Another set of lovebirds will rock Roustabout! with what VanFossan described as an "exotic, whispy, female-jangle pop" kind of sound.
The Mosquitos were born when singer/guitarist Chris Root heard the hum, incidentally, of Brazilian singer Juju Stulbach, while they were helping a friend shoot a student film.
"She was out on the fire escape and she was the star of the movie," Root said. "I went out for a cigarette and she was humming, and she just had this beautiful voice and she was wearing this beautiful dress. It was a love-at-first-sight kind of thing."
Unfortunately, Stulbach moved from the city back to Rio de Janeiro a couple of months later without a romance striking between her and Root -- but the musician couldn't get her voice, or her, out of his head.
"She wrote me a postcard to say she liked a CD I had given her," Root said. "So, I asked her if I could come down to Rio and make some music with her. She thought I was insane."
Stulbach said she didn't know what to think of Root's inquiry. At the time, she was an actress and dancer and wasn't all that comfortable singing. "She said, 'But I don't sing' and so I said sing this: 'La, la, la,' " Root said, singing a few notes. "She did and I told her she'd be fine. I went down to Rio and we took a guitar to the beach and wrote some music."
The core of the group's self-titled debut album was created on the beaches of Rio that weekend in what Root describes on the Mosquitos' Web site as a love letter to Juju. "Our sound is just kind of what it is," Root said. "It's a mixture between our different cultures; it's rock, bossa nova and Brazilian."
When Root went back to the city, leaving Stulbach once again, he asked the co-producer of his band AM Sixty, Jon Marshall Smith, to help him work on the tunes he and Stulbach created.
"The songs were really rough with just vocals and guitar, so I asked Jon to help me produce it," Root said. "He helped work on some keyboard parts and I decided to ask him to join instead of just having him produce the record."
When the album took off, and received a rave review in Rolling Stone, Stulbach returned to the United States and Root finally got his wish -- he began writing music with Stulbach, his new girlfriend. "We've been dating now for about two and a half years and with us, it just works," Stulbach said. "We live together, we get to talk and write songs. It's a partnership and I feel blessed."
The group just released a new CD titled Sunshine Barato, which translates in Spanish to "cheap sunshine," but Stulbach described the meaning further.
"In Brazil, if there's a party or event and it's really fun we use the word barato," she said. "It explains having a good time. It suits our music because our album is like making sunshine into music. And the whole album was written on a beach."
Since then, the group has been traveling nationwide. Stulbach said she likes traveling, although she didn't know what to expect from it at first.
"I think it was more romantic in my mind," she said. "There are definitely lots of new things to see and learn. I like mostly everywhere we go, but I love the West Coast and the South -- the warm weather reminds me of home."
Hopefully, Stulbach won't hold the weather against State College tonight.
