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In early 2006, the members of Bound Stems
decided that the only sensible thing to do was quit their career jobs and head out on tour. This
was a big leap of faith: it takes years of dedicated work to become a high school history teacher,
or to stay on course as a lab tech, or to run the art department of a comics publishing house. The
album they'd just finished making, Appreciation Night, was set to follow their touring for their
first Flameshovel release, The Logic of Building the Body Plan EP, and with the summer ending,
they decided to go for broke.
They took their music nationwide, and it got noticed-in the New York
Times, Spin and Entertainment Weekly, and they got linked to and blogged about enough for even a
bit of backlash. Summer touring blurred into fall and winter touring. It was a life of making
music.
And then, somewhere in Baton Rouge, Bobby figured something out: his role as a teacher was
intrinsic to writing songs, and it didn't make sense for him to cut himself off from the source.
He decided it was time to head home and start teaching history again.
This was big news to the
rest of the band, and not necessarily welcome. They hit the brakes, returned to Chicago, and
examined their circumstances. How to proceed? Chicago engineer Manny Sanchez offered his own IV
Lab Studio to start work on the next album. Bound Stems recorded two roaring new singles-"Sugar
City Magic" and "Hooray Madame Corday!"-and then hit a wall: despite the hot musical start, the
band was still internally at odds. They kept their distance from each other, re-started their
careers, and wondered what role music would end up playing. Radz holed up to make epic
twenty-minute drone and blip compositions, and Bobby sketched out songs he wasn't sure the band
even wanted to play. It got to be winter in every way.
It was the songs themselves that warmed
Bound Stems back up. Radz's arcane audio experiments began to reach out across Bobby's melodies
and chordsÑand all at once the album started to write itself. The band threw themselves into the
detailed craftsmanship that makes their compositions so architectural and huge: parts and plans
pile atop one another, and stories echo and accumulate across songs.
The characters in "The Family
Afloat" are newly inflected, and so are the sounds: "Taking Tips from the Gallery Gang" rides the
Ô60s harmonies of Harvey Danger's Sean Nelson into a joyous finale as much Dylan as Graceland.
"Passing Bell" feels like a summer city night out; "Winston" wavers and flickers like a filmstrip.
"Clear Water & Concrete" arrives via cartoon steamboat, and typewriters and telegraphs clatter
under the gorgeous melancholy of "Only Clementine Knows." Bobby's lyrics flash with new
perspectives: "Happens to Us All Otherwise" shivers with coiled tension and busts loose with a
cathartic, joyous chorus: "It took me years for these words," Bobby hollers, "years to admit I was
RIGHT!"
"Tell me: what became of your family?" inquires the narrator of "Palace Flophouse and
Grill," as a whirlwind of voices argue, confide, split apart and converge all around him. The
climactic rise of "Cloak of Blue Sky" gives full voice to the doubt and fears that darken the
horizon, before crashing through the clouds and into the sunlight. By the time Radz's ragged keys
suddenly part for Fleury's triumphant guitar on closer "Sugar City Magic," the album has reclaimed
the band that made it. "My father came to shake my hand," Bobby sings at last: "Take care of the
family."
Like any good storyÑlike any good lifeÑthe rewards of The Family Afloat had to be
rightfully earned in order to be rightfully enjoyed. The payoff is huge: by facing the conflicts
that make a child an adult, Bound Stems discovered the way a band becomes a family.
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"On opener "Crimes and Follies," a driving, bluesy stomp backs frontman
Bobby Gallivan as he lingers, unsure of a romance that"s rapidly progressing beyond his control.
"At the end of the night," he coos, "we"re crawling up the stairs together with a secret inside."
Then the track slips off into a pensive, sparse pause that mimics the situational uncertainty.
"Crashed around the room, she"s egging me on / Smile politely but I"m too ambitious," Gallivan
relates over slow-building snare taps. "We spent the morning kissing on the floor / We entered
casually but left a wreck." The meandering storytelling is even more effective on the searing
"Wake Up, Ma and Pa Are Gone," which takes off around the supercharged line, "It all comes down
to a moment like this / When I"m leaving for something bigger than us."
SCAN OF CLIP -
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"On its densely packed 25-minute EP, The Logic of Building
the Body Plan (Flameshovel), the Chicago band Bound Stems finds plenty of room in a zone that
borders Wilco, Animal Collective, Tortoise and the Fiery Furnaces. The songs start out orderly
and serene, working in minimalist patterns on a chord or two. But it doesn"t take them long to go
haywire. Tracks mutate from electronics-smudged skiffle to garage rock to noise, and back;
verse-chorus-verse gets discombobulated by psychedelic squall and vertiginous overdubs. And Bobby
Gallivan sings, in an unheroic voice, about memories, romance gone wrong and - strangest of all,
given this stubbornly idiosyncratic rock - commercial ambitions."
