With Whistle Tips, Brooklyn, NY quartet Dinosaur Feathers flee from the tropics of their debut, 2009’s Fantasy Memorial, and push themselves into hitherto unexplored and ultimately rewarding new territories. Once tethered to a drum machine, the addition of drummer Nick Brooks provide new-found forcefulness and flexibility; the clean melodic basslines of Ryan Michael Kelly often grow into dynamic leads without abandoning the low end; and where acoustic guitar once engendered laid-back vibes and folk misnomers,the electric guitar of vocalist Greg Sullow now drives with clear tones, a welcome crunch, and occasionally noisy outbursts. Evolution is, however, only a theory. For all you indie creationists, the Dinosaur Feathers you may have known and/or loved lives on through their sunny melodies, still-infectious grooves, and ever-boisterous harmonies between Sullo, Kelly, and keyboardist Derek “Duck” Zimmerman. These elements, plus such seemingly disparate influences as The Soft Boys, The Olivia Tremor Control, XTC and of course Paul McCartney's Wings, now inform a jazzier/punkier/maybe even poppier mélange.
From the instant bounce of “Young Bucks” and power popper “Untrue” to the impressively ambitious segued trilogy of “Certain Times”, “City Living”, and “Beatcha”, through the hints of prog riffing that open up “SURPRISE!”, this is a fully realized version of a band only hinted at in the past. While Dinosaur Feathers have existed in many incarnations: solo bedroom pop project, dance party karaoke machine, and tropical folkies, their boldest step has come with the transition to simply becoming a rock band.
Dinosaur Feathers-http://www.facebook.com/DinosaurFeathers
Grandchildren-http://www.facebook.com/grandchildrenmusic?sk=app_178091127385
Dinosaur Feathers
Dinosaur Feathers is a trio from Brooklyn who create "‘50s/early-‘60s-inspired pop music."
Greg and Derek sang a capella together at Carleton College in Minnesota. They built a following in New York after releasing a free EP on their website and playing shows on their own and as openers for other artists. After several line-up changes, the group will release their debut album in March 2010, followed by an appearance at SXSW.
User-contributed text…
Dinosaur Feathers is a trio from Brooklyn who create "‘50s/early-‘60s-inspired pop music."
Greg and Derek sang a capella together at Carleton College in Minnesota. They built a following in New York after releasing a free EP on their website and playing shows on their own and as openers for other artists. After several line-up changes, the group will release their debut album in March 2010, followed by an appearance at SXSW.
User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License and may also be available under the GNU FDL.
Grandchildren
The drums smack you in the face first, like a hailstorm with no sign of letting up. Then, as waves of harmonies emerge unexpectedly, a joyous sensation sets in, as if someone just snapped you out of a fever dream. The beat-driven, orchestral-pop epics unfold like an audio scrapbook of memories from the life of Grandchildren songwriter Aleksander Martray.
“I was restless from a really young age,” explains Martray, the son of a high-ranking military officer, born…
The drums smack you in the face first, like a hailstorm with no sign of letting up. Then, as waves of harmonies emerge unexpectedly, a joyous sensation sets in, as if someone just snapped you out of a fever dream. The beat-driven, orchestral-pop epics unfold like an audio scrapbook of memories from the life of Grandchildren songwriter Aleksander Martray.
“I was restless from a really young age,” explains Martray, the son of a high-ranking military officer, born on an Army base in Germany and raised on both sides of the Atlantic. “Growing up in flux between different places I gravitated towards more intangible things like stories, melodies, movies, and dreams, and so early on music became a way of making a home for myself.”
Grandchildren’s debut album, Everlasting, feels like a culmination of all that restlessness. A sonic collage of the sentimental and the confrontational, the album is a safe haven for multiple realities— fusing tribal beats, frayed electronics, fireside folk melodies, richly-woven orchestral-pop flourishes and even field recordings from Martray’s journeys across Central America, the Caribbean and Africa.
“The project began during my nomadic mid-20s. I was constantly split between Baltimore, Philadelphia, DC, and travels abroad. I think the music is a reflection of a young person processing their own coming of age through constant self-inflicted culture shock. The textures of the final album span time and space,” he says. “And yet, it comes across as one seamless reality. You can feel the influences but you can’t put your finger on them.”
During this time Martray’s closest thing to home was a tiny third-floor bedroom in a dilapidated Victorian house in West Philadelphia known as Danger Danger. At the height of its illegal phase, this notorious DIY ‘venue’ hosted everything from IDM-infused metal (Genghis Tron) to frantic free-jazz (Marshall Allen of the Sun Ra Arkestra). These eclectic sounds billowed upstairs towards Martray’s makeshift bedroom recording studio, taking what began as a solo experimentation in dizzying new directions.
“The songs evolved through the recording process,” explains Martray, “they were so layered that when I went to play them live, so much had to be sampled. That’s when I realized this wasn’t a solo project. It’s music for a small orchestra.”
With that in mind, Martray brought his fellow housemates—a motley crew of instrument-swapping misfits—into the fold one by one. This included drummer Roman Salcic, a Croatian transplant reared on American rock music; jack of all trades Tristan Palazzolo; math-thrash guitarist Adam Katz; bassist/percussionist Russell Brodie; and classical-pianist-turned-synth-slinger John Vogel. Over the course of one daunting year, the group developed Grandchildren’s 10-song album into a live set that’s as seamless and widescreen as the recordings.
“It looks spontaneous to people,” explains Katz, “but everything’s carefully choreographed on our end.”
A lot of that stems from a two-month North American tour in 2009, one that was plagued by chicken pox, blizzards, border patrols, and van break-ins. This not only brought them closer together; it gave Grandchildren the chance to perfect the ebb and flow of their live set.
“And now that everything’s down to a science,” says Martray, “the live performance is an art in and of itself. As full and layered as the sound has become, it rests on the backbone of those early bedroom recordings. Kind of like with a car, where you keep replacing parts until the whole thing is new. By the end you can’t even remember what came from where. The process hides within the sound.”
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