Devin Davis
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Devin Davis

Band Rock Singer/Songwriter

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The best kept secret in music

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"Entertainment Weekly"

Sure knows his way around a great hook. Aiming to retrieve his "Iron Woman," he deploys an instantly hummable power-pop chorus - not to mention a boisterous sax solo. - Entertainment Weekly


"All Music Guide (4.5 out of 5 stars)"

from ALLMUSIC.COM

Devin Davis - "Lonely People of the World, Unite!"
4/5 out of 5 stars

by Tim Sendra

Devin Davis spent two years crafting in the studio Lonely People of the World, Unite!, playing just about all the instruments himself as well as writing and producing. All that time and solitary effort has paid off in a big way because this is the kind of guitar pop record that comes out of nowhere and leaves your jaw scraping the floor in amazement, sort of like the New Pornographers' or Sloan's classic One Chord to Another self-titled debut. Davis's songs are an exciting blend of chamber pop (horns, keyboards, lush layers of acoustic guitars), power pop (hard hitting electric guitars, jumpy rhythms, vocal harmonies) and classic 60's pop (glimpses of the influence of the Kinks, the Small Faces and pop-psych bands like the Move or the Easybeats.

Best of all they are suffused with an alarming amount of energy with Davis's slightly geeky voice straining at the seams, the guitars careening wildly and the chords and words flashing by at a blinding pace. Not too many bands these days are writing songs as hook filled and alive as "Iron Woman," "Sandie" or "Moon Over Shark City" or as sweetly innocent and melodic as the quieter songs on the record like "Deserted Eyeland," "Giant Spiders" or "The Choir Invincible". Davis's production touch is remarkably assured as well. He knows just when to cut the dynamics or jump them up a notch and the record flows like an exhilarating live set.

The whole record is filled with moments of head-nodding agreement with his choices, hilarious lyrics and moments of audacity (like when he samples the Monkees' theme song ("we're the young generation and we've got nothing to say") in the boy band dissing "Transcedental Sports Anthem", drops a perfectly blaring E- Street meets Archie Shepp sax solo into "Iron Woman" or hits the accelerator halfway through the Kinks-y barrelhouse piano rocker "Paratroopers with Amnesia" leaving your heart doing crazed jumping jacks.

Lonely People of the World, Unite! is a small-scale triumph and Devin Davis has left competition in the dust. There are few guitar pop records of the last 20 years that are as exciting, well- constructed or memorable than this. - All Music Guide


"Chicago Reader album review"

DEVIN DAVIS Lonely People of the World, Unite! | Mousse

By Bob Mehr

Iowa native Davis is best known -- if he's known at all -- as leader of the 90s college-rock outfit Irving and its offshoot Irving Philharmonic, a band firmly entrenched in the Sonic Youth/Dinosaur Jr camp. For Lonely People of the World, Unite! -- his first album since moving to Chicago in 1999 -- he makes an ambitious transition. Davis plays most of the instruments himself (including trombone, piano, and theremin in addition to guitar, bass, and drums), and the album showcases his penchant for the big-tableau production, feedback-laden hooks, and winking wordplay associated with arena-friendly power poppers like Superdrag and Weezer. The album launches with the brass-fueled bubblegum fuzz of "Iron Woman" and "When I Turn Ninety-Nine," then heads off in manifold directions; it shifts from Kinks-style cleverness ("Giant Spiders") to 50s-flavored barrelhouse piano ("Paratrooper With Amnesia") to a funereal organ ballad ("The Choir Invisible") before closing with the sweeping geek soul of "Deserted Eyeland." Not a duff track in the bunch. - Chicago Reader


"Coke Machine Glow album review"

You know the type:

Slouching in with a forlorn glance at the world, reeking of an acute resignation so profound that his presence transforms his every location into an Ed Hopper tableau. Wandering into a gas station at 11:40 at night, tie loosened after a night of serving seafood, eyes glazed, blearily buying a lighter and a microwaveable burrito. Sitting bored at a deli for a late lunch. Driving through the sleet unblinking, shoveling laundry from washer to cart, renting a DVD. Sleepwalking, staring, mowing the lawn — always alone.

This guy has an anthem, whether he knows it or not. Eleven anthems, in fact, thanks to some guy from Chi-town (via Florida) named Devin Davis who has single-handedly written, recorded, performed and produced a debut album --- Lonely People of the World, Unite! --- of almost unprecedented quality and depth of thought. Think Pinkerton without the pain, or Funeral if it was about loneliness instead of loss. Davis crams enough reckless enthusiasm, pop smarts, and shit-hot Bowie rock’n’roll into Unite’s 36 minute runtime to make Augie March look like a jam band.

