"dangerous girls can be found shopping in front of my house"
I woke up this morning with the weirdest dreams that felt like something between the schlock horror of 1985's Reanimator and that overwhelming sick to your stomach feeling when you headed off to your first day of 8th grade. As I got up wincing at the discordant thoughts in my head, threw on sweat pants and a hoodie making my way to my chemical dispensing savior, the all and powerful KEURIG, I heard the sound of neighborhood cats in a fight to the death. A strange feeling in the air, I looked forward to opening music submissions like I do most mornings to bathe in the normalcy of music blogging.
I pushed play on American Watercolor Movement's track "Dangerous Girls" with the Thursday night high school swelling jazz band horns beautifully sad pleading with emotional acoustic guitar and strings sound, I was in a calm place. The pace picks up like something from an 80's action movie but good and sort of Manfred Mann-esque ("Blinded by the Light") and then vocalist Jason Cieradkowski started unloading. I am taken aback by his vocal style, highly art rock poised meets Brit punkery (or 50's movie Mid-Atlantic) spouting curious words.
"Dangerous girls can be found shopping in front of my house
Dangerous girls with Jerusalem high through the vegetable sky"
I apologize if I got the lyrics wrong. Cieradkowski massages every word turning one syllable words into two or three. I imagine or wonder whether his over reaching undulating style is at once a deeply felt possession or a mockery. At first it pushes me away but the more I listened to what is truly a weird and wonderful, highly rock orchestration, I got it or think I get it.
"Dangerous Girls" is from the band's full length album "Rooftops, Rifles, and Honey Volume 2: Rifles" which is itself a re-release of songs recorded between 2004-2008. Listening to mind numbing tracks like "A Letter to Lilia" which rides on percussive vintage typewriter clicks or the progressive rock dioramic "Release the Pulse" or the foreign film that is "If the Painter were a Photograph" I realize that the sounds American Watercolor Movement created while songs, yes, might be likened more to captured performance art. As I listened I thought of "Picnic At Hanging Rock", Manfred Mann, Human Sexual Response (the thing not the band), The Flaming Lips (the band not a smoking accident), Modest Mouse, Pere Ubu, Pink Floyd and a dozen sporadic 70's movies. The progressive divergent places the music goes with the underground theater sense creates such an interesting musical narrative.
About "Dangerous Girls":
"There was a lengthy recording session followed by a long, late drive home to Jersey City. Upon arrival it appeared there were a number of "ladies of the night" sitting on the stairway leading to the apartment doorway. While navigating several steps past glances of desperation and despair, vocalist Jason Cieradkowski concluded the scene was... DANGEROUS."
American Watercolor Movement suggests, promises new music which is exciting but they certainly set a high bar in the mid-2000's. If you want to be transported, surprised and perplexed even I would suggest listening to "Rooftops, Rifles, and Honey Volume 2: Rifles" preferably early in the morning or late, late at night.
-Robb Donker Curtius
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American Watercolor Movement draws us into a world all their own. With looping beats and a unique lyrical mutability, their songs appeal to our senses—imparting stories of lust, longing, traveling, searching—and we willingly submit to the highs and lows of their design.
American Watercolor Movement is currently comprised of Jason Cieradkowski, Brian Wilson, John Fesken, Joe Centeno, Tom Barrett, and Mark Townsend.
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