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░░██░ play yer tunes ███
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pyt Presents:
Artist: The Vulgar Boatmen
Album: Wide Awake
Record Label: No Nostalgia
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Street Date: 08/12/2003
Ripped Date: 08/16/2003
Genre: Indie
Year: 2003
Ripper: str
Source: CD
Encoder: EAC/Lame
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Release Information
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As American as apple pie or a Ramones record, as evocative
as Elvis' "Blue Moon," as clean as the lines of an Edward
Hopper painting, the Vulgar Boatmen are a musical treasure
that has been buried too deep for too long.
With this great-sounding, remastered 21-track compilation
the Vulgar Boatmen's quiet, well-crafted, hypnotic songs,
drawn from its three critically praised early-90's albums,
are finally getting a shot at the exposure they deserve. The
band's first two albums, "You and Your Sister" (1990) and
"Please Panic" (1992), received critical accolades from
almost every major music publication, including Rolling
Stone. There are already signs that this trend will be
continuing with "Wide Awake." Respected music writers such
as Greil Marcus (who penned one of the two liner essays for
"Wide Awake"), Ira Robbins, Charles Taylor and Bill Wyman
endorse the band every chance they get. But released on a
tiny independent record label, the albums remained almost
impossible to find. A third album, "Opposite Sex" (1995),
remains scarcely available only as an import, distributed by
Warner Brothers in Europe.
Although firmly modern in an understanding of rhythm and of
music as art, the songwriting of the band's two lead
singers, Robert Ray and Dale Lawrence, is informed as much
by the music of rock 'n' roll orginators such as Little
Richard and John Lee Hooker as by such later touchstones as
Big Star, Velvet Underground, the Modern Lovers and
Creedance Clearwater Revival. Instruments, words, voices and
even melodies are all inextricably linked by their service
to the rhythms of the song. It's as if Ray and Lawrence
consciously set about to create an entirely new genre -
adult contemporary for real rock 'n' rollers perhaps - using
Buddy Holly's "Raining in My Heart" and Brian Wilson's
lyrical parameters of girls and cars as its sole template.
That said, no one sounds like the Vulgar Boatmen, and the
Vulgar Boatmen sound like no one else. Ray and Lawrence are
experts in creating abstract expressions from the concrete
building blocks of rock 'n' roll. One listen to "Mary Jane"
(in both electric and acoustic versions), the shimmering
"Drive Somewhere," the jittery, anxiety-ridden rocker
"Allison Says," the picture-perfect "Wide Awake" or the
insistent percussiveness of opening track "Change the World
All Around" should be enough to hook even the most casual of
listeners.
Lyrically, Ray (a professor of English specializing in film
criticism) and Lawrence create open-ended narratives
injected with just enough concrete imagery - sly geographic
references, names (especially women), mentions of
structures: roads, driveways, homes, train stations - to
make the songs seem more like timebound snapshots from the
narrator's memory than story-songs with a traditional
beginning, climax and resolution.
In fact, there is no resolution in Vulgar Boatmen songs.
Even when the singer/narrator seems to be rejoicing in love
("You Don't Love Me Yet," "Heartbeat," "Margaret Says") an
unresolved tension of doubt and worry haunts the song.
Nothing ever seems to work out in their world, but neither
does it collapse in a blaze of glory. It just drives
somewhere while the singer tries to remember "what it was I
forgot to say."
Travel is central here - airplanes, train stations and
especially cars. In the Vulgar Boatmen world, people drive
to remember or to forget, to think or just to drive, to put
a love behind or to approach love (even when the narrator
can't work up the nerve). As a theme, travel is as important
to the songs as the instruments. It's the means by which
decisions are forced, the embodiment of loneliness.
The band's story is remarkable for many reasons, not the
least of which is its strong Indiana roots. The band's
studio incarnation draws members from Florida and Indiana -
the home bases of Ray and Lawrence, respectively. Ray and
Lawrence met at Indiana University and began a songwriting
partnership, exchanging tapes by mail, in the early 1980s.
Lawrence, former leader of the final incarnation of
semi-legendary Bloomington, Ind., punk rockers The Gizmos,
was fronting a series of bands at the time that would later
evolve into a touring version of Ray's Gainesville, Fla.-based
Vulgar Boatmen.
This legendary Indianapolis-based touring version of the
Vulgar Boatmen (Lawrence, phenomenal guitarist Matt Speakes,
bassist Jake Smith and drummer Andy Richards) has wowed
crowds throughout Europe and the United States since the
early 1990s. The band continues to play live sets at top
clubs in Indianapolis, Chicago and Bloomington, showcasing a
highly energized, muscular and confident side of the band
only just hinted at in their most upbeat studio recordings.
Even better, on occasion Lawrence leads the band through
majestic acoustic sets that showcase the brilliance of his
songcraft and the high, lonesome Everyman soul of his
vocals. This version of the Boatmen will be touring the
Midwest and East Coast to support "Wide Awake," which s
scheduled to hit the streets Aug. 12. -mark willson
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Track Listing:
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No. Time Track Title
~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
01 4:11 Change the World Around
02 5:59 Drive Somewhere
03 4:45 Margaret Says
04 3:58 Mary Jane (electric)
05 4:07 The Street Where You Live
06 3:27 Calling Upstairs
07 3:01 We Can Figure This Out
08 2:45 Anna
09 3:48 Allison Says
10 3:20 In a Station
11 4:13 You Don't Love Me Yet
12 3:31 There's a Family
13 2:55 Wide Awake
14 2:36 I'm Not Stuck On You
15 3:17 Fool Me
16 2:27 Cry Real Tears
17 3:26 You're The One
18 2:43 Decision by the Airport
19 3:38 Heartbeat
20 3:44 Mary Jane (acoustic)
21 3:17 Traveling
CD Time: 1hr15min .. Total Size: 103MB
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