them to join them in forming a new band, which they called Amelia. And other than three-quarters of its members' shared history, that's really where the overlap with the Flatirons ends. Where the Flatirons were all bickering and back-biting, the former Flatirons in Amelia have learned from their mistakes and endeavor to make their new band egalitarian, sharing songwriting and production duties. Meanwhile, the Flatirons twang-rock has been replaced with a hazy, deliciously lazy jazz-meets-cabaret-meets-alt-country swing.