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Midtown Dickens asked its community for help and found an overwhelming response
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About 23 hours before the tour commenced last week, Kym Register—one of two co-founders of the Durha...About 23 hours before the tour commenced last week, Kym Register—one of two co-founders of the Durham quintet Midtown Dickens—offered about a dozen friends a favor.
"So, we just got our 16-passenger van fixed, and it turns out that only Catherine [Edgerton] and I will be able to come on tour," wrote Register in an e-mail, explaining that the band's big tour van would only be taking part of the band north for the 10-show trek. "It's such a fun trip, and we worked really hard on it and would like to extend the opportunity to all of our friends that might be able to go, to go. We leave tomorrow at 3 or 4. Who's in?"
As it has a habit of doing, Midtown Dickens' circle of friends and supporters responded. Will Hackney, who plays mandolin and sings in the band, adjusted his plans and got in the van, as did three others, all toting a musical instrument or two. By the time Midtown Dickens hit Richmond for the journey's first show, they were again a quintet.
The offer of a late-summer touring adventure wasn't the first time Edgerton and Register asked their listeners to join them: In December, Edgerton sent an e-mail to 200 people—including local musicians, parents and fans, or "everyone we know," as she says—soliciting investments for the production of the band's second record. Hackney had done something similar with his other band, Lost in the Trees, raising $4,000 through the same letter. Midtown Dickens wanted to record in a professional studio with producer Scott Solter (The Mountain Goats, John Vanderslice), and they would need no less than $7,500 for the project to succeed, and—if the records sold—each investor would receive full reimbursement and 5 percent profit on investment. The responses poured in.
Historically, record labels have worked by paying a band an advance before the record is made. A portion of that money might go to a producer and a studio in order to make the album sound its best. Another bit might be used to pay the band's living expenses, like rent or groceries at home or for hotels and transportation on tour. In the good old days of largesse and high record sales, perhaps an SUV purchase would be involved.
The band has to repay this advance—along with the record label's expenditures on publicists, ad campaigns and the like—by selling records. When those lines cross, the band may finally get paid. The band can concentrate on making the record without worrying about immediately paying for it, but the system's inherent disadvantage for bands is that it works something like a large line of credit. The band can breathe easy while it makes the record, but the burden of debt looms large when the record hits shelves.
Record labels still do this, but the era in which big labels were scooping up indie bands with large globs of cash up front has mostly expired. Bands, then, have to find alternate ways to fund their projects. Hackney, a co-founder of Chapel Hill label Trekky Records, developed this plan for Lost in the Trees because, in the current music climate, the label didn't have money to pay for a project as grand as the band had imagined. Similarly, Midtown Dickens—whose members are small-business owners and service industry types—couldn't front the cost themselves.
Several friends donated as little as $20 or $50 toward the band's success. Meanwhile, a stranger watched Midtown Dickens play on a Sunday morning at a festival last April and later read their call for support online. He responded by writing a check for $5,000.
Click for larger image • Catherine Edgerton of Midtown Dickens during a record-release show at Duke Coffeehouse, Friday, Aug. 28.
Photo by D.L. Anderson
"I didn't know people were going to be so generous. Everybody gave according to their abilities," says Register, prowling the streets of Manhattan on a Monday morning, looking for breakfast after a Sunday night show at the legendary troubadour hub, Sidewalk Cafe. "It pushed us to do this thing that I was not on the fence about but that is hard to do without getting paid."
But this wasn't about getting paid. The investments the band received surpassed its original estimate by nearly $4,000. Instead of using that money to fund a tour or to hire a premier publicist to hustle their music into magazines, Midtown Dickens funneled it into improving Lanterns, effectively transforming it from a mere second album into an involving artistic statement.
"We felt like we had to go all out," remembers Register. "We have to get somebody to record it very well, and we have to make sure people hear it really well. It was an artistic plunge: We're going to do it this way, and we're going to go all out because we've put so much into this."
Lanterns, after all, is the culmination of over two years of writing, rehearsal and recording. The entire package does such a long-term effort justice: Each purchase includes the music on three formats—a black vinyl LP, a compact disc in a sleeve and through a paper coupon printed with a code that allows the music to be downloaded online. A 16-page libretto includes not only lyrics but also an illustration for each song by Edgerton.
