davidshanesmith
Gig Seeker Pro

davidshanesmith

Band Folk Acoustic

Calendar

This band has not uploaded any videos
This band has not uploaded any videos

Music

Press


"click opera"

Am I going mad? I've found something else great today. A new artist, this time, one so obscure that he's only had two plays of some of his MySpace songs (unless the counter's broken). He's called David Shane Smith, and if I were a record company I would sign him like that. He's got something of Dylan about him, something of Cohen, something of Beck, something of Captain Beefheart, something of Mark E. Smith, something of Thom Yorke, something of Jeff Buckley, something of Ariel Pink. Some have compared him to Momus, but I don't think that's apt at all.
David Shane Smith could be a hipster or a schizo. I think he's probably a hipster, on balance; he was in Brooklyn, but now he's in LA. He hasn't released anything, unless by "released" you mean making homeburn CDs and handing them out to friends, free, in sleeves made from torn-out magazine pages.

His music is exactly the fusion between avant and trad that I want to be hearing, the balance that music needs if it's to keep advancing. It's not good enough just to have well-made songs in nice arrangements, you have to push and challenge and bend the medium itself, otherwise it'll go sclerotic and become an interpretive art, the new classical music. Smith does that. He challenges the medium, and therefore the audience. It's good for the medium, good for the audience, and good for him.

Listen to Brand, or -- especially -- Miserabilism, on Smith's MySpace page. You can tell that this guy learned to draw before he learned to scribble. He learned to range before he learned to derange, he could do familiar before he could do strange. Miserabilism starts like a Leonard Cohen song (there's even a tiny whiff of Coldplay about the start), but goes where neither Cohen nor Coldplay ever have or would -- into something very like an early Beck rap, in fact. The next track, Brand, sounds like mid-60s Dylan singing over cheap samples of Cohen's Master Song.

It would be tragic if this guy went straight, threw out the quirks. - Momus


Discography

Diva, Love Songs, WinterTower, Angry Earth, Cloud Pleaser

Photos

Bio

Small town to large metropolis.