Unite dwells in that first album twilight that actually makes you physically, tangibly excited about what a given artist might be able to accomplish. Remember Turn on the Bright Lights, Is This It, Original Pirate Material? Remember the last time you had to play an album for all of your friends? And remember how if they didn’t like it you didn’t want to be friends with them anymore? This is that album, fresh out of nowhere for the year 2005. You’re welcome.

“Iron Woman” is an unfailingly great first track, a searing, air in the hair slammer with a chorus like a steel trap; it’s two perfect minutes, easily as good an opener as “Le Garage” or “Caring is Creepy.” “Turtle and the Flightless Bird” is a fable of genuinely touching earnestness, anchored by the type of drunken shout-along chorus that makes you nostalgic for the absolute present, for the moment you’re listening to the song. The Counting Crows have been trying to hit this note for like a decade now, and Davis perfects it on his first try.

This isn’t the only time Davis does this trick. “Moon Over Shark City” starts on the riff that the Kings of Leon have been grasping for for two albums, and it bursts into a coke-binge freak-out chorus that the Mooney Suzuki only achieves live. “Transcendental Sports Anthem” has more cock-rock megaphone bombast than anything on Permission To Land. The brothers Gallagher will kill each other before they write a ballad like “Sandie.” But while Davis is destroying the competition, he’s also paying homage to the Untouchables: before it becomes a New York Dolls freak-out, “Paratrooper with Amnesia” is a maudlin ragtime crooner, and a deadringer for White Album-era McCartney.

And there’s really no precedent for “Cannons At The Courthouse”, which goes from rainy, gorgeous Blonde on Blonde patter to fuzzed-out Neutral Milk Hotel bliss rawk and (heart-breakingly) back before melting in a vintage psych-rock haze. Ditto for the phenomenal “Giant Spiders”, the album’s centerpiece (craftily buried near the end), built around a Pete Townshend head-smasher of a riff. This song finally seizes a mood hinted at earlier on the album, a mood so emotionally complex as to be unnamed; how’s “bonecrushingly hopeful yet resigned” sound?

I’m running out of superlatives, adjectives and interesting comparisons at this point, and you’re running out of patience for my boundless enthusiasm, but that’s okay: in the end this album is reminiscent of only itself, a conceptual masterstroke (yes, I said "masterstroke") of absurd listenability and intellectual captivation. Davis’ surreal lyrics stand with one foot in the grippingly real (“Man, I don’t ever want to move back here again”) and the other firmly planted in the absurd: I’ll let the line “What happened to the rhino I know?” speak for itself.

He’s at his best when these two worlds collide, like when a forlorn protagonist looks up in “Transcendental Sports Anthem” and sees “the flocks of boy bands flying by, headed down south to Orlando for the winter.” The album’s predominant theme presents itself at an almost subconscious level, a patchwork of odd adjectives and half-dreamed fragments that ultimately forms a sad vignette, an intentionally unfunny joke told by a very lonely person. (I mean, he was writing songs this good and he still had to play all the instruments himself?)

But the music tells a different story altogether, one of a newfound, hard-won hope. That exclamation point in the title is there for a reason, and when you listen to this album you’ll know why. It would be a shame for it to slip through the cracks, because to some ears it’s an early contender for year-end glory, and, hell, who knows how long it may hold up after that. And so what if that first paragraph was culled from the last two months of my life; this album’s personal relevance to me is the sole seed of doubt c - cokemachineglow.com


"Kitty Magik album review"

DEVIN DAVIS
"LONELY PEOPLE OF THE WORLD, UNITE!
((Mousse))
By Sean Moeller


I've never been that keen to writing about records too personally. With that said, you can be sure that anytime you ever read about an album that those two hands typing and giving a work a positive or disapproving mark are connected directly to that part of the head thinking and scrutinizing with the only one-lettered pronoun pulling the strings of every pecking. Nothing can be separated from personal opinion and that's just how it is. Devin Davis made me unable to hide behind a wall of one-way glass and words that sound looked-up. He made me drive slower to where I was going to finish a record that I couldn't bring myself to pause and continue later simply for the way it seemed to impatiently grab me, hold and shake me up.