Apparently, the effort wasn't lost on investors or listeners. When Midtown Dickens played Duke Coffeehouse in celebration of the record's release late last month, the crowd swelled into the exits, and the air was saturated with sweat. People shouted along, and a half dozen guests joined the band as it rolled through all of Lanterns. They sold more than 100 copies. That one investor who'd cut the check for $5,000 decided they'd done enough for him, and he wrote them again. This time, it was a letter proclaiming that his investment had been a donation. He didn't want the money back.
"That letter," says Register, "was the most beautiful act of kindness I've ever seen."
http://www.indyweek.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A401391
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Album of the Month
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Midtown Dickens' Lanterns
(self-released)
26 AUG 2009 • by Brian Howe
Listen up! If you...
Midtown Dickens' Lanterns
(self-released)
26 AUG 2009 • by Brian Howe
Listen up! If you cannot see the music player below, download the free Flash Player.
When the Durham duo Midtown Dickens released its debut, Oh Yell!, in 2007, the music reflected the city that members Kym Register and Catherine Edgerton had always called home: charmingly familiar, but with a layer of tough, post-industrial grit; steeped in history, but invigorated by modern renovations. Midtown Dickens, after all, had learned to play on the fly with whatever instruments they could scavenge or borrow. They soon turned out infectious ditties informed by punk's DIY spirit, bluegrass' conversational instrumentation, folk's storytelling traditions and the emotive crunch of the blues (itself a part of Durham's historic tangles). As a child, Edgerton sat in on her father's front-porch bluegrass jams, and that spirit of informal community music-making pervaded Midtown Dickens' songs, too. Their spare, inviting spaces encouraged sing-alongs from the start, in whatever key one preferred.
Their sophomore album, the self-released Lanterns, retains these core values while benefiting from the lucid production of Scott Solter and an expanded cast of players. While their debut featured many auxiliary musicians, the duo has expanded into a permanent quintet. Will Hackney, of Trekky Records and Lost in the Trees, contributes backing vocals, mandolin and cornet. Jonathan Henderson and Michelle Preslik add a multi-instrumental bonanza, including electric guitar, percussion, upright bass, piano, accordion and glockenspiel. But the rich voices of Register and Edgerton remain at the center, the former loamy, the latter glinting with brass. At times, it's like listening to Janis Joplin duet with Loretta Lynn, collapsing a divide between lush soul and flinty country. Their voices intertwine and explode into uproarious refrains, Edgerton often lifting into raggedly perfect harmonies.
The new members broaden the potential for subtleties of arrangement, though. The rollicking chords of "Old Dogs," for instance, crest on woozy horns, crash-land in a scattering of chimes and peter out to reveal what sounds like a singing bowl ghosting behind them. The subdued "The Road (Pt. 1)" unfurls on a slow, dark tide of droning bass and cheerless piano. The weary uplift of its massed vocals is among the album's most arresting sounds. These inventive flashes paint lyrical imagery: On "The Fish Song," an odd number narrated by a dead fish aboard a carousel, an accordion evokes the tired wheeze of an old calliope. And on the dusty-trail country song "It's Alright," Edgerton's singing saw wafts up like a lonesome cowboy's whistle on the high plains.
Without sacrificing the sense of spontaneous fun that makes many of its songs worth a dozen drably proficient indie rock curtsies, Midtown Dickens has started to take their music a bit more seriously. A band that once was wont to sing about Tetris now seeds genial surrealism with substantial human transactions. It's as if the group's increased musical proficiency gave them the confidence to lay more on the line lyrically, too. They play better, sing better, say better.
This modest increase in professionalism is relative. In an era when technology is geared toward lassoing music into sterile perfection, Lanterns celebrates the beauty of the flaw. Inspired imperfections add vibrancy. All over Lanterns, fissures offset the mediated feeling of the taped musical experience. Tempos drag and then lock in passionately. Vocal lines drop and rush back in. Edgerton's line-ending "woo-hoo's" on "Old Dogs" fall unevenly across the beats, like afterthoughts. The result lacks any sense of the foreordained, seeming to invent itself in each moment.
Such sanctity of the imperfect is writ large in the lyrics, too, which often blend a sort of good-natured snark with a spirit of forgiveness, or acceptance. "I've been too hard on you," Edgerton and Register duet on "Just Like Me," in an off-center roundelay. And on "Annihilation," Register sings, "It's not your fault that you bore me/ I must be naive/ For thinking conversation should be interesting." This band's long let itself fuck up. Now they've learned to allow others to fuck up, too. They don't gloss over failings and disappointments. They let them be and sing them into songs. You can sing them, too.
