Genre : Soft Rock with a Psychedelic tint
Origin : United States
Official site : > - here - <
This review starts out with a snippet section quoted from the original press release, revealed in Italic.
San Francisco's The Yellow Dress will release their third
and heavily-anticipated album, "Faint Music // Ordinary Light," in less
than a month. Recorded and mixed, entirely analog, at John
Vanderslice's Tiny Telephone Studios, produced by Ian Pellicci
(Deerhoof, The Dodos) and mastered by Paul Oldham (Bonnie "Prince"
Billy, Sonny and the Sunsets), the album features an 8-person line-up of
San Francisco Bay Area musicians, plus guest vocals from several more,
mostly from the underground DIY scene in San Francisco and Oakland. The
Yellow Dress has been called a "supergroup" several times throughout its
6+ year lifespan, which is appropriate since every member has at least
one other local project in which they perform. The band draws much
inspiration from the local literary community and often finds themselves
performing at events for folks such as McSweeney's and The Rumpus; the
name of the album comes from the Robert Hass poem "Faint Music." Preorder digital and vinyl editions of the album from Bandcamp before the official release on January 4, 2014.
It comes as no particular surprise that The Yellow Dress is a supergroup renowned of its close connection to the Bay Area literary community, as the music doubtless comes across more than respective renditions of poems arranged to bonfire-compatible musical narratives, as opposed of unraveling as well researched song structures composed of inventive harmonic collisions between sung words and sonic domains. The tendency of being casual, abstract, and almost fragile, - from a rhetorical point of view - is especially notable on the singing content this spin delivers. The style/intention of the vocals is armed with no urge to deliver memorable melodies and segments of peaking/dramatic relevance. Everything is always the same. I would go as far as to claim that there are no melodies demanding your undivided attention, but this probably is the point of the whole effort. The narration willingly submits to the text, almost always communicating a deeply personal, but relatively stillness-centered flow.
These harmonic stillness-patterns are compensated with rich instrument presence. As such, the disc deserves recognition for not even attempting to deceit the listener, instead it openly invites you to witness how it conducts surface level inspections of moods, with all its cards being on the table right from the beginning - albeit the moods and cards it showcases, are relatively limited, in my opinion. This equally is as good of a thing as it is a drawback, and it all depends on the mood-setting you are riding on. The disc itself won't be able to convince you of its charms if you demand your fix to Kill All on spot, and thank God & Co. for that. It is ideal and safe if you prefer your listening session to offer no deviations from still moments of self-reflective fragility and mood-immersion. It is VEEEERRY light-spirited joy music with a consciously constrained image of joy, yet, as hinted previously, one aspect that separates this effort from its peers is its unusually rich instrumental presence - that is highly expectable, considering that the supergroup encompasses eight members while at total war against silence. The production similarly conveys a fragile character, one that is compatible with the anatomies of these placid and gentle casual self-contemplations. Risk free literary music, which equates with its charms and limits.
Check out The Yellow Dress - > here.
GyZ at Bandcamp.
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