FOGGY NOTIONS PRESENTS
PHOSPHORESCENT (DEAD OCEANS)
+ VISUALS BY DONAL DINEEN
APRIL 26TH, EARLY SHOW, WHELAN’S (UPSTAIRS)
TICKETS FROM WAV, ROAD, CITY DISCS, TICKETS.IE
http://www.saltandblues.com/
http://www.myspace.com/phosphorescent
http://www.deadoceans.com/artist.php?name=phosphorescent
"...a cohesive and dazzlingly brilliant album. Soft strums, gentle tambour and Houck’s shredded vocal evolve, layer upon layer, into something huge and hymnal, while the lyrics tell of something altogether more wild and nocturnal. Stirring, dark and beautiful." - Time Out, five stars
"Houck has created a warm, frazzled record for the follow-up to 2005’s Aw Come Aw Wry, stepping even further into the wilderness to conjure spiritual sounds. Pride is about getting back to the roots of humanity, transporting you through dreamy, haunting drones into open landscapes where tribes and wild animals roam, calling to each other." - Drowned in Sound, 7/10
"Houck summons ancient, earthly images (wolves, mountains, doves) just as readily as he does the warm skin of a lover." - MOJO, 4/5
"The love is in Pride's lyrics, which escape the shackles of their occasional poetic flourishes to be unmysterious and self-explanatory, totally broken and totally vulnerable, and therefore unique." - Pitchfork, 8.0 album review
Athens, GA, resident Mathew Houck is the sole member of Phosphorescent. Houck's career began in 2000 when he released the Hipolit album under the name Fillup Shack. A tour of England and Spain followed, with the European press drawing comparisons to Bob Dylan and Will Oldham. Houck's first release as Phosphorescent, entitled “A Hundred Times or More,” appeared in 2003 on the Warm label. The 2004 EP “The Weight of Flight” was his last release for the label, as the 2005 full-length “Aw Come Aw Wry” landed on Misra. Two years later he switched to the Dead Oceans imprint and released the album Pride.
Musicians often head to New York, it's a familiar story. But something magical happened when Matthew Houck picked up stakes halfway through making his new Phosphorescent record, Pride, and moved to Brooklyn from Athens, Georgia.
Raised in Alabama, Houck has always made music steeped in the Southern-gothic tradition, a sweet American folk soaked in atmosphere like a pound cake in rum. On 2005's Aw Come Aw Wry, our weary-voiced bandleader cemented his reputation for making masterpiece albums filled with hallelujahs for both grace and tragedy with songs that swung from ramshackle and joyous to broken and pleading in the space of a prayer. The live show swung along this arc - with Houck sometimes backed by up to 14 or 15 members - creating a full-blown, shambling, marching-brass-band-revival-tent celebration. Pride is something different.
While it's not without the moments of sheer abandon that have made Phosphorescent's work unmistakable – “At Death, A Proclamation” - thunders into familiar territory - mostly gone are the messy marching bands and evangelical fervor. Here, Houck instead channels something more mystical and haunting, offering up a dark, meditative set of songs that is all the more spiritual-sounding for its restrained tone. On previous albums, he's recruited guest musicians to fill the gaps, but on Pride, Houck has only enlisted the services of a makeshift choir, otherwise recording every instrument himself. His achingly cerebral delivery recalls Arthur Russell, but honestly, Pride sounds like nothing else we've ever heard. These are poems uttered in an empty field, punctuated by shouts and hollers, as if from a singer either abandoned or possessed. The lyrics are Houck's strongest ever, wrapped in washed out choral etudes that could be channeled from a rural French chapel or a solemn African tribe in prayer.
Pride sounds like it was made by a man set free. In fact, Pride sounds broken free of time and place altogether. Yet still it is warm, familiar, and welcoming - a record to call home.
The second video from Phosphorescent's Pride album is now available for your viewing pleasure. “A Picture of Our Torn Up Praise” was shot in the countryside surrounding Fairfield, Iowa - a small town of 10,000 located roughly 70 miles south of Iowa City. The cast and crew spent several days working in the freezing outdoors, utilizing everything from stadium lighting for the night sequences to a horse (named Elaborate Affair) borrowed from a supportive local resident. The video was conceived and directed by Los Angeles filmmakers Zachary Sluser and Matthew Thiesen, and features a cast of 20 individuals, aged 5 to 65 years old, and a sizable crew and the work of a champion local taxidermist.
