On Wednesday October 16th,
WagonWheel Presents… is delighted to welcome
Eef Barzelay of American indie rock legends
Clem Snide to
Shakespeares. Set to release a brand new album later this year, Eef heads to the UK for a solo tour along with his fellow countryman
Chris Otepka of
The Heligoats who plays on these shores for the first time. Plus support. Advance tickets priced at £8 are available from
http://www.wegottickets.com/event/225946 or entry on the night will be £10. Doors open 8pm.
***EEF BARZELAY [CLEM SNIDE]***Although much admired by some of music’s biggest names, (Bon Iver, Death Cab for Cutie, Ben Folds), and praised by the likes of NPR, the Onion AV Club, and Daytrotter, Clem Snide and it’s founder Eef Barzelay have managed to stay mostly below the radar for well over a decade.
After a brief flirtation with Seymor Stein’s Sire label they gently exploded unto the late nineties music scene with “Your Favorite Music”; A slow-paced and spare offering that mixed elemental forms of American music with a sonic palette of distressed cello, sampled field recording, and Eef Barzelay’s cracked voiced and left-of-center word play.
Soon there after, in the spring of 2001, the band released “The Ghost Of Fashion” on the now defunct SpinArt label which brought them tantalizingly close to mainstream success when the song “Moment in the Sun” was used as the opening theme for the hit NBC show “Ed”. Though plagued with inter band friction and general mismanagement the band made two more records and toured hard though out the US, UK, and Europe before finally calling it quits in 2005. At which point Eef Barzelay released a couple solo records and tried his hand at scoring movies, most notably the 2007 Sundance hit “Rocket Science”.
Resurrecting the band in 2009 with the darkly understated LP “Hungry Bird” Barzelay took another quixotic stab at sustained profitability within the music business. But as the old models were clearly not working and the industry itself was shrinking, if not imploding, Barzelay found him self will little support and a house going into foreclosure.
Refusing, and/or unable, to give up, and always looking for new and exciting ways to create and connect with his fellow human beings, he began reaching out to fans with an offer to write them a “personal song”, (which would be rendered in a simple home recorded solo acoustic fashion). To date he has written over 150 songs ranging from goofy children’s songs to dark meditations on death and love.
“Songs For Mary” is the Kickstarter-funded result of this collaboration with Eef and his fans. It’s 10 songs are a distillation of the melodies and lyrical themes that emerged from the process. It was produced by Eef and recorded and mixed by Mark Nevers (Calexico, Silver Jews, Lambchop) at the Beech House in Nashville, TN. Featured players are Tony Crow on piano, Ben Martin on drums, Jared Reynolds on bass. Along with Pete Finny on pedal steel and Mason Vickary on lap steel Eef Barzelay plays all the various guitars, ukuleles and organs and does all the singing.
http://clemsnide.com/ ***CHRIS OTEPKA [THE HELIGOATS]***At its heart, The Heligoats is Chris Otepka (vocals/guitar) and home to his wonderfully weird and diverse compositions. His distinct vocal style has been compared by SPIN Magazine as sounding “somewhat like Built To Spill’s Doug Martsch, but also like the Mountain Goat John Darnielle with his sincere and nasal voice.” His lyrical narratives have meanwhile been praised by NPR as “wise, wry observations on human emotions, science and the way things work. His songs are, more than anything else, the byproduct of an endlessly curious mind.”
It’s that restless and overactive spirit that has driven Otepka to establish The Heligoats as his own musical life journal (while of recent years also serving as a touring member of Clem Snide). Since 1998 it has been primarily a solo project with Otepka doing the majority of work and guests filling roles. However on latest recoed Back To The Ache, The Heligoats has become an ensemble piece with a set quartet adding and trans-mutating Otepka’s compositions. The result is as times rustic alt-folk tunes that expand into loose and layered indie-rock orchestra epics as well as a psychedelic and spacey sheens on intimate singer/songwriter material.
http://theheligoats.com/Facebook Event page:
http://www.facebook.com/events/1422365667974815Last.fm Event page:
http://www.last.fm/event/3695225