Coltrane Motion

Find yourself thinking Beck has lost his edge even if the new album is a little bit better and getting back someway to Mellow Gold even though it is Beck on scientology autopilot? Disappointed with the sad sad fact that the up to now always brilliant New Order, after all this time, have finally released a very bad record? Wondering where it's going to come from next?.. Here it is right now, landed on our doorstep via their label over on Cincinnati Ohio - a band from Chicago that you really do need to go get a slice of. Four tracks; the first - Pi Is Exactly Three - sounds like New Order might do if they were a warm lo-fi alternative American band brought up on Guided By Voices. A beautiful song that doesn't want you to touch it when it's out on the dance floor, it really does sound a like a very fine New Order moment without ever being a clone. The End Of Every Movie has us wondering if the CD player is functioning properly, quite unexpected after the fluid glow of the opener - this is real angular awkwardness, but then you pick up on the delicate song underneath, and the Farfisa glow. And then Supersexy 67 is just that - supersexy - how good are this band!? I Guess The Kids Are OK is the final treat of four - real is the new thing, this is so right, this is so right.. Noisy fuzzy lo-fi fluid fat indie pop and frenzied jazz and cut up hip hop and howling power chords and whooooooooooooooosh, it's been on my floor for three days waiting in line for attention.. Shoegazer cacophony meets lo-fi Beck dance beats, left field songs of beauty.. Oh yes, I need more of this and so do you, this totally rules

- Organ (UK) . April 7, 2005 - Organ (UK)

Sounding like a cross between something like the Gang of Four and Beck, Coltrane Motion, an indie pop trio from Chicago, mixes a variety of styles on its new EP, No Well OK Maybe Just A Little, just out on Cincinnati's Datawaslost Records. At one minute, the band's going through herky-jerky motions in "I Guess the Kids Are OK" and at the next, lead singer Michael Bond is crooning over sparse breakbeats in "Pi Is Exactly Three". Top-notch songwriting skills hold the whole thing together. - Cleveland Free Times

'60s psych, shoegaze, Kraut-rock - there's plenty of musical influences swirling around in this Chicago-based duo's debut. Songs About Music is a pulsing romp of a long-player, with just enough meta-music intellect, drones, and guitar fuzz to keep our synapses firing and our toes tapping. - XLR8R

Onstage the two men come equipped with an arsenal of vintage gear and modern electronics in order to duplicate the swirling, thick layers of sound that fill each track on their debut album, Songs About Music.. Bond and Dennewitz give it their all in a live setting, making the more exuberant moments of Songs About Music feel that much more alive and immediate. The reckless abandon and barely-in-control movement of the band's shows are fantastically captured on the lo-fi, DIY release, and it's this fact that has helped Coltrane Motion recently swoop across the blogosphere like a virus of Tapes 'n Tapes proportion.. - UR Chicago

Coltrane Motion, also known as Michael Bond and Matt Dennewitz, is a Midwestern band with as much love for the Ronettes as they have for My Bloody Valentine. Songs About Music, as the title implies, may be an excuse to unabashedly cop licks and lyrics, but distinguishing these musical instances isn't easy. Their idea of Spector's famous "Wall of Sound" technique is more like a 200 ft. electric fence, drowning melodies in distortion and noise.

- NPR

Coltrane Motion's Songs About Music might be my fave record of the year so far.. They churn up a messy onrush of cracked keyboard sounds and simple, insistent rhythms, overlaid onto melodic pop and doot-doot vocals. Reminds me of the thrill of the very early Pavement records, the eureka of hearing those guys cover doo-wop syllables with Fall spasms.. The album title, it turns out, is straightup earnest: these songs are indeed about music, and this rock is metarock. Not that there's any Grand Statement or anything here, and whew for that. Instead it's just Let's Put on a Show, mooning away, and hey, we've got '60s pop stars, we've got the same chords, the same notes, we've got kick drums, snare drums, kick drums, snare drums.
- Bury Me Not

When singer/composer Michael Bond and guitarist Matt Dennewitz relocated from Cincinnati (where Bond helped helm the still-in-operations datawaslost collective/label) to Chicago a few years back, the Indie music world was just beginning to show more of a whole-hearted interest in danceable, electronic sounds. It was perfect timing for the admittedly more adventurous and noisy duo – perhaps best described as Indie Dance Punk — which has seen many of its releases fervently frothed over by the tastemakers of the music blogosphere. In fact, when the group's full-length, Songs About Music, came out in 2007, it was ranked alongside some of Indie's heaviest hitters as one of the most written-about new releases of its time. And the reviews were almost universally positive.

"The Year Without a Summer" is fairly classic Coltrane Motion, with a dissonant mix of Dennewitz's creative guitar, churning organ/synths and epileptically propulsive beats. Bond's nasal, distorted voice is an acquired taste, but within the lo-fi bombast of songs like "Summer," it's hard to imagine any other vocalist being nearly as fitting. Side B's "Maya Blue" is a hypnotic blend of organ drone and faint and hazy melodies, like early Dandy Warhols with the energy levels pushing the needle into the red.

The group's live show is highly recommended, as Bond and Dennewitz make like a sonic Tasmanian Devil whenever they take over a stage. You'll sweat or be sweated on. And you'll like it. - Citybeat