Debut album The Portrait Is Finished and I Have Failed to Capture Your Beauty... released by Locust Music.The romantically entwined duo of Dan Bejar (Destoyer, Swan Lake, New Pornographers) and Sydney Vermont (Visual artist, Bonaparte vocalist, former Toronto Children’s Choir kid singer) performing under the moniker Hello, Blue Roses have announced one of very few live shows for the year. This rare public appearance from these lovebirds -- fittingly booked the week of Valentine’s Day -- takes place February 16th in Brooklyn, NY at Glasslands (289 Kent Ave.)
Hello, Blue Roses’ 13-track debut was recently released by Chicago-based label Locust Music. The disc, titled The Portrait Is Finished and I Have Failed to Capture Your Beauty... draws on everything from an unabashed love of 80s AOR a la Prefab Sprout and Kate Bush to prime Aquarian-age femme folk of the 60s & 70s to create an infectious, readymade classic.
“When I listen to the sound of it, I hear European pastoral music butting up against a harsh 80s reality,” Bejar says. “The Hello, Blue Roses songs are completely untethered to any of the bullshit streams coursing through the scene right now. That’s just how Syd writes them; it’s not her fault. They’re completely melodious, but still so strange. It’s a product of not really caring what people think, but still caring a lot about people.”
“Dan supports every strange idea I have ever had,” says Vermont, “and then we craft it into something to our liking. We hear different things in the songs and try to bring both visions into it, which involves a lot of trust and generosity, because we are very different. It makes for an overall eclectic sound, which still has its own organic logic.”
The band’s decision to team up with Locust Music is totally apropos given the celebrated label’s wide-eyed approach and Hello Blue Roses’ own deeply accessible but eclectic sound. “The roster seemed impossibly all over the place, and also not tied down to any era or genre,” Bejar says. “But once you start looking at everything they’ve done, it’s pretty impressive and head-scratching.”
Just as Bejar and Vermont thoughtfully describe Hello, Blue Roses, Locust Music head Dawson Prater eloquently places the band’s work in fitting context. “Outside of the influences of 60s-70s singer-songwriters, Dan and Sydney are touching on some of the popular music of the 80s that a lot of us 30-somethings have lived with whether we liked it or not,” Prater says. “At the heart of it, I think all of we’ve got this repository in our heads where popular music takes root and Hello, Blue Roses have gone there in a totally unironic way and recast the sweetness and mismatched optimism of the music of the Reagan era to the way it should sound, the way this stuff often sounds in our heads and that’s what timelessness is all about.”
Hello Blue Roses Live:
02/16 Brooklyn, NY Glasslands
(289 Kent Ave.) w/ Begushkin
The Portrait Is Finished... Tracklisting:
Stream The Album HERE
Release Date: January 22, 2008
01. Hello Blue Roses
02. Scarecrow
03. Paquita Reads By Candlelight
04. Shadow Falls (MP3)
05. Heron Song
06. St. Angela
07. Coming Through Imposture
08. Golden Fruit
09. Come Darkness
10. Sunny Skies (MP3)
11. Mediterranean Snow
12. Skeleton Aim
13. Sickly Star
14. Hymn
On The Web:
www.locustmusic.com
www.myspace.com/helloblueroses
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