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Emerging over the last year as perhaps the most promising new band in the city, Snowglobe takes the next step this week with the release of their debut album, Our Land Brains. Released by the Athens, Georgia, label Bardot Records, Our Land Brains actually improves on the band’s live show, capturing their gently psychedelic sound. Snowglobe’s music compares favorably with like-minded bands from the Elephant 6 collective — The Apples in Stereo, Neutral Milk Hotel, Olivia Tremor Control — but just as easily conveys a love for ’60s source material like the Beatles and the Kinks. On Our Land Brains, singer-songwriters Brad Postlethwaite (one of the guys behind the local Makeshift Records compilations) and Tim Regan come up with a collection of beautifully melodic songs, and the band puts them over with a varied, playfully experimental sound that makes great use of piano, horns, and strings with their guitar-bass-drums format.
Snowglobe will have a CD release party for Our Land Brains on Saturday, March 9th, at the Young Avenue Deli, with Geraldine. Earlier that day, from 3 to 5 p.m., the band will join locals Loggia for a set at Shangri-La Records to celebrate the release of the bands’ split 7-inch single. — Chris Herrington
The Bloodthirsty Lovers is a nearly unimaginable assemblage of virtuosity. Just consider the lineup of this genuine Memphis supergroup and let it sink in deep. First and foremost (in every way), there is Dave Shouse, the multifaceted musician and songwriter from indie stalwarts the Grifters and critical darlings Those Bastard Souls. Add to the mix Jason Paxton, the Satyrs’ sweetly maudlin frontman, whose sweeping classical aspirations were revealed on the final track of the Satyrs’ first (and possibly last) album. And let’s not forget DDT’s mad genius Paul “I swear you can turn a tree into a violin played by the wind” Taylor. Doesn’t it all sound too good to be true? If Shelby Bryant of the Clears and Cloud-Wow Music fame — and a charter member of the Bloodthirsty Lovers — wasn’t leaving town for parts unknown (a terrible blow to the Memphis scene), it would have been too good to be true.
But even without Bryant, this group of amorous vampires is composed of so many brilliant sonic chefs that any musical stew from their collective kitchen seems doomed to arrive DOA. Far from it, friends. Though each of these guys has his moment to shine, Shouse is clearly taking the lead here. He has blended the explosiveness of the Grifters with the pop-meets-prog sensibility of one of his earliest musical endeavors — the all-but-forgotten Moroccan Roll. Shouse abandoned “head” music for flat-out rocking in the ’80s when he had the great revelation that “working people don’t go out on the weekends to seek enlightenment, they want to shake their ass.” With the Bloodthirsty Lovers he may have proven, after two decades of experimentation, that these two musical byproducts are not mutually exclusive. The Bloodthirsty Lovers will be at the Map Room on Monday, March 11th. — Chris Davis