Music
Press
If you like nice neat labels for your music, then buy Our Lady of Bells' Forgetting the Way Home and place the CD safely in the indie-folk chamber pop section of your library under the sub-category of "Current Favorites."
- nooneisawake.blogspot.com
The entire album is divine, from the quiet harmonies ot the plaintive guitar twangs, My heart gets caught in my throat at least once every time; more if I'm really paying attention. - Kelsy Flynn
Our Lady of Bells is quite masterful at creating a dreamlike ambiance with their music. The group clearly enjoys crafting surreal moods. - David Ryan Polgar
If you're looking to be spellbound...[this] folk-rock quartet can hush a room with their sparse songs built from cascading acoustic and electric guitars, piano, and male and female vocals. - Ken Maiuri (Pedro the Lion, The Mammals)
Jules Gimbrone sings with an air of regret and entirely without pretense, letting the strength of the timeless, sea-charged melody pull us along. - www.fingertips.com
For Northampton’s Our Lady of Bells, all the right cymbal crashes, piano key pleading, and singing strings evoke heartaches, heartstrings, and other typical heart-related imagery, but the songs rise above clichés and put the folk-pop quintet on a promising path behind Kings of Convenience, Belle and Sebastian, and Okkervil River.
- Michael Walker
. . . the band filled the room with a fully robust, yet soft earthy sound. If the music were a person it would lay stone paths to the garden in its yard on the weekends. It would hang the laundry out to dry barefoot in the front yard. It would roll down grassy hills. - Christopher Wilkey
Our Lady of Bells ... has been garnishing attention recently for its blend of orchestral arrangements with an overarching emphasis on melody and sparseness. ... Our Lady of Bells takes aim at crafting emotional crescendos within its songs. - by David Ryan Polgar
"[Occasionally] I'll stumble across a hidden gem like Our Lady of Bells ... and be completely blown away." - on Masslive.com August 2006
Discography
Forgetting the Way Home (2006)
Our Lady of Bells EP (2005)
Photos
Bio
Up from out of the quirky stew of the Western MA music scene popped Our Lady of Bells, bearing a cross-pollinated bouquet of country rock, folk, indie and chamber pop. Their marvelous experiment began in late 2004 when songwriter and guitarist Jules Gimbrone was shopping around for a new sound and found drummer John Berry fresh off the boat from Rhode Island with chops like you read about. They were clicking as a duo but things really started cooking after Jules found singer and guitarist Geoff Rice impersonating Fred Schneider at the local VFW and invited him to come and play. The newly formed trio hunkered down in Jules' moldy country basement, taking a couple of months to get a handful of brand new songs ready for public consumption. They starting playing hometown shows and self produced a four-song EP in the winter of '05. Friends told friends, the crowds started getting bigger and the gig radius started expanding. Cambridge and Boston. Portsmouth New Hampshire and Portland Maine. Triumphant appearances in Manhattan and Brooklyn. New songs were coming fast and furious, and Christmastime '05 saw the band recording once again. In the studio the sound expanded further with Geoff adding to his duties with piano and harmonica, Jules chiming in on mandolin and violin and a handful of friends on bass, cellos, violins, guitars and accordions. To help recreate the fullness of their new sound on stage, the band recruited Gregg Cornish on keyboards. A bigger, better Bells was born.
In April of 2006 the band unveiled their debut full-length album FORGETTING THE WAY HOME. These twelve tracks span the band's range of moods and styles, expanding the band's sound without losing the hauntingly spare quality for which they've become known. The band completed a national tour in September of 2006 and returned to their cozy valley to work on new songs.
Unfortunately, life intervened—as it is wont to do—and the three founding members of the band found themselves pulled in different directions, eventually ending up living in three separate states by midsummer 2007. It just wasn't possible to keep things going, despite their love for the band, the music and their fans. In June 2007 Our Lady of Bells announced that they would be "on hiatus" for a long while.
The final show is scheduled for July 26th at the Iron Horse Music Hall in Northampton, MA.
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