Awesome Car Funmaker

Madison's Awesome Car Funmaker makes its flamboyant dance-pop stick with musicianship that's unexpected from a band with such an adolescent sense of humor. For its new album E For Everyone, celebrated at this show, the band thickens up its hyper excess with bigger, clearer production, extra layers of keyboards, and lyrics that confront desperation and apathy. There's still plenty of boneheaded sing-along material on tunes like "Sloppy Girl" ("Slop in the slop up in the slop yeah / sloppity slop?"), but Everyone makes real progress when the fun collides with the unrest. On album closer "An Ode To Escape Or Explode," the band yearns to ditch the Midwest for Mars, all in a delirious hail of synths, hi-hats, and vocal harmonies. Opening: The Selfish Gene, Inspector Owl. - The Onion, A.V. C club

30-Minute Music Hour: Awesome Car Funmaker
(Awesome Car Funmaker performs live on the 30-Minute Music Hour.)

“Existential party rock designed to make you think about the head you are banging,” is how Awesome Car Funmaker describes their own sound. One of the hardest working punk-rock-dance outfits in the state, Awesome Car Funmaker is at the top of Madison’s very active indy-rock heap. Formed in 2003 and with over 300 shows (many of them all-ages) under its belt, Awesome Car has just pulled to the curb with a brand new CD, E Is For Everybody. While the record pops with party-hearty tunes, the band isn’t afraid to bring heavier themes to the beer keg. Like God, war, and Mars. Awesome Car Fumanker is a "Top Rock Band" winner in the Madison Area Music Awards.

June 17, 2008

Link: http://wpt.org/medialibrary/mediaPlayer.cfm?id=332&searchTerm=30-minute%20Music%20Hour

- Wisconsin Public Tetlevision

No one could say that Awesome Car Funmaker’s first two releases, Green Means Go and Of Lovers And Monsters were failures. They showed the promise of a local act on the rise. They were littered with shards of brilliance but showed only scraps of the pop-rock behemoth the band’s live shows have proven them to be. However, on their latest effort, E For Everyone, ACF finally captures the true sense of their mammoth sound. The album opens with a surprisingly composed image of the band. “Don’t Try” is a smooth, relaxed reflection on the superfluity apparent in American consumerism. Although significantly more calm than other tracks, it stays fresh and doesn’t drag on before launching into the rest of the album. The classic ACF that fans have come to love is not entirely absent, though. Tracks like “Break Out the Cake” and “NASA or CIA” maintain the pop-dance-rock intensity that characterizes the group. “Ant County Fair” is the perfect illustration of how ACF have grown as a band. They dial down the velocity without losing any of the dance-ability of the track. They mix a swaying guitar melody with a swelling synthesizer and signature falsetto as the verse grows into a powerful distortion-driven chorus. “Sloppy Girl,” the album’s first single, combines synth melodies with a driving bass line, and encapsulates the frenetic melodies that make the band so great. “Divided States of the Absurd” is an intimate encounter with a Vietnam veteran, lead singer Ryan Corcoran’s father. Although the eccentric lyrics vanish, the track is still definitive ACF, albeit a more mature version focusing on the common disillusionment with war. The album’s final track, “An Ode To Escape or Explode,” is a fitting end to an album full of themes of disenchantment with Mid-western life in general. It is the climax of a life built on banality. As the song proves, when “everybody’s on the edge of death; / We are certainly alive,” and in search for a time when “everything’s uncertain,” ACF have one message: “Carpe diem.” Since 2003, ACF have mesmerized audiences with a relentless onslaught of energy and enthusiasm for each song. One of the problems with earning a name on stage gimmicks and songs about the living dead (2006’s “Brand New Zombie”), though, is that any musical profundity gets lost in the novelty. Recorded at Chris Walla’s Hall of Justice and produced by Beau Sorenson, E For Everyone is a triumph in production, somehow capturing both the energy in each track as well as the sonic intricacies. Though there’s no substitute for experiencing the ACF Monster live and in-concert, E For Everyone provides the best documentation of the beast yet, and is a glaring triumph for one of Madison’s most likeable bands. - The Daily Cardinal, University of Wisconsin, Madison

The episodes of VH1's "Behind the Music" are full of stories about rockers who had their bad behavior backfire on them. But usually, that bad behavior involves something pretty drastic, like trashing a hotel room or falling out of a coconut tree.
For Ryan Corcoran of Madison pop-rock band Awesome Car Funmaker, it was failing to pay his electric bill.
Corcoran had just finished recording the backing vocal tracks for "Heart Attack," one of the songs on the band's new album "E For Everyone," when MG&E decided to do something drastic about the three-month overdue electric bill at Corcoran's near eastside apartment.
They came out and shut the power off, and Corcoran lost all the tracks and had to re-record them.

"Actually, doing it the second time around, they got a little tighter," Corcoran said. "It was still disheartening."
Between that and the first shipment of CDs that botched the band's name (they read "Awsome Car Funmaker" on the spine), it's no wonder they didn't call the album "E For Effortless." But you can't hear the strife on the disc's songs, which are the deliriously entertaining, lyrically offbeat, keyboard-drenched pop-rock songs that ACF has become known for in these parts.
The band is playing a CD release show at the High Noon Saloon, 701 E. Washington Ave. at 9 tonight. Admission is $5, and fellow local pop-rockers The Selfish Gene and DeKalb's Inspector Owl are also on the bill.
An ACF live show is known for its energy, as the four nattily-dressed, clean-cut lads leap and spin about the stage in a state of rock 'n ' roll delirium. While previous albums were mainly an attempt to distill that on-stage pandemonium onto a CD, the band said they wanted to do something more polished for "E For Everyone."
"It was more of taking a step back and seeing how we could go back and see how we could make the tunes a little more polished and composed," Corcoran said.
"It's a little bit more orchestrated than past efforts," bassist Justin Taylor added. "It's more of an organized train wreck."
The subject matter ranges from breakup songs like "NASA or CIA" to the surprisingly personal "Divided States of the Absurd," about Corcoran's relationship with his Vietnam veteran father.
And they veer from the global "Costa Rica" - which packs a surprising amount of information about the Central American nation ("No wealthy landed oligarchy/Family coffee farms since the 1830s") into a pop-rock song - to the local "Awesome Car Funmaker Safari," where a Fitchburg suburbanite is unwittingly duped by the drive-through employees at his local fast-food restaurant, a scenario Corcoran said was inspired by his experience working as a part-time coffee barista.
"It's a different world on the other side of that window," he said.
The original line-up of the band met after Corcoran put an ad on madisonmusicians.net headlined "Captain Rock and Roll Seeks Bandmates." Taylor said he couldn't pass up a chance to work with someone who actually referred to himself as "Captain Rock and Roll," and in fact calls Corcoran "Captain Ryan" to this day.
Keyboardist Brendan McCarty, who Corcoran calls the "flair button" of the band, and new drummer Andy Manos round out the line-up. The band members said there's no magic formula for what keeps them working well together.
"We're willing to put up with each other," Corcoran said. "We want to play shows, and we like to dance and party, even though we're in our late 20s."
rthomas@madison.com - The Capital Times, Madison, WI