ARTIST: Elvis Perkins
TITLE: Ash Wednesday
LABEL: XL Recordings
GENRE: Indie
BITRATE: 163kbps avg
PLAYTIME: 0h 50m total
RELEASE DATE: 2007-02-20
RIP DATE: 2007-02-13
Track List
----------
1. While You Were Sleeping 6:19
2. All The Night Without Love 3:10
3. May Day! 5:00
4. Moon Woman II 4:25
5. It's Only Me 3:58
6. Emilie's Vietnam in the Sky 2:59
7. Ash Wednesday 6:30
8. The Night & The Liquor 4:44
9. It's a Sad World After All 4:12
10. Sleep Sandwich 4:10
11. Good Friday 5:17
Release Notes:
NOTE: Previous release was nuked for bad pack.
Elvis Perkins was raised in Los Angeles and New York and took to music at an
early age, perhaps an inevitability if Elvis happens to be your name. He briefly
learned the saxophone, before picking up the guitar in high school and taking
lessons with Prescott Niles, one-time bassist for the Knack. While he played in
rock bands, Perkins also developed an interest in the classical guitar, and
began to compose music in both idioms. He wrote poetry too, which gradually
morphed into lyrics. After a short stint at college, he began to cultivate the
idiosyncratic, highly personalized style that distinguishes Ash Wednesday, a
process which for Perkins was ôa long journey, long in the comingö.
PerkinsÆ debut album started life as a collection of home-made demos, which were
cut to analog tape, then fleshed out (with the help of a small group of friends
and fellow musicians), in a Burbank studio and at a Victorian house in L.A The
resulting material is Ash Wednesday, a beautiful album in which Perkins
transforms circumstances of his personal life into compelling, dream-like songs
with lyrics that teeter between the specific and the surreal.
For the last year and a half, Perkins (alongside his three-piece band: bassist
Brigham Brough, keyboardist/guitarist Wyndham Boylan-Garnett, and drummer
Nicholas Kinsey, known collectively as Elvis Perkins in Dearland) has been
playing club dates throughout the USA to increasing acclaim. PerkinsÆ live
reputation has grown, along with his audience, aided no doubt by enthusing
on-line bloggers. After a performance at Rockwood Music Hall, on ManhattanÆs
Lower East Side, folks at Stereogum declared, ôWe were sold on the spot û
fuss-worthy folkies just donÆt come easy...Double bass, harmonica and strings
color these lyrical laments, but the manÆs easy melodicism is the real charmö
In writing, Perkins prefers the poetic to the polemical; his lyrics often have a
whimsical quality, their melancholy aspects counterbalanced with an undercurrent
of hope. He repeatedly returns to images of sleep and dreams and flight, as if
we might all wake up at once and find ourselves in a far better place.