If this record was created by a guy lacking companionship, may he always be alone and really feel the cold grip of singularity. Let Davis maintain an existence of emptiness for all his days just so this well and this anxious creativity never dry up. He's the nameless bedroom pop whiz who looks like Luke Wilson as a carnival barker/traveling salesman on the cover of his record who'll be dominating year-end "ones you fucking missed" lists by every indie rock publication. The frenetic, headlong plunge into every guitar-driven song would have been enough to prove his salt, but Davis - an implanted Chicagoan who makes a habit of recording fireworks shows and shares some of the beautiful characteristics of city mates Johnny Polonsky and Fig Dish - writes some oddly catchy and inventive lyrics that double the pleasure. His perfect pop songs (and they are just that) have a fire in them that could help bend horseshoes. He barely hits some notes, but does it in a way that makes you love him. The songs go to the right places, spring to life on cue and make you think about a Starbucks at the top of Mt. Everest, David Bowie, Willie Nelson and how it might be possible to take the long way home from work again just so you can listen to this son of a bitch from front-to-back without interruption. - Kitty Magik


"Salon.com track review"

AUDIOFILE BY THOMAS BARTLETT

Daily Download: "Iron Woman," Devin Davis

"Iron Woman," the opening track of Devin Davis' debut record "Lonely People of the World, Unite!," is a ragged, invigorating, somewhat anarchic two-minute rock song, the vocals delivered with Springsteenian gusto and grit, and with an unhinged sax solo snuck in to rough things up further. The whole record is mightily impressive, equal parts tight songcraft and undisciplined emotional fervor, recorded nearly single-handedly by Davis over a period of a few years. Also available for free download, "Turtle and the Flightless Bird" and "Deserted Eyeland."

- Salon.com


"Ink 19 album review"

from INK 19

(published on Ink 19.com)

If the triumph-against-adversity stories surrounding Lonely People of the World, Unite! are to be believed, then Devin Davis' noteworthy solo debut owes its very existence to loneliness. After moving from Florida to Chicago in 1999, Davis had trouble finding likeminded musicians to work with and so spent two years in midnight isolation at his home studio or snatching unbooked time at Chicago's ACME Recording, where he worked as an engineer. Apparently the disc itself was never even intended for a commercial audience. It was only supposed to be his musician's calling card.

A lonely person attempting to rally all sorts of lonely people, he inhabits in his songs different narrative personas: a hapless down-and-outer pleading with the Iron Woman of the eponymous opening track, an altruistic itinerant turtle, a desert island castaway, or a lovesick dreamer caught in some kind of capitalist nightmare. Davis pulls off this hat-switching exceedingly well, always credible and never giving over to the tediousness of self-pity or getting mired in gloom.

"Iron Woman" is punchy American roots rock in the Superdrag mode, embellished with shouts, group choruses, and a squealing sax solo performed by Davis himself. And like most of the tracks on Lonely People, it prides itself on concision. Only "Cannons in the Courthouse" dares to flout the conventional three-minute running time. "When I Turn Ninety-Nine," another one of the many album highlights, combines raunchy fuzz guitar with organ and trombone while Davis' narrator shuffles around in madness' alternate reality.

On the ballad "Turtle and the Flightless Bird," Davis renders his lyrics with a natural, spoken quality, preserving here the fluid seesaw rhythm of the song without forcing the words to maintain strict line breaks and meter. Although his fairy-tale dreaminess on this track is genuine, elsewhere his cynicism is something to be savored viz. the hard-rocking "Transcendental Sports Anthem: "Look up there in the sky/ at the flocks of boy bands flying by/ [Š] My oh my, can they sure play/ I saw a new one just today/ singin' 'We're the young generation/ and we've got nothing to say' (with a musical nod to The Monkees, the boy band of their day, in these last lines)."

Half-buried near the end are the bluesy "Paratrooper with Amnesia" and "Giant Spiders," the closing line from which gives the album its title. Neither of these is worth mentioning except to call attention to one of Lonely People's rare lulls, though the piano of "Paratrooper" in particular does give the disc a bit of stylistic diversity. Fortunately "The Choir Invisible" and "Deserted Eyeland" wrap up the album on a strong note, if not exactly the power pop frenzy of "Iron Woman" and "Moon over Shark City."

With any luck, Davis' clarion call should reach all corners of the globe. This is enjoyable, often exhilarating stuff, enough to pull any despondent loners out of themselves and set their fingers drumming and toes tapping. www.devindaviswebsite.com - Ink 19


"LAist album review"

Have you heard Devin Davis yet? We have, and frankly he has us wondering whether one of the year's best CDs hasn't already taken its bow.

The album is called, "Lonely People Of The Wold, Unite!" Davis spent over two years recording it, playing virtually all the instruments himself. The result of all that hard work is a collection of songs that flow together, lift us up, toss us about and make us giggle like kids. It ebbs and flows. It crashes into your living room, it pauses for a breath, it makes a gorgeous melodic point and then it races off into something new, often within the span of a single song.