Midtown Dickens releases Lanterns at Duke Coffeehouse Friday, Aug. 28, at 9 p.m. Mount Moriah and Des Ark open the free show.
http://www.indyweek.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A400393
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Deckfight Lanterns Review
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Midtown Dickens
Lanterns
Self-released, 2009
I’m a big believer that albums equal seasons, and ...Midtown Dickens
Lanterns
Self-released, 2009
I’m a big believer that albums equal seasons, and time, places and context influence the perception of an album almost as much as the album itself. That’s why we’ll get a hundred different top albums of the decade in the next few months.
So, Midtown Dickens has made an autumn record. Because when I think of autumn, I think of long mountain drives with different colored leaves and I think of BANJOS of course, so Midtown Dickens delivers on that one, lucky for me. See the correlation? FALL=MOUNTAINS=MOUNTAIN MUSIC. Yeah, that formula is as easy as pie with ice cream on top. Oh, now I’m thinking DINERS instead of campfire and diners only fit into the summer days and winter nights mythology, so now I’ve screwed this review up.
Midtown Dickens is the mostly the collaboration of Kym Register and Catherine Edgerton with friends added in and they prioritize echoing harmonies and ambient sounds of nature, as if it were recorded in hollow logs or empty slides, see it depends on the context of the CITY or the COUNTRY. RURAL vs. URBAN. I don’t know where the Midtown Dickens ladies live, though it says Durham, and people from Durham are in this urban messy morass, though I know people from the Triangle like to fake it and think they all live in Aerostreams outside of town in the empty fields, but as far as I know, the only ones really do that are the Bowerbirds (okay...I'm sure there are more, but they are probably in Winnebagos).
Midtown Dickens
Midtown Dickens inhabits that space that as people we’re all trying to navigate, the space between nature and urban, life with “postmodern conveniences” and “life in nature” and the musical traditions that go along with it. On this self-released album, their promo copies are handmade envelopes with a simple collage image and typewritten Courier letters. It’s a throwback, but with their unassuming, (anti?)folk banjo-strumming ways their second song “Annihilation” is about a nuclear holocaust or something and the absurdity of what will be missed: “It’s going to be a long, hot nuclear winter, without your lemonade when all that you’ve got a big field and a pile of remains.” Register and Edgerton’s harmonies can be tricky, one is more powerful than the other, the other is meek but passionate (I don’t know whose voice is whose), but together they develop this say-speak sing-song about not only annihilation, but the ghost of cowboys (“Spring”) and turn excellent metaphors about sea life (“The Fish Song”). Also like to rock and swoon to “Old Dogs,” a slow song with a fitting horn arrangement about hitting the road on a cross-country journey.
With support from the tradition-oriented Carolina Chocolate Drops, Midtown Dickens will sound like an impressive but simple light-hearted bluegrass band. Lanterns is mostly a slow-go, not many songs have immediately catchy hooks and if they do they are drawn, way drawn out, like a string of dough that somehow gets longer and longer, and yet no holes emerge. But once the stories and lyrics come into focus on these songs a couple of true American(a?) poets emerge. After I term this an “autumn album” my favorite song is one that reminisces about summer, “The Best Summer Ever.” They sing “it’s the best summer ever, whether or not we know it yet,” which is an ironic take on the endless optimism that our culture puts on the promise of seasons…and here’s where I eat the whole first paragraph. I did screw this review up.
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Midtown Dickens Keeps it in the Family
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Band to release its new album
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Jordan Lawrence
Diversions Editor
Sitting with Durham...Band to release its new album
0 comments
Jordan Lawrence
Diversions Editor
Sitting with Durham’s Midtown Dickens in the living room of original member Catherine Edgerton, it’s hard not to see the duo-turned-five-piece as a happy family.
There were homemade mashed potatoes, a smattering of home-made art on the walls and conversation that meandered through blithely nonchalant innuendos and a discussion on the warrants of the made-up term “supa-bite.”
It was less like a band practice and more like sitting around on a lazy Sunday afternoon, shooting the breeze with your nearest and dearest. For Edgerton and her constant Dickens partner Kym Register, it is this quality that has marked the band’s growth into a five-piece complete with bass, drums and mandolin.
