American Watercolor Movement

American Watercolor Movement It Takes Fifteen To Tango In My Book, What Book Do You Read? (www.americanwatercolormovement.com) Reminds me a bit of one of Luke Sutherland’s more abrasive projects. Though this is perhaps more angst-laden and less euphoric. There’s a similar feeling of theatrical desolation to some of Scott Walker’s later work, though this is far more poppy by comparison. Very carefully crafted dark art pop, with a fragile male vocalist intoning confessional longing and misery. Other touchstones might be: Disco Inferno, later Talk Talk, and Current 93, without sounding that much like any of them.

George Parsons
Dream Magazine #7
- Dream Magazine #7

Come and enter. The world of American Watercolor Movement awaits feverishly with open arms. Experimental post-rock madness that travels deep into the world of progressive ideas of how music is not only created but recorded, American Watercolor Movement is a constant evolution of how we hear music. Experimental music that is this divisive in sound but so united in fandom is rare so clutch onto it tightly. Magnificent! -- J-Sin, Smother Magazine - Smother Magazine

A hypnotic European travelogue of impressions, experiences, chance encounters, and missed connections. But this is no Club Med vacation -- AWM want to bring out Europe as confusing, sleazy, foggy, threatening, decayed; usually sexy, sometimes dangerous, always alluring. Jason Cieradkowski's songs are crammed with peddlers, old buildings, ruins, airports, cafes, "chlopcy", and fetching girls whose languages he doesn't speak. Lost in a kaleidoscope of vaguely recognizable sounds and cultures, Cieradkowski's narrators drift from location to location, following barely-discenrnable signals and voices, and an unarticulated longing. Chasing chicks through grubby European streets becomes a metaphor for communication breakdown. Or maybe it's the other way around.
I'll be straight:And The Maps Came Down is a major release, and one of the most interesting rock albums to come from New Jersey in the past five years. Musical travelogues tend to be distinctive by nature, but Cieradkowski's European explorations have gone to tape with uncommon vividness. Far from home, surrounded by unfamiliar faces and beholden to a foreign logic, the narrators stumble through sonic tapestries alternately carnivalesque and menacing. The silences between the tracks feel like the spaces lost in translation.
Tris McCall / NJ.COM
- NJ.COM

A diverse album with one unifying element, that of a twisted, slobbery thread of damaged genius that flosses every song, no matter how serious, how silly, how awful or how pretty they are. This CD-R (Perhaps Transparent is a CD-R label) opens with the lucid raveup of "Cupid's Without Pants," which features wicker-stick shuffle drumming, noodling melodies, castoff vocals that recalls Mayo Thompson at his least annoying. The poignant "Silver Gultch 1886" follows, and slows the rambling momentum bugun on the first song to a drunken crawl as the brittle guitars are plucked for all their fragile beauty as the singer enunciates his regret to the snap of saltine creacker snare. The desperate insistence of "Dresden" reinstates the pace of the first song with a steady drum clip, over which horns, guitar and voice fade in and fade out. "Automobiles and Broken Legs," with its hyper, tinny strums, off-kilter singing and clamorous cymbal splashing and "Wipeout" drum break, is a fairly basic but rewarding musical stab, if only for the moment it lasts. "Contraband Cowboys (Tough Love)" is an obnoxious combination of the two prior songs, but I like it. "Marie," is a hilarious tribute to Spinal Tap. "Kiss my glove. Put it in your mouth. Smell the glove. The love is all around." The breathless singer and the nasty guitar solo take the song to its most ridiculous end. The American Water Color Movement throw the humor into high-brow gear with "Marie," which is probably the sleeper song of the year. Over spare percussion and chiming harmonics, a man affecting the accent of a serious German artiste (think Sprockets) tells a story of traveling the Black Hills of Montana to hit a hip party at a hot pub. Along the way, he meets a woman who takes him on, long before he is ready. As the song intesifies, we learn of his plans gone awry, and in the end, we're left to know all this dead sexy lover wants is to be loved, to be held, to be touched. I thought about quoting some of the lyrics, but I would end up reprinting them all, for the story depends on each line building upon the previous. While the album continues for another seven tracks, I'm going to stop here, because if these tunes don't sound like they interest you, then you wouldn't have the patience to listen through the back-half of the CD to find the Gems buried within, anyway. I normally never, ever do this, but since it might clinch the deal for someone: This record is recommended for fans of early-Pavement, listenable Red-Krayola, Meringue, Home, Wingtip Sloat, Angels of Epistemology, et al. OK. That probably narrows it down to six people. If any of you six are reading this, you know what to do.
Steve Brydges--Copper Press
- COPPER PRESS MAGAZINE

A t last count, this New Jersey collective included eight members (late TV-painting guru Bob Ross is not and never was among them) The members play keyboards, a cello, a violin, guitars, bass, a trumpet, a flute and a lap top, while churning out a comic mélange of high-concert art noise.
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS (5 LIVE: Hot tips on this weekends coolest concerts)
- NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

In a good month, I’m at Maxwell’s three or four times. That’s thirty visits a year for fifteen years, several bands per bill. You know I’m up front for all of them; I don’t hang around at the bar. So when I say that last month’s American Watercolor Movement show was one of the handful of best performances I’ve ever seen at Maxwell’s, that’s saying something. I don’t like to make recourse to transcendental categories of value, and I don’t go to shows to be “blown away”, but by the time they’d finished their set, I was speechless.
TRIS McCALL / NJ.com
- NJ.COM