Patience is rewarded, more often than not. Detroit-area guitar-glorifiers the Paper Sound’s debut album dropped back in 2005, a curious and somewhat erratic time in the music world where electro-heavy M83/LCD/Animal Collective-types were clouding out traditional indie-rocker types.
This quartet (Phil Kinney – guitar/vocals, Al Brown – bass, Josh Wheeler – guitar, Nate Sjorgen) stuck it through the late 00’s with consistent touring/performing and survived a uncertain time of personal transition and band-inertia to realign for The Struggle with Light, their long-awaited 2nd chapter and its an unabashed back-to-business statement showing the pure and potential pop-rock results of guitar-pedal percolation and melody-melded-to-reverb-regiments. Sequenced-drums be-damned, we go back to the whipped up, sun-blasted rock balladry of sincere, rousing, guitar-bass-drum outfits who seek (and find) catharsis and resolve by rolling the sleeves back up over weary hearts and firing their flexed riffage ever-forward with propulsive rhythms and soaring anthemic vocals.
See them: Sept 1st at the Berkley Front (Berkley, MI) with The Bends and DL Rossi.
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While I’m on the subject of new Detroit sounds – there’s more new songs up this week from Detroit quintet Eleanora – their first proper full length Some Happy Accidents started streaming over the weekend.
Experimental soul/folk-focused baroque-rock, or something like it. These are precious-yet-jagged landscapes the listener drifts over, breezed by by dazzling, breathy vocals, waving through nocturnal blends of acoustic and electric elements; downbeat and sensual sweeps through trip-hop-esque atmospheres; prominently featuring the violin and the voice, murkier brood-pop richened with orchestral spice and honeyed with woozy/wonderful harmonies.
This band should play the Ark, asap.
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There’s another Ypsi Flea scheduled at Woodruff’s later this month. The fourth installment of this community-bolstering swap-fest (ranging everything from records, to clothes to food) is always serenaded by a line up of musical performers. All-afternoon-long, on Sunday, 9/23, Depot Town diddlers can stop in to shop humble/heartening offerings from their neighbors and enjoy live music by the likes of singer/songwriter Jim Cherewick (his own tunes backed by a full band), a new project, The Rebel Kind, featuring members of Ypsi-based Bad Indians, cloudy electric-warblings from Lidless Eye and dream-pop dabblings from Light Bath.
Tables. Stuff. Music. Woodruff’s.
That’s all for now; more next week.