Bagheera

Bagheera is made for fans like me: people who love Superchunk, Yo La Tengo, Grandaddy and Rainer Maria. It's a duo of Theodore Moll and Heather Dallape, and despite signature hardened guitar lines and distorted squeal, these two are softies in the best way. Twelves comes for the rock, but stays for the undying melody. They blend layers of full, contagious, and often noisy rock styling with unabashed enthusiasm, constantly sounding like they're hitting their stride. Twelves is not meant to be airtight, leaving space for these deliberate sidebars and patient listeners. As such, it is continually rewarding, and shows Bagheera as a band to follow - track to track and from this remarkable debut forward
.Reviewed by Sarah (Iddings) Peters - lostatsea.net

What began as two individuals committing their alien ideas to home recordings transformed into an album's worth of hairy, polyphonic music from Neverland.
Not sure what indie rock is and need an example? Here it is.
- www.anathema.ws
- www.anathema.ws

……...is a pleasant surprise. Same goes for Grandaddy's Sumday and Bagheera's Twelves; two discs that are poppy yet experimental and well-produced… - www.joecritic.com

As their debut record, Heather Dallape and Theodore Moll lay down thirteen tracks of melodious and harmonious vocal layering and stripped guitars. This is a record that should get worn out on college radio stations. Bagheera seems like the perfect band to complete a solid indie rock touring package. - exoduster

The duo's lo-fi indie pop is a lofty, cosmic gem filled with textured guitars, grooving bass lines, and pushy drumming. This is definitely a debut that will urge you to catch Bagheera live and anxiously await their next "experiment."
-Jeff Church-
- Playback St. Louis

Bagheera's sound is a little bit messy and their melodies are sometimes kind of loopy, but several of these songs hit the spot immediately (like the glorious "Long Division" and "Admission/Concession"). Others grow on you with repeated listenings until their gentle hooks sink deep into your brain. That's the case with "Isolated in an Accelerating Universe", for example, which hides gorgeous guitar lines in a sonically sloppy web of distortion, and of the rhythmically strange but undeniably hook-filled "Solstice"
.Highly recommended - All Music Guide

www.riverfronttimes.com/issues/2004-09-15/music/bsides.html - River Front Times (St. Louis)

RODNEY WILSON | CIN WEEKLY CONTRIBUTOR



Art and science are strange bedfellows: The former calls to mind passion and inspiration, while the latter exists within the rigid world of fact and scholarship. Yet, despite the inherent differences in the two fields, history has seen the line between art and science consistently blurred. Leonardo Da Vinci produced the "Mona Lisa" and "Last Supper," all the while laying the groundwork for modern biology and engineering. Early photographers were in every way chemists, experimenting with volatile compounds in pursuit of a new imaging technique. Science fiction is one of the most successful of all modern storytelling genres, from books to television to movies.

St. Louis duo Bagheera probably won't be seen on the cover of Scientific American anytime soon, but its debut album, Twelves (Asian Man Records), exhibits an interest in science that's not usually seen in a rock 'n' roll band. With sonat reference Newton's Law, anthropology, physics and astronomy - even using short-wave radio signals as a metaphor for a relationship at one point - Bagheera has made an album that's influenced by science, yet deftly avoids the pitfall of becoming a novelty (á la Schoolhouse Rock).

DOWN TO A SCIENCE
"We're both kind of nerdy, so we're really into science-based kinds of things," says Theodore Moll, half of Bagheera's songwriting duo, along with wife Heather Dallape. "It just kind of comes poetically out as science-based lyrics."

Their interest in science is exercised in the couple's approach to making music, as well: Moll speaks of the couple's process of writing as the result of experimentation. "We were doing some home recording stuff, without the intention of doing a band, per se. We were just writing songs and seeing what we could do, recording-wise - teaching ourselves how to record and seeing what was possible," he says, adding that Bagheera started out as demos for another band that Moll and Dallape both played in (the now-defunct Climber). "A lot of the compositions that we wrote were not really meant for a live band - they were a little more intricate, a little more complicated, because we just kind of went nuts and recorded anything that was possible."

They burned their home recordings onto a CD for friends, one of whom was Mike Park, owner of the indie label Asian Man Records. Park wanted to put the songs out as an album, so Bagheera went into the studio to re-record the songs, though pieces of the original experiments are still present throughout Twelves. "A lot of the stuff that we recorded were kind of 'accidental' recordings that we just kept - like where we'd make some sort of noise and it just sounded really good and there was no way to produce that again without losing the quality that made it cool in the first place," Moll says.

It should come as no surprise that Bagheera is, in many ways, the result of technology: Moll and Dallape originally recorded their songs at home, on a four-track tape recorder and multi-track computer software. "Having the luxury of recording at home is just an amazing thing - it wouldn't have been possible to do that 10 years ago without a lot of money and a lot of really good equipment," Moll says.

MARRIED TO THE MUSIC
Science may be the means to an end, but the end here is music, and Moll and Dallape make eclectic indie rock that supersedes any lyrical tendencies. Filled with fuzzy guitars, hard-hitting drums, and a heaping handful of sonic oddities, Bagheera's music is driven by the couple's arresting vocals. Moll handles his vocals with an ease that's reminiscent of Idlewild's Roddy Woomble, and Dallape's vocals are sweet and clear, with just a hint of edge. Bagheera's songs shine when the singers' vocals come together - when the couple harmonizes, the result is truly captivating.

Their capability as a duo isn't surprising for a husband-and-wife team - acts such as Mates of State and Cincinnati's own Over the Rhine have proven that creative couples bring something unique to their music. Logistically, it's a songwriter's dream - when you share a home with somebody, the opportunities for collaboration are endless.

"I think it's just great, because we can play music anytime, and we do a lot," Moll says. "A lot of the songs that we've recently written came about on camping trips or vacations - we take our guitars with us everywhere. It's just cool, writing music any time, any place, wherever it happens."
- Cin Weekly (Cincinnati)