The Perfect Vessels

Catchy pop with just enough groove to take the edge off. The songs have a nice kick, and often enough they made me smile. I like the way the melodies pop and crackle.

- Aiding and Abetting

Should be called the Perfect Pestles, because this rootsy power pop was so good it ground me to a powder! - Roctober Reviews

With a jangly heart and energy to spare, the power-pop/psych of The Perfect vessels could be a suitable soundtrack to the coming of spring, their songs filled with melody and enough groove to get your feet tapping. Add to that, some inventive guitar trickery, memorable hooks, the sound of a farfisa, and you have an collection that will be a welcome addition to the collection. Highlights include, the beautifully constructed “Anything is Everything”, the woozy pop of “Turned Around, the gentle sweetness of “Do You Know the Way?” and the energy-filled “Forever” with its twisted funk guitar sound. - Terrascope

Hailing from Memphis, Tennessee, brothers Graham and Justin Fox Burks along with their lifelong friend David Bell join forces to produce a highly pleasant, melodic, and utterly engaging platter of pure bright and uplifting pop-rock bliss. The crisp and lively vocals harmonies soar straight for the stratosphere with topmost joy and vigor. The peppy and tuneful arrangements are neatly filled out by ringing guitars, smooth basslines, and jumpin’ drums. Moreover, there’s an extremely sweet and positive vibe which permeates this whole album like a welcome and refreshing ray of happy sunshine. A totally likable and enjoyable album. - Jersey Beat

The Perfect Vessels, hailing from Memphis, have released their full-length Name Our Own Stars at the best time. An album that is just perfect for the summer, with great melodies and soothing vocals, these songs are sure to put a smile on your face as you bob your head back and forth. This CD is certainly nothing ground breaking, but this release is better than most of the indie-pop albums you will see out there. The bass is smooth and the drums will make you tap your toes along to the beat. With only a couple of weeks until summer, this album will make you think of frolicking around in the sun through the grass with friends. An easily accessible album, this record is a really enjoyable listen. - 91.7 FM WCUR Radio

Pretty good Memphis trio who bust out some real nice pop songs on this record. There’s some real nice melodies but the record is 15 songs long and they could have whittled it down to about 9 or 10 and made a real strong record. Record by Doug Easley who makes everything sound better. www.makeshiftmusic.com
- Dagger Zine

The Perfect Vessels have an overall sound that I was not expecting coming from a band that originates from Memphis, TN. The group is made up of brothers Graham and Justin Fox Burks and David Bell. The power pop trio has a bit of a Wilco, a more upbeat Pinback and there is a slight but more organized Of Montreal feel, filled with cliché phrases in the lyrics. The set release date for the album is April 12.

“Running Out Of Time,” is upbeat with the acoustic guitar and the drums. The Southern accent is auditable when you get to “To All These Big Brothers.” But it doesn’t take away from the song—if anything, it enhances it. The band sends listeners on a trip during “Atmosphere.” The tone and the repetition in the chorus put you into a daze if you let it. “Maria (Only You Know Why)” isn’t anything special and is the weakest cut on Name Our Own Stars, which is rather upsetting seeing how the album was flowing quite nicely up until that song. Luckily, “Under The Starlight,” helped to save the album. This is probably one of my favorite tunes off the release. The guitar in this track reminds me a lot of Pinback, which is why I like it so much.

The mellowness is replaced with the power again with “Selling The Scenario,” which comes in as a close second for my favorite ditty; it’s danceable and bouncy. In “Forever” the bounciness is replaced with funk, which you can still get down to the cut. The instrumentals in “Shine,” the final piece of the disc is a nice way to bring the album to a close. It is relaxing, peaceful and still catchy. The album is different with the acoustic guitar/power pop fusion.

In A Word: Different - The Aquarian Weekly

These Perfect Vessels emerged from the sweltering great musical melting pot of Memphis, Tennessee, and were formed from noisy shed experimenters into a melodically inclined trio of power pop purveyors.

This feels like one of those reviews where Pavement have to be namechecked at least once, and quite early on, so let’s get it out of the way: these Vessels do indeed surge and yaw and occasionally founder in the wake of Malkmus et al., turning out wilfully eclectic and subtly fractured songs that vie for the parallel, off-kilter vibes of acerbic and carefree. The slacker anthem stomp of “Turned Around” made this reviewer exclaim “Wowee Zowee!” to himself. There are also some archer moments of self-aware Sonic Youthery and, in this debut’s finer moments, Byrds-ish flights into the stratosphere.

