The New Heaven and The New Earth

I didn't know there was an old heaven and an old earth before I reached the new ones with the unexpected album All Saints' Day released in 2009. This collection of six songs handles itself much like a stranger at a street fair, propelled on by it's hunger and emptiness, yet tragically beautiful as a natural beast that is perpetually stuck. They sing as if they have found scraps for dinner, and eat, all the while knowing it's rotten. The cellos shift gracefully as only a bleeding heart can shift through moments and days and years. Accompanied by beautiful chords and simple slow beats, portraits of low poignant freckles of time frozen by myth and melody. It is sad, luring, and yet still shines light, demonstrating the delicate partnership between hope and fear. - Quarantine Media

In May Edible Onion, a Philadelphia based collective that releases small run, hand-packaged records, will be releasing a compilation called A Cure For The Broken-Hearted. Each copy of the compilation will come in its very own accordion style book, filled with watercolor illustrations and information about the songs. In anticipation of the release the collective are streaming a different song from the compilation each week until its official release in May. The latest song to be featured is by Philly Psychonauts The New Heaven And The New Earth...

The New Heaven and The New Earth are Roger Alejandro Martinez and cellist Jeffrey Russ. The duo filter classical and baroque music through a
surrealistic, psychedelic pop lens like a perfectly imagined hybrid of early Pink Floyd/Syd Barrett and Owen Pallett's Final Fantasy.

The track that they have contributed the fragile, finespun 'The Book Of Floating' to Edible Onion's A Cure For The Broken-Hearted, a track that floats like a soap bubble on a light breeze. It's vaguely hypnotic, the aural equivalent of a lava lamp.

Luckily you don't have to move heaven and earth to hear the track as you can either download it courtesy of the Devil or trip over to the Edible Onion where it is streaming now.
- The Devil Has The Best Tuna

"THE NEW HEAVEN AND THE NEW EARTH... sort of make this Renaissance chamber / boys choir noise, that is, they have nice voices and actually know how to pluck their strings, probably in the dark (and they are in the dark..) Some of the better song-writing i have seen come out of South Philly lately. Their lyrical content seems to reference an obscure time when apocalyptic warnings and weird prophesies dominated public thought ("..we stared into the stormy eye of madness and took that holy apparition by the hand..") With creepy synths, dissonant auto-harp, and surprising cello parts, I can't tell whether TNHATNE are poking a sort of Monty-Python-fun or crossing their hipster hearts with this project. Whatever the case, they are touring in support of their new record and cassette EP, ALL SAINTS DAY, released on Philly's own Edible Onion (...Power Animal, Br'er), just weeks ago." - Evan Horn

"Roger Alejandro Martinez named his latest outfit after a verse from the freakiest part of the Bible, the Revelations chapter that envisions the end of days and beyond. The music, though, is a gentler kind of apocalypse, hand-made folk with shadowy plainsong harmonies, unearthly chimes and bells and angelic harp strums. Martinez—who has lately been playing with the dronier, more freeform Br’er—crafts pretty, vaguely unsettling chants and ditties in the Philly freaked tradition of Espers and Fursaxa. You can purchase hand-decorated, very limited edition cassette copies of the upcoming All Saints Day now, but the CD version won’t be out until next year." (Jennifer Kelly) - Philadelphia Weekly

The New Heaven And The New Earth is the hauntingly beautiful chamber-pop project of Philadelphia songwriter Roger Alejandro Martinez and the production and assistance of classically trained cellist, Jeffrey Russ. Their debut EP All Saints’ Day was released earlier this week on August 31. Throughout the EP, Martinez’s vocals float ghost-like through an enchantingly mysterious field of hang-picked guitar, swirling arpeggios and distant strings. The result is a lush, otherworldly soundscape that is both unsettling and occasionally hopeful, which is mirrored perfectly by Martinez’s eerie lyrics, such as on the track “Santa Muerte”: “And I live in a house where everything is soft / and everything is friendly / and everything is boring / and everything is dying / and I am always sleeping until the happy spectres finally come and wake me.” On “St. Valentine” guest musician Gabrielle Smith contributes soothing but mournful vocals to a melody of subtle, ringing piano that leads to a sea of menacing strings creating a tensely evocative setting. All Saints’ Day is available on vinyl and cassette in limited edition individually hand-crafted packages by the always impressive Edible Onion label. Harpist Darian Scatton who contributed to the album also designed the gorgeous lyric booklet that accompanies the album. If you haven’t stopped by the Edible Onion site before to check out their own excellent releases (all featuring hand-tailored packaging), now would be the time. - Musical Pairings

"I believe this is exactly what they meant when they started calling things chamber pop, though back then they couldn't throw it all together with some snazzy synths and one classically trained cellist.

Sweetly enough the wikipedia on this genre corner prefers "baroque pop", which proves to be even more appropriate for The New Heaven And The New Earth, a band with an EP on Edible Onion that runs like an ornate, 21-minute mass performed in some side chapel of a grand, flowery cathedral... in West Philly.

The release, All Saints' Day, drives the metaphors home with its album design, a combo-deal of felt and foil and marker that evokes a stained glass front viewed from the Dark Side, with heaven streaming through. Also, a hand-drawn lyric booklet designed by Darian Scatton.

This kind of charm is nothing new for Edible Onion, who specialize in this kind of hand-packaged piety for all their releases. Check their site." - Jeremy Krinsley - Impose Magazine