Stephen Brower & the Silent Majority create intimate no-fi folk filtered through a decadent indie rock aesthetic. American primitve by way of the shoegazers.

12 MP3 Songs
ROCK: Folk Rock, FOLK: Modern Folk



Details:
Siphon some fumes from the American Primitive guitar meanderings of John Fahey, the kitchen-sink folk of Califone, the boozy, Southern gothic literacy of James McMurtry, the populist guitar fireworks of Dean Ween, and the decadent noise of the Jesus & Mary Chain and youâll have a heady ether somewhat akin to that which Stephen Brower & the Silent Majority are trying to project.

Brower crafted the bandâs debut Sad Songs & Others over several quiet years in various Los Angeles apartments, usually alone with a cadre of cheap microphones, cheaper guitars, and cheaper still amps. Listening to the tracks on Sad Songs, one might well detect a distant door slam, dog bark, cricket chirp or bottle clink, and theyâre meant to. The songs are laid bare - imperfect, untrained, and messy, as good folk art should rightly be.

âLa Baie des Angesâ opens the set , a droning rattling dirge that draws as much from the languid, unsettling films of Michael Haneke and Bruno Dumont as it does from american primitive master John Fahey, the folk iconoclast in whose honor Brower (alongside M.Ward) conceived and co-produced the acclaimed 2006 tribute I am the Resurrection.

Fahey is a major touchstone an inspiration for Brower, as Sad Songsâ two other instrumental tracks (âLâEclisseâ and âLe Beau Sergeâ) attest, but other influences abound, albeit somewhat surreptitiously, throughout Sad Songs. âDonât Sweat It,â the albumâs only cover, belies Browerâs admiration for tongue-in-cheek genre hoppers Ween, but the track itself plays as a re-imagining of sorts, stripping away the originalâs gas-huffing abrasion and offering instead a stripped down stoned folk epic. And while âDonât Sweat Itâ might stray far the original, Dean Weenâs guitar techniques serve as a point of reference throughout, most explicitly in the guitar driven wordless chorus of the title track.

Elsewhere on Sad Songs Brower offers the antiheroic plights of a Los Angeles drunk resigned to his fate in âBarstow by Noonâ, a Deep South kid trafficking in AK-47s, Oxy Contin, and bootleg beer in âPisgah,â and a Hollywood hopeful at peace with his own flawed approach in âHillsong,â to name a few. The character sketches that fill Sad Songs are concise, elliptical, and perhaps even unresolved, but each one exhibits a candor and vulnerability that is at once disarming and lasting, terms that easily apply to the whole of Sad Songs and Others.