These guys are really good. Their record’s really good, too, but also flawed. Hubristically so, maybe. It’s an ambitious project, fifteen sprawling tracks stretching the disc out to the one hour mark, and now and then giving the impression that the runtime wasn’t the only thing to be stretched. Some songs here seem just a little thin, slight fillers sitting in the shadows of the handful of killer tracks without. Call it artistic enthusiasm, excitement to finally be out of the shed, but it sometimes seems like the group’s striving not just to emulate a Pavement record, but rather one of those lovely Pavement reissues with the bloated tracklists. “Name Our Own Stars” feels like the “LA’s Desert Origins” to the “Crooked Rain” that could have been. Plus, y’know, pop records aren’t meant to be longer than forty minutes. Everyone knows that.

“Name Our Own Stars” is recommended. It’s overwhelming, overlong, difficult to digest, terribly frustrating, immensely satisfying, packed with sporadically brilliant songcraft. When these guys set sail for their own, unfamiliar waters, they’ll be very exciting to follow, and perhaps they’re already on such a heading. In their words: “To all these big brothers / I want to thank you / For helping me realise / That I’ll never be you.” - Americana-UK

I love guitars and good guitar playing. Maybe it’s a penis-envy thing due to my own lack of true playing ability, but I can’t get enough of it. A little guitar pyrotechnics is often the saving grace that I need to get into a band or album, and The Perfect Vessels’ new release is a great example of some really great guitar playing and intricate power-pop song-smithery.

The songs from Name Our Own Stars are very poppy. I grew up with a hard-wired aversion to most pop music. And I’m not talking Lady Kaka pop—I’m talking tight, controlled power-pop. I’ve never enjoyed Big Star like I’ve been told that I’m supposed to, and I may or may not have been molested by early Elvis Costello. I don’t know. I’m in regression therapy, so we’ll see. The Perfect Vessels are making a strong case against my natural instincts. Their music has an uplifting innocence to it that reminds of my preteen angry youth where Peter Buck jangled his way into my heart. Beyond that I am a little hard pressed to Frankenstein a comparison together. They Might Be Giants, but far more romantic. Firehose, with less ironic whimsy. XTC’s schizophrenic chord changes filtered thru some early REM.

Aside from being anchored by nice vocal harmonies and even nicer guitar work, the gold is in the details of these songs. The pre-verse set-ups, Farfisa organs, acoustic guitars, and random atmospherics offer a depth of field that really brings the underlying songcraft into focus. "Under the Starlight" opens up at the 3:20 mark, when a mellotron-ish sounding layer fades in and lifts the song into the night sky.

The ability and nuance displayed in these songs should come as no surprise from these music scene veterans. Having been members of some very cool local bands such as Small Room, Pezz, and Halfacre Gunroom, this trio have created a compelling brand of guitar-driven power-pop that can convert even the most stringent critics. Come and see for yourself!

The Perfect Vessels CD release party is this Saturday Oct. 23rd at the Hi-Tone with the Subteens and Tiger Mountain (members of Harmony Bros and Yazoo Shakes). Indie Memphis is sponsoring it as part of their Memphis music showcase, and the band will be donating one dollar from every CD sold the night of the show to the kids of St. Jude. - Live From Memphis

Super cool debut album from Memphis, Tennessee's The Perfect Vessels.

It may have taken them a few years to put out their first album...but the good news is that they got it right. Name Our Own Stars is a super groovy album full of slightly psychedelic upbeat modern pop. The songs feature great vocal melodies, superb harmonies, smart guitars, and cool driving rhythms. There's a really great fresh inventive quality here that is missing in many modern pop bands. It could be the excitement of recording a first album...or it could just be that these guys have a knack for writing super cool memorable tunes. Whatever the case...this one is a resounding hit here in the super plush babysue office suites. We're totally grooving on kickass tracks like "Runnig Out of Time," "Shade Tree Astronomy," "Do You Know The Way?", "Under the Starlight," and "Shine." This is one helluva kickass debut... TOP PICK.
* * * * * - BabySue.com

The Memphis Flyer cites the Perfect Vessels in a best of 2010 list:

