Hadley's Hope
Orlando, Florida, United States | SELF
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A chance encounter at Epcot involving a band with a name inspired by the James Cameron film Aliens:
That's the back-story behind the new self-titled release by Orlando's Hadley's Hope, to be celebrated at a CD release show Sunday at BackBooth.
Jim Abbott
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It's the third release from Hadley's Hope, a rock band with songs that aspire to be cinematic enough to warrant that Cameron reference. (In the Aliens saga, Hadley's Hope is a 22nd Century human colony established on Acheron LV-426.)
On the new 5-song EP, the core unit of singer-keyboardist Michael Fargnoli, guitarist Kyle Bodshaug, drummer Christian Hernandez and bassist-vocalist Ryan Graham never met a monster chorus they didn't love.
Year in Review: Check out our favorite photos from 2011
Graham, the band's new studio bassist, also is the Epcot connection. Based in Baltimore, he was vacationing at the theme park when he met Fargnoli. In a long-distance musical relationship, the Orlando keyboardist added tracks to a new release by Graham's band, The Dirty Marmaduke Flute Squad, and enlisted the bassist to play on the new Hadley's Hope material.
Eventually, Graham was enlisted to mix and master those songs at a studio in Baltimore. He'll also be on hand to perform with the band on Sunday.
And the disc?
Those expansive, approachable choruses help lift songs such as "Tax Day," material that's densely packed (maybe too densely) with lyrical imagery and riffs.
"What do you want to say?" intones that song's opening verse, "Is this your judgment day? Does anything exist, then slowly fade away? Don't listen to what I say. You took it all away and made a nice tax day."
The best stuff here is the breakneck "Father O'Graham's Mix" of "Zoom," one of the band's signature songs, and a live version of "Mars Today." In its best moments, Hadley's Hope stops thinking so much and lets muscle and feeling take over. - Orlando Sentinel
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Hadleys-Hope/203322975154 - Facebook
Discography
Live! From LV-426 (2006) EP
Bells & Strings (2007) CD
Zoom (2008) Single
Century Of Progress (2009) CD
Hadley's Hope (2011) EP
Me, Melting (2011) Single
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Bio
Hadley’s Hope started innocently enough in 1999 with Michael Fargnoli writing and recording his own bedroom demos of electro-pop anthems. After garnering attention via the (at the time) brand new MP3.com, the urge to form a band began taking hold. A revolving door of musicians came and went until 2005, when it was time to make a change. Studio K, the name they were operating under, was soon to be no more.
Summer 2005 saw the addition of Kyle Bodshaug on guitar and also saw bigger changes on the horizon. For the next year Kyle and Michael would form a songwriting bond that would propel them to their next endeavor: finding a permanent drummer. A good one. This happened early in 2006 with the addition of Christian Hernandez, a bombastic drummer from the Washington DC punk scene. They quickly adopted a name culled from their favorite film, James Cameron’s ALIENS, and Hadley’s Hope was born.
For the next year they honed their live show and built up their stable of songs, a process made easy by Michael’s endless supply of composition books brimming with lyrics and chord changes. In 2007, the band began recording their first full length effort- Bells and Strings. It was a huge step forward in their creative process and prepared them for what was to come next with the recording of Century of Progress,
From late 2008 until spring of 2009 the band recorded and mixed Century of Progress at Alpaca Ranch Studio in Orlando, Florida. Showing what they could sound like utilizing a full studio, the band released the album that summer and led it off with the still immensely popular digital single Zoom. Playing relentlessly to promote the release, Hadley’s Hope found themselves in the position of next recording an EP to showcase what they saw as the ever evolving future of their sound.
During the recording of this new EP, entitled simply Hadley’s Hope, the band formed a creative and musical relationship with Ryan Graham, a musical wizard out of Baltimore, Maryland who not only records, mixes and masters all of Hadley’s Hope’s music, but is also their studio bassist. The band sees Graham as a “full time, 100% involved and invested” band member.
Since finishing the recording for Hadley’s Hope, the band has continued to gig around the Central Florida area, write new songs, and expand the scope and energy of their live show including adding full time bassist Micah Tappe to the lineup.
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