Music
Press
Windsor quartet Yellow Wood have an innate knack for elongated melodies and undulating tones and inflections. Their current release, EP 2 is a wistful wander through apparitions, illusions and reverie. Steve Gibb meticulously crafts glittering textures, and Ryan Fields' bass lines murmur and throb beneath the rumble of Matt Rideout's sophisticated drumming. Adam Rideout conveys emotion with clarity, which he builds up swiftly, piece by piece alongside their expansive arrangements. When his voice reaches its height, it soars and lingers inside bones like an unexpected chill. The percussion on "If You Ever Need a Friend" is like anticipatory heartbeats, the guitar slinky and sensual and Adam's voice husky and restrained as he sings "I'll think we should have waited/I'll not have the courage to say I failed at this again." "Eye of the Storm" emerges with a calm and delicate exterior, but an inherent struggle is exposed in the song's bridge foreshadowing the solemn flood waters that rise with the intensity of the beat. EP 2 quite elegantly illustrates that there is beauty in stillness and solace in loneliness. (www.yellowwoodmusic.com) -
Cassandra Caverhill - The New Pollution - blog
Chubby Pickle - Tuesday May 31st
Yellow Wood is like Eono on acid at a U2 studio jam while Bono is off saving Africa. This band is a wild, barely controlled experiment - a virtual spa for the ear, leaves the listener grinning. A place where hi meets lo-fi, featuring softly arcing vocals, great use of space and echo, and wildly tangential guitar melodies all thrown into a mad mix of analog and digital effects. Adam's cautious vocals hold the band in check until the instrumental sections when the band lets loose like a private school slut at recess feeling up a ride of crazed dissonance that ends hanging on by a fingertip to the edge of consonance. Check them out on the 31st. JS - Upfront Magazine (May 2005)
Discography
ep1 (2004)
ep2 (2006)
2eps+2songs (upcoming reissue from shameless records canada)
Photos
Bio
Welcome to Yellow Wood, the collective expression of three restless twenty-somethings: the brothers-Rideout (Adam and Matthew James) joined by Windsor music stalwart, R. Mathew Fields (Riverfront Ensemble, Full White Drag). We make music with rock band instruments, laptops, lyrics, and a penchant for the grand. We are from Windsor, Ontario, Canada (industrial border town, baby-sister city to Detroit, Michigan), though geography does little to indicate our sound. We want to move you.
Past
The journey began as the sole effort of the Yellow Wood brothers, Adam and Matthew-James, in early 2003. During that year we wrote our first batch of songs, and then recorded them in our parents' basement, playing all the instruments ourselves. Originally intended to be a demo to facilitate the writing process, it became our first EP, and was released on May 14/04 as "EP1".
Upon the release of EP1 we were joined by talented friends to perform as a live band, gigging regularly over the next two years. The most solid membership began in February 2005 with R. Mathew Fields taking up bass duties, and Steven Gibb on guitar/keys, with whom we played a wide range of shows regionally and across eastern Canada. These shows and regular rehearsals over the next year produced exciting new material written as a full band, which we set out to record a year later.
Present
In February (2006) we hunkered down in our home, this time with the production assistance of David Stephan (high school music class-mate and assistant to Grammy winner David Bottrill) to begin work on our second EP. The expansiveness of the new songs and their arrangements lead to the layered and textured style of the recordings, a fruitful challenge to our skills as musicians and as home recordists. Also the experience was our last with Steven Gibb, who added his brilliance to the record but moved on to new projects upon its release. The officially untitled disc (often referred to as "ep2") was released on May 5, 2006. Joined again by talented friends from the fertile Windsor music scene, namely Erik Ingalls (NOT_digital) and Kyle Marchand (What Seas What Shores, Orphan Choir), we played a steady schedule of shows and a second successful eastern Canadian tour in support of the record. Joined now by Tim Davidson, Yellow Wood is playing shows, planning tours, and working on songs for a new recording.
Yellow Wood music means elaborate arrangements, sonic exploration, poignant lyrics and strong melody rooted in carefully crafted songs. We despise insincerity, arrogance, and defensive irony. There is hopefully none of that here, but instead honest vulnerability, hope, hate and love. We want to move you.
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