The emergence of "new blood": This year has seen the emergence of several interesting new local bands/artists on the scene, including Kruxe, the Gunslingers, the Sultana, Michaela Caitlin, the Perfect Vessels, Tiger Mountain, and the Burning Sands, among others. - The Memphis Flyer

Local indie trio the Perfect Vessels celebrate the release of their debut album, Name Our Own Stars, this week at the Hi-Tone Café. The trio — Graham Burks on guitar and vocals, younger brother (and Flyer photographer) Justin Fox Burks on drums, and David Bell on bass — recorded the album at Easley-McCain with help here and there from musicians such as Snowglobe’s Tim Regan, Glorie’s Jason Paxton, and Halfacre Gunroom’s Aaron Brame. The band boasts a shambling, tuneful indie-pop style with spacey elements — both musically and conceptually, as the album title indicates. The Perfect Vessels play the Hi-Tone Saturday, October 23rd, on a bill that includes Tiger Mountain and the Subteens. Admission is $5. Showtime is 10 p.m. — Chris Herrington - The Memphis Flyer

When singer-songwriter Graham Burks returned home to Memphis in 2008, his head was full of new musical ideas and influences that he was itching to explore. Looking for the perfect musical foils to go along with him proved simpler than he could have thought possible as he settled back in with his oldest collaborators, brother Justin Fox Burks and childhood friend David Bell.

"Justin and I have been playing together from the very beginning," says Graham Burks. "And David started playing music with us when we 13 years old. ... We reconvened, and it started with late-night experiments in the band room. We realized we were sort of onto something."

That something is now evident on Name Our Own Stars, the debut release on Makeshift Records from the trio's band, The Perfect Vessels.

The group will mark the local release of the record with a show Saturday at the Hi-Tone Café. The Subteens and new band Tiger Mountain, featuring members of the Harmony Brothers and the Yazoo Shakes, will open. The show is part of the Indie Memphis Music Showcase, and film festival VIP passholders get in free. In addition, several local filmmakers have contributed video clips that will be projected during the Vessels' set.

The Burks brothers (Graham, 36, is the older by 14 months) grew up in Germantown, where they say their earliest musical sensibility was formed by the suburban punk scene. Inspired by a cache of instruments they found in the attic, the brothers formed their first band, Manufactured Emotions, in middle school with Ceylon Mooney, who would go on to lead local punk stalwarts Pezz.

From there, the brothers largely went their own ways. Graham delved into the straight-edge punk scene, playing with the band Recoil for several years. Meanwhile, Justin went in a more alternative-rock direction. The brothers reunited briefly on stage in the late '90s in the band Living Room, which featured Graham on drums and Justin on guitar.

In 2004, Graham and his wife moved first to Idaho — "He was working," Justin says with a laugh. "He wasn't living in the mountains off the land." — and then Seattle. There he was exposed to a whole new set of influences that shifted him toward a more pop-friendly, psychedelic-tinged indie-rock sound.

"I had been formulating this band for awhile," he says. "I was starting to write songs out in the Northwest and taking in all of these influences. There were great radio stations and great culture all around, and every band in the world came through there."

In the interim, too, Justin had been on his own musical journey. After playing with other groups including Halfacre Gunroom, Burks and Aaron Brame, who helps The Perfect Vessels today round out their live sound, formed the Hometown Nobodies, a group best known for its project where they wrote and recorded a new song every week for a year.

"Being in that band totally prepared me for this one," says Justin Fox Burks, who chiefly contributes arrangements to the group's songwriting process. "Whatever was on our minds that week, that's what we did. So you really get to explore all your songwriting options that way. I ran into a little songwriting fatigue after it was all over, but it was an experiment that was, overall, very good for my musical education."

Earlier this year, The Perfect Vessels went into the new Easley McCain Recording studio to cut Name Our Own Stars with producer Doug Easley. "We were really excited," says Graham Burks. "Guided By Voices, the White Stripes, Sonic Youth, all these bands that sort of made up the '90s for me and made me who I am happened there."

The Perfect Vessels CD release party with the Subteens and Tiger Mountain

Saturday at the Hi-Tone Café, 1913 Poplar. Doors open at 9 p.m. Admission: $5; advance tickets available online at hitonememphis.com. For more information, call (901) 278-8663. - The Commercial Appeal