"For (the first album) it was just like me and Kym were like walking with our arms around each other through a park goofing up,” Edgerton said of the band’s loosely organized beginnings. “We’ve had time to open up to more people, sit and intentionally create something instead of it being this haphazard accident.”
Dickens’ sound has certainly grown past the bare-bones cuteness of its first release. On the new album Lanterns, the band takes the playground twee of such singers as Kimya Dawson and hitches it to the power of a true mountain band.
It’s a leap in musical prowess that the band said it couldn’t have made without the help of a very supportive Durham music community.
“We didn’t ever even think about being a band,” Edgerton said, explaining the way her friends pushed her and Register to perform. “I think I played harmonica and three chords on the guitar. All these people lent us time and money and resources.”
And as the group tripped over itself for a solid five minutes thinking up people to which its success is owed, it became apparent that this sense of community is an inherent part of the band’s identity. It’s a reality that mandolin player Will Hackney felt from the beginning.
“I knew I was just a backing guy filling in,” he said of his first practice. “I felt really comfortable throwing out ideas like right away. That was a really cool thing to walk into”
As a testament to Dickens’ near-symbiotic attachment to its surroundings, Friday’s record-release party will feature a more-than-10-member incarnation of the band featuring musicians that have played with them long the way.
And as they look ahead to the culminating celebration of all the hard work, the players can’t help but be amazed that all the hard work —both by them and their friends — is finally about to come to a head.
“So many people have come together to help us. There’s more and more people involved, and there’s vinyl and all this great stuff,” Register said. “It’s pretty crazy to be holding the thing up, having had it going in your head for two years.”
Contact the Diversions Editor at dive@unc.edu
http://dailytarheel.com/content/midtown-dickens-keeps-it-family
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Seriously Funny
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Midtown Dickens' BFFs are for real
By Ruth Eckles
A washboard hangs on the wall. There's a saw...Midtown Dickens' BFFs are for real
By Ruth Eckles
A washboard hangs on the wall. There's a saw nearby, sitting among vintage amps, a drum set, congas, a piano, a saxophone, a trumpet, a trombone, guitars and ukuleles. There's a stand-up bass leaning against a wall, a gift from a grandmother, close to a banjo rescued from a dumpster.
"Most of this stuff was either given to us or we found it," says Kym Register, one half of Durham duo Midtown Dickens, sitting on an orange and white couch here in their self-made creative paradise on Crafton Street. Skeletal black typewriters perch on end tables, ready to capture any free-floating thoughts.
And there are plenty of those: "This is so funny. I feel like we're in marriage counseling or something ... like we're going to paint a little sunset and walk away into it hand in hand," says Register, sitting across from a disturbingly realistic fake rooster sitting on a coffee table that she picked up at a gift shop in the mountains that "sold a bunch of Jesus shit."
Casually, and with humor: That's how Midtown Dickens works. After all, that's how it started. Register and Catherine Edgerton--best friends, roommates, bandmates--met when they were 16, immediately bonding over an enthusiasm for Janis Joplin. They started playing songs together soon, taken with the acoustics of a parking garage on Rosemary Street and excited by songs sung on streets corners and at open mics.
"Before I met Kym, I knew four chords on the guitar and 'Turkey in the Straw' on the harmonica. That's it," says Edgerton.
Register's relationship with Edgerton has been reciprocally important: "I've always loved music, but I never felt like it was complete, and I was never satisfied with anything I ever wrote and never played out until I met Catherine. I feel like without her, I can't play music. She allows me to be less critical and stressed out about it. I can't imagine doing this with anyone else."
They've been around music since they were kids, though: Edgerton's father is adored Southern author Clyde Edgerton, who, in addition to being a novelist, has always been a bluegrass musician. During her childhood, Thursday nights meant a front-porch, old-time picking session.
"It was almost like growing up bilingual because I was blessed to never have to learn how to harmonize or learn music theory in order to play music. I doubted myself for a long time," she says. "When I finally got up the guts to start playing out, I found it was already in my back pocket."
Register's grandfather performed at the Grand Ol' Opry. He gave her his first guitar when she was 14. She promptly painted a daisy on its body with Wite-Out.
Such a carefree association with music has been essential to Midtown Dickens. Borrowing cues from their anti-folk antecedents, they're not obsessed with perfection of technique as much as they are purity of feeling: If a chord is botched or if a playful lyric forgotten, they simply look at each other, laugh and keep playing. What's better, the audience laughs with them.