SCAN OF CLIP
"[The Logic of Building the Body Plan EP
is] an immersive listen..."Wake Up, Ma and Pa Are Gone" breezes past on gorgeous guitars and a
sprightly drum pattern (courtesy of Harvey Danger refugee Evan Sult), almost slows to a halt,
then pulls up for a speaker-blowing crescendo. Then there"s "Risking Life and Limb for the
Coupon," where Gallivan stays calm while the rhythm leaps and lurches until the cathartic
full-band sigh of the finale with memorable calm/frantic call-and-response singing...catch [Bound
Stems] now -- before they become another entirely different band."
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"A woozy triumph featuring quivering vocals, ragged distortion, and train-track drums, the song
follows its haphazard trajectory to arrive at a blissfully imperfect indie-rocking whole."
SCAN OF CLIP
"The music is smart and ambitious incorporating a tongue-tying jumble of lyrics on "My Kingdom For A Trundle Bed" and a collage of
field recordings on the two part "Up All Night," but it"s also emotionally super-saturated,
achieving post-rock"s complexity without its aridity or pretension - this is clearly a band bound
for greatness, or at least bigness."
"Quirky indie pop that"s experimental yet strangely accessible...if you"re a fan of [The Flaming Lips]-or adventurous pop music in
general- Bound Stems are right up your alley."
SCAN OF CLIP
(Top 45 Chicago Artists) "The math-rock-tinged indie-pop band"s 2006 record "Appreciation Night"
was a bafflingly complex testimony of what pop music could be--a wildly imaginative full-length
debut that was really a hundred-song album."
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"The array of sounds on Appreciation Night is dizzying, not unlike the whirlwind approach of
Broken Social Scene, and like that Canadian collective, Bound Stems most certainly has a problem
sitting still for too long. Because of this notable fact, Appreciation Night is a startlingly
diverse and adventurous set of music, in addition to being an energetic and touching homage to
their home."
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"[Bound Stems] have created the newest flavor of rock - the Neapolitan collection of dizzying
guitar riffs, witty and diverse narratives that stands as a wake up call to the music industry
and its parched audience."
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"From the complex tracks like "Andover" and "Excellent News, Colonel" to the dissonant guitar
crescendo of closer "55 Cross St.," this album manages to be continuously rewarding all the way
to the final applause."
SCAN OF CLIP
"...each of these tracks contains moments of pure pop bliss where the experimental elements all
converge with one another to form something straight forward and undeniably catchy."
SCAN OF CLIP
"Listen to [a Bound Stems] songs like "Wake Up, Ma
and Pa Are Gone" and "Risking Life & Limb for the Coupon," two of the EP"s best tunes, and you"ll
hear the ratty pages of a crinkled and ink-worn notebook that chronicles the life and blood of
this band."
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"The Logic of Building the Body Plan is a challenging listen with its dissonant guitars,
choppy time signatures, strangled vocals, and "found" samples of bizarre conversational snippets.
This EP has as much in common with King Missile as it does Yo La Tengo, with a little bit of the
geekiness of the Dead Milkmen and the cut-and-paste studio sounds of Beck thrown in for good
measure."
SCAN OF CLIP
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Right Click on Image and Select "Save link..." to download 300dpi photos
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Photos by Paige Brubeck & MUST be credited
Copyright 2008 Flameshovel Records
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Photos by Chris Strong & MUST be credited
Copyright 2005-2006 Flameshovel Records
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Photos by Liz Parrott & MUST be credited
Copyright 2005-2006 Flameshovel Records
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07.11.08 @ Schubas | Chicago, IL
07.18.08 @ Village Green Records | Muncie, IN
07.19.08 @ Sneaky Dee's | Toronto, ON
07.20.08 @ Club Lambi | Montreal, QC
w/ Jeremy Jay
07.22.08 @ Union Hall | Brooklyn, NY
07.23.08 @ M Room | Philadelphia, PA
07.24.08 @ Mercury Lounge | New York, NY
07.25.08 @ Velvet Lounge | Washington, DC
07.26.08 @ Howler's Coyote Lounge | Pittsburgh, PA
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The Logic of Building the Body Plan CDEP
(DIG032)
Released 11.15.05
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Appreciation Night CD
(DIG037)
Released 9.19.06
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The Family Afloat
(DIG044)
Coming 09.09.08
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