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| | Bedroom Walls | |
| |  | | About | | SESHU BING (guitar, vocals, songs)
DONNA COPPOLA (keyboards, vocals, tambourine)
MELISSA "SISSY" THORNE (vocals, keyboards, bells)
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| Country | | United States | | Region | | California | | City | | Highland Park |
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| | Wednesday, January 02, 2008 |
| | http://jammerdirect.com/Bedroom Walls |
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| HEY - WHAT'S THE WORD ON THAT NEW BEDROOM WALLS ALBUM? |
| | "[Bedroom Walls] don't simply ponder their sad-sack nature, they celebrate it, transforming rainy-day guitar ballads into gorgeous mini-symphonies packed with enough vibraphone, glockenspiel, strings, and woodwinds to blow the clouds away." - SPIN "Put simply, "All Good Dreamers Pass This Way" is an exceptional and mesmerizing album to fall in love with." - Under the Radar "Every track here is positively delightful...All in all, a strange, sensational record that will captivate you from the first listen." - All Music Guide "Imagine Stars making an album with Air. Without a doubt, Bedroom Walls wills soon be playing out of every sad person's bed-side radio." - Urb "In the spirit of The Clientele (only lusher), Bedroom Walls lay in strings, bells, and deep twang, creating a wistful feeling that unfurls like a miniature movie" - The Onion AV Club "There is no substitute for listening to a Bedroom Walls album." - PopMatters "In a town top-heavy with genius it seldom fails to neglect, Bedroom Walls is worthy of giddy note for many reasons." - LA City Beat "Lovely...a dreamy and engaging form of art pop" - The New Yorker "In Flaming Lips/Broken Social Scene/Pink Floyd fashion, the Bedroom walls show they’ve successfully mastered the use of dynamic composition. Undercast bass lines and a few doses of the melodian add to the disc’s orchestral feel, offering a classical quality that at times seems more in line with Mozart than David Gilmour. - MSNBC "Independent Study" "[Bedroom Walls] make very catchy, sometimes spacey, all-the-time excellent pop music for the modern urban hipster (i.e. you)." - Tripwire's "High Five" "Opening an album with a song called "In Anticipation of Your Suicide" might mark a band for life, but when you're L.A. quartet Bedroom Walls, it's more of a promise." - Austin Chronicle "Melodic but vaguely sinister popishness." - C |
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| | Bedroom Walls can leave listeners feeling like they’ve been exposed to something very lovely, but maybe a tiny bit evil. Despite the lingering scent of brimstone, it’s an arrangement that seems to make everyone happy. The tricks of the band’s trade are a narcotic grace, a cruel sense of humor, and melodies that draw crooked lines all over the pop map. The L.A. WEEKLY did a good job explaining the phenomenon: "Music has to be liked a bit too much. Bedroom Walls make that easy, playing songs with awkward perfection. It's shamelessly melodic, kind of ambient, kind of spaced-out, surprisingly clever. It's like your little sister on drugs, insouciant and a bit off-the-wall." Or, as Bedroom Walls told the LOS ANGELES TIMES with a sly wink, "We just want to make people sad."
Bedroom Walls formed in 2002 when Seshu Bing, Melissa Thorne and Julian Gross (now of Liars) got together in Los Angeles to arrange the repertoire of ethereal non-sequiturs Goldman had been amassing by the light of the dirty L.A. moon. The group began rehearsing songs that would eventually populate their sleepy, infectious 2003 debut, I SAW YOU COMING BACK TO ME. In a brazen act of sublime idiocy, they dubbed their sound Romanticore. Critics and fans liked what they heard – the record earned praise for its stunning textures, shimmering melodies, and dark wit from the likes of ROLLING STONE, THE VILLAGE VOICE, and THE BOSTON PHOENIX, and DJ Nic Harcourt invited them on his legendary KCRW radio show for an in-studio performance. (ISYCBTM reached #9 on KCRW’s album chart the month of its release.) The band expanded to a septet and played shows in New York City, Boston, San Francisco and Austin, where they wowed industry-types and Lone Star hipsters at last year’s South-By-Southwest Festival.
Now comes Bedroom Walls' breathtaking sophomore album, ALL GOOD DREAMERS PASS THIS WAY (Baria Records), which has already received raves from SPIN, URB, and the ALL MUSIC GUIDE. Produced by Rafter Roberts (Sufjan Stevens, Fiery Furnaces, Black Heart Procession, Castanets) and mixed by Joe Chiccarelli (The Shins, Beck, U2, Rufus Wainwright, Journey), the record finds the band indulging both its melodic gifts and its love of ornate instrumentation. Bing says he was trying to capture the epic schizophrenia of his high school mix tapes: "When you're a kid, you just love what you love without thinking too hard about classifications or sub-genres. So, I would make myself these mix tapes with a Squeeze song followed by a Pink Floyd song, followed by a Smiths song followed by Led Zeppelin. I found one of these tapes when we were starting to arrange this record and I loved the crazy internal logic of it. I wanted to get all of that – the anglo-pop of Squeeze, the mythic bombast of Led Zeppelin, the druggy sprawl of Floyd, the teenage narcissism of the Smiths."
After recording ALL GOOD DREAMERS, the band underwent another transformation, paring itself down to an essential threesome of Bing, Thorne, and Donna Coppola, with outside assistance brought in as the situation demands. Paradoxically, the live sound is more chaotic and unhinged with this streamlined crew – songs that felt like whispered confessions on record now sound like raucous bursts of joy and madness. But despite the sonic shape-shifting, it’s really just a continuation of the mission: to craft a sound that hints at the darker side of pretty things and the lighter side of knowing your ex-girlfriend is happier now...
MORE SPECIFICALLY:
SESHU BING (guitar, vocals, songs) DONNA COPPOLA (keyboards, vocals, tambourine) MELISSA "SISSY" THORNE (vocals, keyboards, bells) |
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