"We get the best response when we're just being ourselves, playing around onstage. When we're all serious and like, 'Hey--this is a show,' it doesn't work," says Register.
"I think it's refreshing to people. It's refreshing to us. No one in the world can claim they've never made a mistake," Edgerton adds. "For me, in every area of my life right now, there's pressure to do things right. The coolest thing is that we can get onstage and not do it right and get a good response for that."
Spontaneity is a key element in the creation of a Midtown Dickens song. Songs are grown organically out of whatever is happening in the moment, whether it's agonizing over what to do with their lives when they'd rather be at a Bulls game eating hot dogs, or hanging out in their socks and underwear playing Tetris on the couch. Both have a natural affinity for song structure and storytelling, and their music keeps both the ear and the heart interested.
That easy feeling and inviting charm have earned Midtown a fast local audience: Though they've only been playing as a band for just over a year, they've already played places like Cat's Cradle and Local 506, sharing the stage with friends from The Moaners and Maxwell/Mosher to The Future Kings of Nowhere and The Dirty Little Heaters.
Register says, though, that they're most excited about their friends and connections with Durham bands and venues. She says it's a music scene with deep roots and on the rise. "Right now, there's just this buzz of excitement, and it's putting this glow over Durham," she says. "Durham is like one of those capsules you throw into water and suddenly it turns into this big, spongy dinosaur."
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Midtown Dickens/Oh Yell!: Knox Records
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With jingly, jangly ease and front porch hee-haw (with smarts) freshness, these rural riot grrls can...With jingly, jangly ease and front porch hee-haw (with smarts) freshness, these rural riot grrls can wax about eggs and toast, porn stars, banjos, airplanes, and A.M. Radio with amateurish glee and off-key casualness (did you catch those horns squeezing thru “Airplane” with its jazzy manner and lyrical love of “rain”?). I suppose, imagine a Bloodshot Records band with looser vibes and less artful style, not unlike a coffee shop jamboree. “Cowboy” hovers like Western pulp gone ironic — “you can write a cowboy song/about everyone who’s done you wrong.” The guitar line surfs with little inflections of Rawhide, and the gals, one the daughter of Southern novelist Clyde Edgerton, warn the gun slinger to pack up his bags as the howls of dust-caked corrals swim in the ears: “Take ten paces/turn around/aim at the city street lights.” It’s endearing and earthy. “The Job Song,” on the other hand, is a stab at the jobs that we never really want to work at anyway. The lady behind the fluorescents has a face that looks like sand, she sings, and although I’m not quite hooked on the analogy, it is quirky. “Sometimes it feels so good to cry/to get out of the burning boat alive…” is some more of their adroit wordplay, which is, as noted by their publicist, “clever but not lofty.” I agree, but sometimes it feels more interested in its own cleverness rather than carrying a narrative, which might be a nice inversion of the rural songwriting format, but also a little studied too. “Spine,” a punchy rocker at times, somehow references both the IRS and Texas, warning that although the narrator’s a romantic, she’ll throw you off the boat if fucked with. It’s that kind of spirit that tattoos the songs with an ink of feisty catch phrases and “don’t mess with me” self-determination. On “What a Bore,” she heads to a restaurant to run the gambit of boring conversations, like neighbor gossip and Monopoly. The music, however, is a little more pregnant with drama. Bells tinker, drums crank, and a piano tries to quell the overall shipwreck of voices cracking and curlicuing around each other. It’s got more heft than most of the other tracks.
“Jezebel Lee” takes a crack at the gal with the lead guitar, fancy clothes, and rock’n’roll lifestyle, who ain’t no real star on stage or in the night sky. She may make the other girls cry, but the narrator ain’t buying her cellophane persona. For the old-school video geek in you, they have an ode to Tetris, the Nintendo hallmark of ages past, when a girl could sit around in underwear and socks on the couch, one hand on the button going numb, the other wrapped around French fries. It’s bareboned, wily, and whistling. And in case you were waiting for the accordion, they supply an ample wheelbarrow load on “Saturday Morning,” a hangover hootenanny of sorts, with a draggy circus tempo, noting lyrically that the mirror will not reveal Dorian Gray but the hollow-eyed shell of a gal whose “doing fine” despite the obvious truth. Jumping trains and swilling Mexican beer, rather than being boxed-in by school, are options on “A.M. Dial,” and the la-la-la choruses carry easy swagger as the singer notes she’d rather watch bulls and eat hot dogs than much else, although the bills are calling to be paid too. All in all, there’s both a under-produced, rusty knife, kick-the-can style that is infectious here. There is also a interesting tension between word sly, savvy approaches and folkloric musical permutations that may be a bit off-putting to some, like college kids visiting the tilted barn of old timey white music and filling grandpa’s pants with post-modern jive.
