Thursday, May 21, 2009
In this cutting-edge era of the cheap-and-easy digital dissemination of music online, when even the most popular millionaire bands in the world can't decide if creating a physical CD is even worth it, a reporter's mailbox does not exactly fill up with actual compact discs, let alone from nonmillionaire local artists.
So when a snazzy local album appeared in the office looking like a psychedelic autumnal test pattern, emblazoned with a spooky photo of a sign saying "Frost Heaves" and including a full-color lyric booklet, it was an exciting day. Someone still believes in the ancient ways.
"I've always been on the side of the dinosaurs," joked band leader and wrangler Daniel Hales in an interview earlier this week. "But I felt I really had to do something special for this album because we all put so much time and hard work into it."
For Hales, "we all" means a lot of people - his band's self-titled debut record includes contributions from as many as 14 local musicians. It's a loose collective that can play shows as a mini-orchestra, or appear as just Hales and his "Robo-drummer" looping pedal.
The Frost Heaves will perform as a quartet (Emily Brewster on backing vocals, Steve Koziol on bass, Hales on guitars and more and Brian Marchese on snare and hi-hat) live on WRSI on June 7, on the popular radio station's "Turn It Up to 11" weekly broadcast.
Enjoyable journey
The packaging isn't the only creative and alluring thing about "Frost Heaves." The music shimmers richly, and it came as no surprise when Hales divulged that some songs have 10 layers of guitar tracks. The thick soundscape rewards repeated listenings, and the varied album makes for an enjoyable journey.
Its 14 songs include a largely wordless hazy epic ("Shepherd of Lost Shopping Carts"), a fractured-kaleidoscope rocker ("Northpole in July"), a raga-like, eerie funk drone ("Discontinued Road") and an immediately catchy pop gem with a disorienting chorus that feels like the fever visions of a film-noir hero, having been drugged and knocked out cold ("Wrong Meter").
The album starts out on its most beautiful, haunting note, "Bridges Freeze First," with pedal steel moaning across the sunset landscape while violins and slow-motion cymbals fill the air. "Pray your undertaker put snow tires on his hearse," Hales sings dreamily.
The Greenfield-based singer/songwriter/musician/poet's list of influences is as long as a term paper and includes everything from author HG Wells to composer Charles Ives to Leonard Cohen to whale songs. Hales already has a band, The Ambiguities, but explained, "The Frost Heaves is where I get to follow my eclectic tastes wherever they want to go - whether into the psychedelic, electronic, folk, pop, rock, Americana, experimental - using whatever instrumentation it takes to get there."
"In the recording process, I really reveled in the chance to be musically promiscuous," Hales said, explaining that he invited a number of musicians he respected to contribute, among them drummers Mike Levesque and Tony Vacca, bassist Kurt Fedora, vocalist Anne Pinkerton and violinist Emily Breines. "I was lucky enough to have most people I asked say yes. At the time I didn't give much thought to how this was going to work live. Once the album was done, I tried to get as many of the folks who played on it to participate, but there were four different bass players, three different drummers.
"Fortunately, my good luck held and some awesome musicians who didn't play on the album agreed to join the Heaves collective: Brian Marchese on drums, Steve Koziol on bass, and Leo Hwang-Carlos on guitar and secret weapon. It wouldn't have worked without them."
Lyrical detail
Hales, who's been the English teacher at a residential special education high school in Northampton for 11 years as well as teaching evening classes at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, also writes plays, poems and fiction, which helps give his songs lyrical details not often put in pop tunes.
Lines pop out as though in 3-D:
"I'll go quietly like a bedsheet drifting over New England streets."
"All descended from grandfather clocks/ breeding dust and minding our ticks and our tocks."
"A baby stroller cradling pinecones/ a sled that stalled, dissolved into the hillside/ a leash corrodes, collar tagged Shadow."
The "Frost Heaves" CD is available now, and for those that can't catch the band's radio appearance or would prefer to see the group live, they'll be opening for a Pothole Pictures showing of Hitchcock's classic film "Rebecca" at Memorial Hall in Shelburne Falls on June 26 at 6:45 p.m.