History Tall Young Men

NEW EP out in January! In Studio Now!!

http://twitter.com/TallYoungMen

http://tallyoungmen.bandcamp.com/album/saint-record

"The irony is that this is a band about nothing - no job, no future, no holy ghost. They show up after you've gone to bed and sleep with your mom and when you get up for breakfast, there they are in a smoking jacket, eating your Wheaties and smiling like they know you know what they 've been doing." - as reported by Dean Corteen outside of the Silver Dollar Saloon in Dicksville, USA.

A SAINT FOR TROUBLED TIMES

Tall Young Men’s new release sings to the masses about life, liberty and the pursuit of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness during these days of hope and strife.

Seattle, WA, October 30, 2008 – Denouncing the past as just another set-up for the future, St. Record by Tall Young Men creates a driving, edgy atmosphere of gutsy rock that reminds us tough times call for a poetry of the people. The songs on St. Record don’t blatantly put forth a comrade’s call to arms, but in a more subtle way, talk about those day-to-day things that make up lives from Petersburg to St. Petersburg, Compton to Camden.

Hopes run high that a new direction will come with the new administration. But miracles don’t happen overnight. St. Record doesn’t offer miracles, but talks about the people who could use one…

Tall Young Men is a band of working-class artists (or actually guys who have jobs...sort of...one is a filmmaker, the other a reformed gigolo). Artists who’ve taken powerful lyrics and patch-worked them into songs that are at once catchy and rough, in sort of a punk pop way that overcomes the saccharine of pop and the nihilism of punk.

Behind the raspy, puncuated vocals and guitar of Brick Briscoe, Tall Young Men have put together an opus that gives you a sense of déjà vu, where it eerily seems familiar, but you can’t quite put your finger on why. You hear it in the sing-along quality of the chorus of “For a Canadian Boarder Guard”, where the moment is simply expressed in “I wish I had a cigarette and a beer. Or a whisky. Or a anything.”

Briscoe, and band mate Tedd Klipsch (yes, he’s related to the Klipsch speaker dude), have some ideas about what makes the songs work. “When we decided to do this project,” Briscoe recalls, “we wanted to do something personal, but not about us personally. That freed up some of the creativity to be someone like a character instead of being yourself.”

Klipsch is less introspective: “We talked about this being a band, in the sense of creating together. While we wrote songs individually, there was a lot of collaboration. We agreed from the beginning to keep ourselves out of the main story lines. And that we wanted this to be a rock and roll album.”

The result is somewhere between blue collar rock and street corner poet and French storyteller. “Dress Up” uses a simple, bass-driven rant infused with Andy Gill-inspired guitar work to deliver a message of taggers and panhandlers on the loose in the big city. That song rubbed up against “Jack the Ripper” with its catchy hook and street violence imagery might make you think this was a pretty pessimistic vision of the future from these two. The reality is, life is rich. Rich with imagery and feelings. We’re lucky that we get to experience that richness.

When the gut-wrenching of “ILOVEYOUSOMUCH” unleashes, it comes from a place not so much where love relationships are hard as, is this what it means to be in love? Why didn’t someone warn me about this?

The music of St. Record carries the same quality as the lyrics: at one time in your face, at others a little less so. But always with a sense that there’s something a bit unusual coming around the corner. And occassionally, without warning, it all comes to an abrupt halt.

The band plays live,with or without Tedd Klipsch, who refuses to quit the day job.

Instrumentation

Brick Briscoe - Vocals, Guitar, Bass, Drums, Synth

Tedd Klipsch - Bass, Backing Vocals, Percussion, Synth

Victor Birkle - Drums

Jerome Bosco - Beats

Creative Commons By-SA License