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Album Review: Midtown Dicken's Oh Yell
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If I had to imagine how the Raleigh-based female duo Midtown Dicken put together their debut album O...If I had to imagine how the Raleigh-based female duo Midtown Dicken put together their debut album Oh Yell, I wouldn't see it as your typical studio session.
There was probably a lot of smiling, maybe some drugs, a veritable buffet of instruments and inanimate objects used in their stead, and substantial amounts of improvisation.
Actually, when I heard the first track I had trouble conceptualizing any studio being involved at all. "Eggs and Toast" sounded like it could have been created on the back patio of someone's house during one of those semi-coherent, late-night, post-party jam sessions that we've all been privy to at least once in our lives. The song starts with a simple guitar riff and what sounds like drum sticks hitting a block of wood.
As would be expected, the lyrics convey a similar off-the-cuff tone: "I want you to like me so we can go get breakfast/ You can get eggs and toast."
Track 2 gets a bit deeper... kind of. It's called "Guitars" and makes a unique argument for banjos over guitars. One verse, my personal favorite, goes something like this: "Guitars and airports they're both the same/ You can take off from both just to come back again/ and they both smell like sweet, sweet, sweet Lucky Charms/ that get soggy in milk and then they fall apart/ But banjos are neat/ I think banjos are neat."
I'm sold. Needless to say the lyrics were accompanied by a guitar and a banjo with a bit of fiddle mixed in.
Like I said, these ladies (Kym Register and Catherine Edgerton) use a mélange of instruments. At various points in the album, Catherine and Kym play the guitar, drums, banjo and fiddle along with some trumpet, trombone, slide whistle, ukulele, accordion, piano and bass. They also include in their musical repertoire a skateboard, cups, bottle caps and a "tinky thing."
There are some less absurdist, somewhat more serious songs on Oh Yell. "Cowboy," the fourth track for example, concerns itself with a relationship that's gone by the wayside. It maintains a slower, darker tone accompanied by metaphorical lyrics like, "Were you aware of your loaded gun?/ It would have hurt a lot less if you were a straight shooter/ Were you really aiming at me?/ Better pack up your bags and run/ Like you do every time when you've come undone."
Appropriately, they are able create an eerie, old west shootout feel, with their skillful musical saw playing droning throughout the track.
Nevertheless, I would argue that the essence of Oh Yell and Midtown Dickens overall is more playful than anything else. How can it not be when on track 10 they devote two minutes and 16 seconds to explaining how awesome the old-school video game Tetris is? Notably, this is the track that puts to use cups as a means of percussion.
There is something strangely charming about this album. Perhaps it's the apparent innocence of it all. Register and Edgerton weren't trying to make a profound, monumental opus with Oh Yell they were just having a bit of fun and they wanted to share it with anyone willing to listen.
It's doubtful that these ladies have a formal mission statement of any kind but they sum themselves up nicely in a letter which accompanied the CD: "We'd rather barely get by on an instrument we don't know than play the cello flawlessly, and we value the quirkiness and delicate perfection of things that aren't perfect." A few sentences later they add, "We harmonize with the purity of swans."
Yep, sounds about right.
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Midtown Dickens: Oh yell!
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Released May 15th, on Durham's 307 Knox Records, Oh Yell! is not only one of my favorite releases of...Released May 15th, on Durham's 307 Knox Records, Oh Yell! is not only one of my favorite releases of the year, but one of the best Spring/Summer albums to be released in a long while. Road trip thoughts with star lit dreams, Midtown Dickens' Oh Yell! has been a long time coming.
Midtown Dickens are the lovable, laughable, and musically talented Catherine Edgerton and Kym Register. They play a hybrid brand of "Anti-folk / Naturalismo", that is more about having fun and singing from the heart than anything else. Their man-made tools of choice include banjos, accordions, guitars, and basically anything else that's laying around, but it's their god given gifts, their hands, their hearts, and their vocals that are what really shine.