"Lonely People Of The Wold, Unite!" slipped into record stores back in March without much impact. But word of mouth is growing. This time next year he'll be as much a household name as Joanna Newsom became last year or Badly Drawn Boy before that. (Of course, when we say household name, we are, of course, referring to your average Indie household.) It's the sort of summery album you might want to crank up to eleven while cruising down up the PCH with the top down on your convertible.

And if you don't have a convertible, it might just inspire you to get one. - LAist


"Pitchfork album review"

Devin Davis Lonely People of the World, Unite! [Mousse; 2005] Rating: 7.2

This power-popping ode to loneliness is the one-man-band opus most basement-dwelling indie rock nerds think they could make if they felt like it. Mop-topped and horn-rimmed, Chicago by-way-of Florida singer Devin Davis is ambitious, but it's not necessarily his nasty trombone or theremin chops that make his debut solo album better than your local mom-and-pop clerk's self-described "Bolan meets Pollard" pop masterpiece. Instead, it's his knowing way around a walloping chorus and his welcome sense of restraint and economy that allow said hooks to live for many hum-worthy listens.

A loosely conceptual record, Lonely People of the World, Unite! sees Davis embodying a varied cast of, well, lonely people-- or, as it happens, lonely ghosts or lonely turtles. "Iron Woman" doubles as the record's seafaring jumping-off point and its most distinguishable, immediate moment. "It's hard to live in a basement and not get carried away," sings Davis on the Guided By Springsteen stomper. This lone wolf mostly takes his own advice to heart. Recording the vast majority of the album by himself, Davis doesn't often succumb to vain overindulgence and his piled-on retro-instrumentation punches up more than it bogs down.

The singer's limited yelp hinders some songs from reaching Kinks-esque fantasia, but on "Turtle and the Flightless Bird", Davis' vulnerability matches his hard-shelled counterpart's grounded hopefulness. The track finds the title pair in an unlikely partnership, and it reads like a heartbreaking fable.

The exclamation point at the end of this album's title is a testament to Davis' sense of mutual togetherness. Just as he looked to organs, drums, and gongs to quell his own isolation in a new city, many of the characters in his tales of woe are buoyed by the songwriter's optimism. Loneliness has rarely sounded so celebratory or inviting. - pitchforkmedia.com


"Splendid e-Zine album review"

from SPLENDID E-ZINE
by Jennifer Kelly


"It's hard to live in a basement / and not get carried away," Davis sings in the first line of Lonely People of the World, Unite!'s opener, "Iron Woman". In many ways, that line defines the whole Devin Davis experience. In some ways, Lonely People is a quintessential one-man album, as quirky and individual as outsider art can be, but it's also richly instrumented and expertly crafted in a way that surpasses most basement projects.

Devin Davis started in Jacksonville, Florida, where he had a short-lived noise band called Irving Philharmonic. Then, as young people in novels are always doing, he decided to pick up stakes and set out for the big city -- Chicago to be precise -- to make his fortune. Once there, he discovered that making friends, forming bands and developing your potential isn't exactly a given, even in a town as large and music- oriented as Chicago. He got a job in a recording studio, and during his free time he wrote songs and recorded them, almost entirely by himself, in his bedroom and in his empty workplace. There are certain tracks, he says now, where you can hear the footsteps as he walks back to his guitar after turning on the recording equipment.

His story isn't particularly remarkable -- it seems like half of the CDs we receive are home-recorded -- but Lonely People is of an entirely different order: so rich and varied, so imaginatively melodic and so full of arresting lines and twists that it would be a great album no matter how it was made. Think In an Aeroplane over the Sea, Bee Thousand, Son of Walter -- it's that kind of record, the kind you play over and over again until every drum fill, every chord change, every lyrical paradox is etched into your synapses.

Unlike many lo-fi recorders, Davis spent a great deal of time editing his work -- eliminating the transitions, cutting the fat, making sure that every second of recorded material paid off. As a result, the songs are quite short -- only the grandly imaginative "Cannons at the Courthouse" extends past four minutes. That's with what amounts to four movements: the guitar-picked lyricism of the first two verses, the chorus's GBVish glory, the dead-stopped psych-rock interval with its trippy description of Starbucks on Mt. Everest, and the Dark Side of the Moon-leaning outro. It sounds like a pastiche, but the song works on every level, and the parts, while distinct, coalesce quite nicely into a whole. Simpler, but just as heartbreakingly effective, the ballad "Sandie" is all you need to know about loneliness and longing, with its exquisitely joined lyric and melody ("Sandie... what's that face about?) and its soaring trumpet break. Sixties influences abound, but they never overwhelm. Lots of people will recognize the guitars from "Baba O'Reilly" in "Giant Spiders", but how many will catch the very Keith Moon-like drumming at the beginning, or the goofy Sell Out-style exuberance of lyrics like "I won't stand still / til I'm upside down in the back of your eyes"?

