Biography
Since releasing Birdseed Shirt in January 2009, buzz has been growing regionally and nationally, with a breathless Pitchfork review and a stellar week at SXSW. Currently booking a national tour for June/July.
"Brave and Ferocious... 8.0" -Pitchfork
"[Deleted Scenes] has hit its stride in a major way on debut album "Birdseed Shirt." It's an album of smart, slippery and varied indie rock songs, but it never feels like the band is forcing things just for the sake of being different. Some songs have the nervous energy of early Talking Heads, while others succeed thanks to intricate subtleties that show an obsessive attention to detail. Don't get too attached to any of those sounds, though. Scheuerman has no interest in doing the same thing twice."
-Dave Malitz, Washington Post
"Birdseed Shirt, the debut LP from Deleted Scenes, is a creative and emotional album of soaring, hook-laden highs and more tempered lows, with each mood skillfully executed and full of rich imagery and metaphors. Taking the odd title from a Jonathan Safran Foer novel, the duo from Brooklyn and Washington, DC make playfully unpredictable songs that veer in unexpected directions while remaining completely infectious."
-NPR.org
"Not since the days of Fugazi and Discord Records has a D.C. band made such a stir on the national music circuit."
-Washington Post Express
"Deleted Scenes' recent album, Birdseed Shirt, often sounds as if it's been gently glazed with cold medication, but that doesn't mean it's creatively sluggish. All that fine-tuned, morose reverb and space opens up on a band that has enough subtle craft to explore everything from its mopey side ("Get Your Shit Together For The Holidays") to psych-rock aggression ("Mortal Sin")."
--The Onion
"So go see the Deleted Scenes in a small club while you can."
--Madison Isthmus
"Cheer factor: -4 out of 10, though it�s a good kind of hurt. �Keep your shit together for a couple days,� Scheuerman sings, reminding himself and the listeners that the holidays aren�t the only thing that can�t last forever."
--Black Plastic Bag
"The first full length album from the Deleted Scenes' Birdseed Shirt will take you back to a time when indie rock was not just the sophisticated soft rock that it has morphed into in recent years. Each and every song on this album is not only a musical example of song writing at its best, but a lyrically as well. The strongest songs on the album are many layered walls of sound. The more subdued songs create a cyclical rhythm with catchy hooks that will have you bobbing your head or hosting your own personal dance party."
--Sen Baltimore
"The range of emotions - the strength of anger, the saturation of joy - pour out of this new bundle of songs. �Take My Life� is a grand example of this - starting off soft and sweet even though the lyrics talk of suicide (the sound almost beckons comparisons to Ra Ra Riot or Band Of Horses), but as it progresses the track cranks to a new height with a chorus I simply love to sing along with. Another highlight for me is �City That Never Wakes Up�. Here�s a song built on a complex rhythm and a chanting chorus that ebbs and flows then sparkles at the end. It�s like a walk through a midnight drenched city."
--Pasta Primavera
On "Mortal Sin," the band takes an acid-rock trip that's absolutely habit-forming, while "Ithaca" features a beat that's weirdly reminiscent of the old Filter tune "Take a Picture." Even "Turn to Sand," which begins like a pretty straight-ahead pop song, surprises after a few bars thanks to a sneak attack of blues licks.
--Madison Isthmus
"'Birdseed Shirt' is one of the D.C. area's finest indie-rock CDs ever released, sounding a bit like the reverbed Americana of My Morning Jacket
if that band wasn't always lost in the Grand Canyon, or a more vibrant version of Galaxie 500's gentle psychedelia.
--Washington Post Express
"It's an understatement to call the album an ambitious debut. Deleted Scenes mixes up genres and styles on practically every song, from the bluesy
swagger of opener "Turn to Sand" to the playful "Ithaca" � which answers the question "If Peter Gabriel jammed with Sunny Day Real Estate, what
would it sound like?" (Answer: Awesome.)"
--DCist
"Birdseed Shirt is a fantastic debut and it reinforces what we've been saying all along. It's shocking that this band isn't huge."
--DCist
"Deleted Scenes is one of those bands that I kept hearing about rather than actually hearing. So I was wonderfully surprised when they turned out
to be way better than I was expecting. Deleted Scenes (DC/Brooklyn) plays propulsive, rhythmic indie rock with wonderful psychedelic arrangements, a great sense of humour and best of all they don't disappoint. I kept hitting the repeat button on the MP3 player every time "Mortal Sin" came on."