On their debut, Oh Yell!, Edgerton and Register create songs that we can relate to wrapped in beautifully instrumented packages. They sing about visiting their mothers, love life, jobs, and even eating hot dogs at a Bulls game. But that's life, not just for them but for all of us. And that's what I think I like most about Midtown Dickens...Their real.
The cd features 16 songs, if you include the secret track, and, minus the Christmas material released last December, it seems to be in large part their repertoire. What I like about the lineup on Oh Yell!, and this might not mean much to some of you, but I like seeing the progression of a band. Because they have included not only their newest tracks, but some of the older fan favorites as well. You can definitely tell they have grown as musicians and lyricists, on the new material, it just sounds fuller and more alive, but it's nice to hear songs like AM Dial and Tetris be included here as well. I think it sets up a time line, and this is just me talking here, I could totally be wrong, but I think bands sometimes ignore where they came from and only look forward and I'm really happy that instead of releasing an 8 or 10 track cd like most bands do today, that we get 16 songs, the past and the present, all of pure folk delight.
They may remind some of you with hints of Kimya Dawson, (mentioned here yesterday, and that graced Durham for Midtown Dicken's cd release party), or a stripped down folk version of the nineties girl cuddlecore / punk band, and I use the term punk so loosely and in tongue and cheek it's not even funny, Cub. They take elements of what those two examples have done for music, and whether they are influences or not, take what they have learned and have only improve upon it.
My favorite tracks on the cd are the first three tracks, Eggs and Toast, Guitars, and Airplane. They possess a feeling that really encompasses what it is to see MD live. Whether it's the harmony that you fall in love with, the banjos and guitars that make me jealous, or the way Edgerton tells a tale, Midtown Dickens will be your new favorite band and if you listen just right, you can here them crack a smile.
On a youtube clip of the girls performing Tetris, we see them sharing a mic, laughing , and having fun, and I want you to remember that. When they perform, live or on cd, they seem to be one unit. One person, one heart, once voice. A lot is to be said about this, because in a world of a "me" mentality, it's inspiring to see someone who is thinking of "you" first.
Now I keep referring to sweet, and cute, but on a few tracks, including What A Bore, also one of my favorites, we hear something at the center of this sweeten shell that almost resembles, along with the instrumentation, a crashing wave... building it's musical crest as it gets closer and closer to the shore line where it's forced to break by end. A song that stands out in the field like a rock where nothing will grow and this is where I think most people start in life, a barren space and as we stroll further and further away we encounter grass, bushes, trees...life. Man it's a great song!
I know, it kind of seems like I've gone off in a tangent from the "review", take what you will from it, but I think to enjoy listening to any band really, to get the full picture, it's nice for someone to be able to tell you how they feel when hearing the band. You get a real sense, or worth, rather then to churn out clinched lines and.10 cent words. So that's my piece and I figure that's why you read in the first place.
Below are three tracks for you to enjoy and links to acquire. They will be performing at Bull City Head Quarters on June 17th with Kaia Wilson and later in the month on June 23rd with The Future Kings of Nowhere. The local scene here is blossoming more and more every time I look around and Midtown Dickens is near the front leading the pack.
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Metamorphosis
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"I would never do it without you. There's no way because the best part is that it's fun, you know,...
"I would never do it without you. There's no way because the best part is that it's fun, you know, like we have our fights and we have our struggles but it's like being with my sister. ... I would never do it alone, it would be boring," says Kym Register, right, 25, as she looks over at bandmate and best friend Catherine Edgerton, 24, during a practice in Edgerton's Durham home.
The young women have been friends since they met as 16-year-olds in Durham and have been playing music together just as long. They laugh as they agree on what drew them to play music with each other in the first place, a common love for Janis Joplin. "We just started playing music together out of fun but never really seriously at all," Edgerton says. They played parking lots from the back of her car with a variety of instruments ranging from a saw to the guitar. "It's just fun to be a spectacle sometimes," Register adds.
Their band, Midtown Dickens, officially started two years ago by accident when a friend asked them to open a show for them. "Two days later we wrote all these songs. ... We didn't have a mission to start a band, it just kind of happened," Register says. When asked to define the band's style, the list grows as large as the number of instruments they each play. Register replies, "It's like best friend jam. That sounds like Care Bears would be dancing behind us or something, but that's how we started with the different instruments, like whatever we had lying around we wanted to have fun with ... if we have something, we just play it and we'll just have fun making music about cigars and babies and other random stuff."
supersonic
