Air Raid Sirens

Lock up a garage band in a basement in South Portland, Maine. Maybe three and a half years. Make one of them a quirky songwriter with an almost savant-like ability to craft new material, and you get what separates Bluestone from the rest: nearly fifty high-polished songs and another hundred and fifty some-odd songs rolling around in Joe Brien Jr.'s obsessive mind. And a deadly accurate sixth sense of what to expect from each other both on stage and off.

"We've been together for so long, the band itself is like a friend," observes twenty year old bass player, Ian Riley. Riley picked up the bass after teaching himself guitar, and began playing with Brien, now twenty-two, in 2002. Soon after, they added drummer Elliot Heeschen, now nineteen. Heeschen, a classically trained jazz trumpet player, previously had been playing guitar in a project with Riley. When you think of Bluestone, think Foo Fighters, Mudhoney, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains and Nirvana.

This band is characterized, above all else, by the stark and emotional veracity of its songwriting. At the age of fifteen, Brien played drums for a moderately successful band, The Taxis. "I got to learn songwriting from the best," recalls Brien. He also got a crash course on the music industry, which is one reason why Bluestone has exclusively focused on crafting their material. It's time for this to change. This band is a fully developed powerhouse waiting to explode on the music scene.

Brien's smoky, multi-dimensional vocals are delivered with the weary edginess of a reluctant messiah. His leads range from subtle harmonies to crashing, but relentlessly restrained chaos. Riley's bass, a solid mass lurking beneath the guitar, reaches up with multiple tentacles to lay down melodic surface layers. Heeschen's drums echo his personal stability and his steadfast commitment to the structural integrity of the music. "We write what sounds good," muses Riley. "Elliot knows the science of it."