Watch the video here:
http://www.scjag.com/mp3/do/tornuppraise.mov
PHOSPHORESCENT (DEAD OCEANS)
+ VISUALS BY DONAL DINEEN
APRIL 26TH, EARLY SHOW, WHELAN’S (UPSTAIRS)
TICKETS FROM WAV, ROAD, CITY DISCS, TICKETS.IE
http://www.saltandblues.com/
http://www.myspace.com/phosphorescent
http://www.deadoceans.com/artist.php?name=phosphorescent
"...a cohesive and dazzlingly brilliant album. Soft strums, gentle tambour and Houck’s shredded vocal evolve, layer upon layer, into something huge and hymnal, while the lyrics tell of something altogether more wild and nocturnal. Stirring, dark and beautiful." - Time Out, five stars
"Houck has created a warm, frazzled record for the follow-up to 2005’s Aw Come Aw Wry, stepping even further into the wilderness to conjure spiritual sounds. Pride is about getting back to the roots of humanity, transporting you through dreamy, haunting drones into open landscapes where tribes and wild animals roam, calling to each other." - Drowned in Sound, 7/10
"Houck summons ancient, earthly images (wolves, mountains, doves) just as readily as he does the warm skin of a lover." - MOJO, 4/5
"The love is in Pride's lyrics, which escape the shackles of their occasional poetic flourishes to be unmysterious and self-explanatory, totally broken and totally vulnerable, and therefore unique." - Pitchfork, 8.0 album review
Athens, GA, resident Mathew Houck is the sole member of Phosphorescent. Houck's career began in 2000 when he released the Hipolit album under the name Fillup Shack. A tour of England and Spain followed, with the European press drawing comparisons to Bob Dylan and Will Oldham. Houck's first release as Phosphorescent, entitled “A Hundred Times or More,” appeared in 2003 on the Warm label. The 2004 EP “The Weight of Flight” was his last release for the label, as the 2005 full-length “Aw Come Aw Wry” landed on Misra. Two years later he switched to the Dead Oceans imprint and released the album Pride.
Musicians often head to New York, it's a familiar story. But something magical happened when Matthew Houck picked up stakes halfway through making his new Phosphorescent record, Pride, and moved to Brooklyn from Athens, Georgia.
Raised in Alabama, Houck has always made music steeped in the Southern-gothic tradition, a sweet American folk soaked in atmosphere like a pound cake in rum. On 2005's Aw Come Aw Wry, our weary-voiced bandleader cemented his reputation for making masterpiece albums filled with hallelujahs for both grace and tragedy with songs that swung from ramshackle and joyous to broken and pleading in the space of a prayer. The live show swung along this arc - with Houck sometimes backed by up to 14 or 15 members - creating a full-blown, shambling, marching-brass-band-revival-tent celebration. Pride is something different.
While it's not without the moments of sheer abandon that have made Phosphorescent's work unmistakable – “At Death, A Proclamation” - thunders into familiar territory - mostly gone are the messy marching bands and evangelical fervor. Here, Houck instead channels something more mystical and haunting, offering up a dark, meditative set of songs that is all the more spiritual-sounding for its restrained tone. On previous albums, he's recruited guest musicians to fill the gaps, but on Pride, Houck has only enlisted the services of a makeshift choir, otherwise recording every instrument himself. His achingly cerebral delivery recalls Arthur Russell, but honestly, Pride sounds like nothing else we've ever heard. These are poems uttered in an empty field, punctuated by shouts and hollers, as if from a singer either abandoned or possessed. The lyrics are Houck's strongest ever, wrapped in washed out choral etudes that could be channeled from a rural French chapel or a solemn African tribe in prayer.
Pride sounds like it was made by a man set free. In fact, Pride sounds broken free of time and place altogether. Yet still it is warm, familiar, and welcoming - a record to call home.
The second video from Phosphorescent's Pride album is now available for your viewing pleasure. “A Picture of Our Torn Up Praise” was shot in the countryside surrounding Fairfield, Iowa - a small town of 10,000 located roughly 70 miles south of Iowa City. The cast and crew spent several days working in the freezing outdoors, utilizing everything from stadium lighting for the night sequences to a horse (named Elaborate Affair) borrowed from a supportive local resident. The video was conceived and directed by Los Angeles filmmakers Zachary Sluser and Matthew Thiesen, and features a cast of 20 individuals, aged 5 to 65 years old, and a sizable crew and the work of a champion local taxidermist.
Watch the video here:
http://www.scjag.com/mp3/do/tornuppraise.mov
