Biography
Eddie Baranek serves as lead guitarist and vocalist for The Sights while sharing songwriting and vocal responsibilities with bassist Mark Leahey; the pair first began performing together at age thirteen and launched the band early in their final year of high school. Their debut concerts took place in the opening months of 1998, when both musicians were still minors and therefore unable to have personal memories of the late-1970s punk and new wave groups that most shaped their style—the Buzzcocks and the early Jam—or of the British mod acts such as the early Who and the Creation that had informed those bands. Eugene Strobe replaced a succession of earlier drummers in late 1999, bringing a wildly unrestrained, Keith Moon-inflected energy to the trio’s live shows.
That same year the youthful group tracked its first album, Are You Green?, at Jim Diamond’s Ghetto Recorders. Spectator Records, a modest Detroit independent, released the record in 2000, only to fold shortly afterward. Fall of Rome Records of Los Angeles reissued Are You Green? in 2001 and also put out the band’s 2002 follow-up, Got What We Want. Three years after that, the Sights delivered a self-titled album on New Line/Scratchie; the group resurfaced in 2010 with Most of What Follows Is True.
That same year the youthful group tracked its first album, Are You Green?, at Jim Diamond’s Ghetto Recorders. Spectator Records, a modest Detroit independent, released the record in 2000, only to fold shortly afterward. Fall of Rome Records of Los Angeles reissued Are You Green? in 2001 and also put out the band’s 2002 follow-up, Got What We Want. Three years after that, the Sights delivered a self-titled album on New Line/Scratchie; the group resurfaced in 2010 with Most of What Follows Is True.
Albums