The sheer variety of styles, instruments and melodies employed here is stunning, especially considering that Davis himself played all but a few lines of trombone, pedal steel and French horn. "Paratrooper with Amnesia" morphs from stride piano blues to an all-out rocker. "Transcendental Sports Album" is, as its title suggests, built on an arena-worthy rock riff, but it punctures any "We Are the Champions" machismo with its purloined Monkees melody and observations like "look up there in the sky / see the boy-bands flying by." The songs are all complex and layered; piano, guitar, organ and even occasional surges of brass are fully integrated into the fabric of the melody. There's giddy excess here, too, but it's controlled extraordinarily well. Consider, for instance, the way the chorus of brass emerges out of "Deserted Eyeland", which until that point is a purely acoustic guitar-based tune. It's like a 747 taking off -- you can't believe the air will support that kind of weight, and yet it does so almost effortlessly.

Lonely People is, without doubt, going to be the overlooked classic of 2005. If you were late on Kelley Stoltz or The Decemberists or Micah P. Hinson, take heart. There are still little-known geniuses cranking out great albums in basements. You just have to know where to look. - Splendid e-Zine


Discography

"Lonely People of the World, Unite!" - LP (2005)
"When The Angels Lift Our Eyelids In The Morning" - song included on Kill Rock Stars compilation "The Sound The Hare Heard" (2006)

Photos

Feeling a bit camera shy

Bio

Hailed by Ben Gibbard as "one of the loudest, most assaultive singers... since Jeff Mangum decided to pawn his guitar after making In The Aeroplane Over The Sea", Devin Davis' critically acclaimed self-released debut album "Lonely People of the World, Unite!" is a rollicking rock and roll romp, complete with gang choruses, horn sections, barrel-house piano and handclaps. The listener may then not initially realize that Davis played nearly every instrument himself, and that the uproarious rock betrays the fact that it was recorded in isolation.

Attention to the meticulously crafted lyrics will reveal that, in much the same way The Magnetic Fields' "69 Love Songs" was a was a meditiation on love, "Lonely People of the World, Unite!" is actually an anthemic ode to loneliness in its many forms.

The theme of loneliness was partly a result of the recording process. Having moved to Chicago from Florida, and finding it difficult to meet people to play music with, Devin set to work recording on his own, spending marathon sessions in his home studio alone, often in the middle of the night, over a span of two years. He would sometimes sleep on the couch at ACME Recording (where he was employed during the day as an engineer) for days at a time to make personal use of unbooked studio time, which often consisted of him running back and forth from the control room to the studio to record takes by himself.

Inspired by 60’s rock albums where song lengths averaged 2 to 3 minutes and album playing times rarely exceeded 40 minutes, Davis labored to streamline his songs down to the bare essential parts, cutting away potentially ponderous instrumental sections in favor of concise rock statements. His intention was to make an album of songs that evolved quickly (both lyrically and structurally) and moved forward without lapses in momentum;  this "less is more" approach resulting in a record with little or no gaps between songs, and a running time of 36 minutes.  

The songs of "Lonely People of the World, Unite!" are told in first person through the eyes of a varied cast of lonely characters, (ranging from the ghost of legendary American West folk-hero Everett Ruess, to a heartbroken turtle and a sea-weary Viking), and seek to be more story than diary entry, with surreal settings such as a coffee shop on top of Mt. Everest and a bomb shelter in the midst of a nuclear war in "Giant Spiders."

Song styles are also refreshingly varied within sequence, with heavy stomping guitar anthems such as the Bowie-esque "Moon Over Shark City" and "Transcendental Sports Anthem" being immediately followed by quieter folk numbers such as "Sandie" and "The Choir Invisible." Many songs experience abrupt stylistic shifts within themselves such as "Cannons at the Courthouse" which leaps from Springsteen inspired stream of consciousness folk, to fuzzed out Neutral Milk Hotel bliss-rock, to Floyd-esque heavy psychedelia all in the matter of 3 minutes. All of these homages are wrapped together into a uniquely cohesive whole by Devin’s peculiar brand of lyrics, rhyming structure, and songwriting, which, along with the strong production, makes "Lonely People of the World, Unite!" stand up against any commercially produced album of the last decade.

After handing out early CDR copies of the album to friends, a band finally began to take shape. In addition to solo acoustic performances, Devin and the group are currently performing in support of "Lonely People.." as well as working on recording a new album.

contact: devin_davis@sbcglobal.net
www.devindaviswebsite.com