--Duggup (UK)
"The songs Deleted Scenes recently posted to their MySpace page are surprisingly ambitious--delicately psychedelic Americana that makes
judicious use of musical gizmos and gadgets to instill an autumnal stoner vibe. Songs like "Fake ID" are steeped in blurry digital haze, as if
somebody tried to play the Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory song "Pure Imagination" through a modem circa 1997."
--Aaron Leitko, Washington Post Express
"Where are the labels that should be chomping at the bit to release a band like this?"
-J Robbins on jrobbins.net
"Harmonies supplement smooth lead vocals; Beatles-y hooks populate head-bobbing numbers like the lead track, "Turn to Sand"; Fugazoid angular repetition rears its head here and there. On the standout track "Ithaca," the band shows that pleasant polyrhythms can set up a song without veering too far into Graceland territory."
--Pittsburgh City Paper
"[In "Ithaca"] a constant tonal ringing is a frame for the band�s somewhat afro-cussion, bright, accommodating guitar melodies and Menomena-esque double-vocal lines."
--Peer Validated
"Brooklyn's Deleted Scenes are an ambitious indie quartet with a fine line in delicate psych stained Americana. As moody as a chameleon sitting on a
De Kooning painting with confessional lyrics that are more Priory therapy session than depressives diary the band could be the alter ego of the
Summer of Love."
--The Devil Has the Best Tuna
"Deleted Scenes is a great band. Not a great local band, but a great band in general."
-- DCist.com
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Bio:
Deleted Scenes burst onto the now legendary Olney, Maryland hyphy-pop scene in 1998, after songwriters Dan Scheuerman and Matt Dowling met at a juvenile detention center urinal while visiting incarcerated relatives. Citing Cabaret Voltaire, Sparks, and Misissippi John Hurt among the artists in which they were in no way influenced, the two immediately began sculping the Deleted Scenes signature sound using mostly shoe horns and limp pillows. Guitarist Chris Scheffey and drummer Brian Hospital soon joined the compulsively apologetic duo to take their nefarious bedroom scuzz into a live setting.
In 2005, Deleted Scenes entered a commodious hellhole in East Baltimore to record the four songs that would make up the "Deleted Scenes" EP. Following the album's release, the band hit the road in Scheffey's father's airbrushed, self-portrait-slathered bread van, playing scores of dates across the US in an attempt to get people to like them.
After having their van covered with faded denim in Gary, Indiana, Deleted Scenes relocated to Washington, D.C where they subsisted exclusively on Ethiopian fir-fir and recorded only raindrops for three months.
It was around this time in 2007 that Deleted Scenes stumbled upon a surrealistic plop of a record called "Sookie Jump" by one "L. Skell" (of The Rude Staircase), and immediately went on a crusade to hunt down the now bald and olfactorily unpleasant recluse. Wearing sneakers, the band drove up to Skell's West Philadelphia dungeon, only to find him in a salvia, nutmeg and EPMD-induced stupor. After haranguing him for 10 straight hours, Skell finally agreed to help in the creation of what would become "Birdseed Shirt".
Following tender sessions with heroic soundsmith J. Robbins, the band holed up in Skell's dark, dank hermitage for 17 months collecting like stamps every last perfumed essence of sound until what resulted was not only a mellifluous, anthemic collage of existential joy and despair, but the best pop record of 2009. Dig!
"Birdseed Shirt", Deleted Scenes first full length record, unclenches your chest and pours sonic Elysian Fields inside, waterboarding your viscera with unspeakably catchy hooks and unbridled, youthful senescence.
--What Delicate Recordings
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RIYL: Dismemberment Plan, Danielson Familie, Modest Mouse, Talking Heads, Radiohead
Key Tracks: "Fake IDs," "Ithaca," "Mortal Sin," "Turn to Sand"
Deleted Scenes, 3367 18th Street NW, Washington, DC 20010
e: deletedscenesmusic@gmail.com
p: 240-426-8533
w: www.deletedscenesmusic.com
Instrumentation
Dan Scheuerman - vocals, guitar, percussion
Matt Dowling - bass, vocals, guitar, vibes, trumpet, piano, organ
Chris Scheffey - guitar, vocals, pianos, organ
Brian Hospital - drums, percussion
Discography
Deleted Scenes EP - 2007 (Echelon productions)
Birdseed Shirt - 2009 (What Delicate Recordings)
Links
| http://www.deletedscenesmusic.com |