I knew Austin Tally from when he played in another band that I recorded a few years ago. They were pretty folksy. When I heard he was in a new band I instantly wanted to get in touch and see what they were about. He send over a cassette. It was pretty jangly and weird. I dug it. But it wasn’t until they came in for the microshow last month I truly understood what was going on. There are serious pop hooks going on underneath all the thick yet detailed sludge of guitars. I keep hearing early 90s Dinosaur Jr. & Smashing Pumpkins with out all the drama, bombast and crazy tempos. There’s room to take a breath. And there is an articulation to the songwriting one can totally sink their teeth in to.

Wing Dam is Austin (Soft Cat, Omoo Omoo, Silent Whys) on vocals and guitars, Sara Autrey (Dan Deacon, Bitch Cave, Which Magic), who plays bass and sings and other various sundries in an amalgum of other bands is amazing talented and a super swell person and Abram Sanders (Lower Dens, The Snails) is their drummer and does just that. He’s an incredible drummer with a great sense of time and focus and at the end of the day can still be heard over Austin and Sara’s bombast of destruction.

Please enjoy this microshow like I have been for the past month.

Abram Sanders – drums
Sara Autrey – bass guitar / vocals
Austin Tally – guitar / vocals

Engineered by Sean Mercer
Mixed by Mat Leffler-Schulman

Download MP3s - 76 MB

(more…)

America opens with a blast of distorted noise, which shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. Dan Deacon’s playfulness has always been balanced with a certain harshness. Squealing synths dominated the high end while the low end kept things propulsive and danceable. If Dan Deacon’s music poked our nostalgic pleasure centers — reminding us of Kool-Aid soaked bean bags in front of afternoon cartoons — his music also brought to mind the ensuing sugar headache.

But on America the static and the squeals give way for precise percussion, orchestral winds and strings, and long vocal melodies. The harshness hangs back in the mix, allowing the listener to hear all those intricate rhythms, making good on his promise to bring classical minimalism and pop maximalism together. All the polyrhythms and marimbas bring to mind Steve Reich, while the opening of the epic, four-part “USA” sounds like a Koyaanisqatsi outtake.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Don’t be mistaken, though, Dan Deacon still marries seriousness with catchiness and pop pleasure. It all comes together best on “True Thrush.” The track starts with some micro-looping a la The Field, but then the song settles into something that sounds more like vintage Caribou. Then, like clouds parting for the sun, a big wordless melody comes floating over everything.
(more…)

Dave Jacober’s solo identity away from the Dan Deacon Ensemble, Holy Ghost Party and Dope Body is called Jacober. I mastered Jacober’s debut record due out on Friends Records. Aside from being a swell guy, an amazing drummer and a great arranger, he’s put out a collection of very interesting music.

“in a swirling bedlam of melting pastels and exotic sea life of the living room tank variety. The slow churn and complexity of Brown’s visualization seems to match Jacober’s colorful poptronica and even suits his understated delivery, though all good things come to an end and eventually the maelstrom melts over him in a consuming pink tide first, then allowing an upside down gathering of jellyfish to shift into gear.” – Decoder Magazine.

Here are two of my favorite tracks from Water Karaoke:

Set Adrift

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Steps

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Instrumental post-rock band, We Used To Be Family, came in last week and completely redesigned what they do as a band. They added acoustic guitars, glockenspiel and VOCALS. It’s what a microshow was designed for! One of my highlights was their cover of Philip Glass’s Knee Play 5, in which audience members read lyrics to songs by artists born or having lived in Baltimore. It’s magnificent and exemplary of how a microshow should be!

The songs read during Knee Play 5 were:
“The Bells” by Edgar Allan Poe
“An Acrostic” by Edgar Allan Poe
“Lady Liberty Needs Glasses” by Tupac Shakur
“Friend to a Friend in Endtime” by Lungfish
“Cornflake Girl” by Tori Amos
“The Thong Song” by Sisqo
“Wham City” by Dan Deacon
“Tree” by David Byrne
“These Are The Times” by Dru Hill
“We Are The Ones” by Double Dagger
“Rainbow Six” by Tom Clancy
“What The Dead Know” by Laura Lippman
“Hall of Fame Speech” by Cal Ripken Jr.
“The Corner” by David Simon
“The Bicentennial Speech” by Thurgood Marshall
“Bros” by Panda Bear
“Shake It To The Ground” by Rye Rye
“Sleeping On The Wing” by Frank O’Hara
“Leaves” by Afaa M. Weaver
“The World” by Jan Heller Levi
“Burning Oneself Out” by Adrienne Rich
“Manhole Covers” by Karl Shapiro
“Dancin’ Fool” by Frank Zappa
“Crying in the Chapel” by The Orioles

Technical info: Suitcase kick drum: Beta52, Snare: Shure SM7, Drum overhead: Oktava 012, Yoon Electric: Sennheiser 421, Shank Electric: Sennheiser 509, Acoustic guitars: SM81, Cello: Apex 460, Violin: AT4033, Litz’s Vocals: Shure SM10a, Glockenspiel: Okava 012, Allyson vocals: Neumann U87.

Download MP3s - 106.81 MB

(more…)

Dan Deacon’s 2007 album Spiderman Of The Rings attracted a flurry of national press coverage both for the Baltimore-based musician and Wham City, the  multi-media collective of artists at which Deacon is the center. But so much of that coverage focused on the external facts — the wild live shows, the illegal warehouse venues, the bizarre outfits, the eccentricity of the whole Wham City scene — that something almost got lost in the shuffle: that Dan Deacon is kind of a brilliant guy who made a great record.

(more…)