“Your parents give you this?” “Which? No that’s mine."
The wistful soft indie rock punches of "We Rifled Through" by Philadelphia based The Chairman Dances puts their own memories artfully on display and thusly pulls our own out too. The ramped up downbeats, jangle pop guitars, shuffling proggy musicality and genial vocal countenance, to me, feels like something between garden rock and flower punk and has me thinking of Athens, Georgia, of 90's American college radio, of bands like R.E.M or The Plimsouls or 10,000 Maniacs or The Who and The Jam if they chose folk based indie rock instead of classic and mod based rock to paint their art with.
LINER NOTES from the band (bracketed):
["We Rifled Through" is the lead single from our new album. The lyrics recount teenagers rifling through a bin of donated goods. The music reflects their feverish activity. We recorded the song live to get the raw, punk-like energy. It was produced by Daniel Smith of Danielson (mewithoutYou, Sufjan Stevens).]
["We Rifled Through" is the lead single from our new album. The lyrics recount teenagers rifling through a bin of donated goods. The music reflects their feverish activity. We recorded the song live to get the raw, punk-like energy. It was produced by Daniel Smith of Danielson (mewithoutYou, Sufjan Stevens).]
These lovely moments, these brief encounters like sun filtering through trees are important. As someone who has lived a long time and covered a lot of ground including the 'band' thing, my songs were often times filled with pain and doubt saturated with more doubt. To this day, I love melancholy songs but I also love wistful songs and "We Rifled Through" reminds me to try to pull out those reflective small moments that shape who we are, not just the moments that leave scars. Some say that as you get older you become wise, either that or you just become a lot less masochistic.
"We Rifled Through" is my first glimpse of The Chairman Dances' upcoming album "Evening Song" dropping October 11th, 2024. All the songs are seeded from a story or maybe a poem> The band explains this better than I ever could on their Bandcamp.
"We Rifled Through" is my first glimpse of The Chairman Dances' upcoming album "Evening Song" dropping October 11th, 2024. All the songs are seeded from a story or maybe a poem> The band explains this better than I ever could on their Bandcamp.
Evening Song began as a poem. The main textual difference between the poem and album is that their scenes are flipped. The poem begins at a lake and ends at Maggie’s apartment on a seminary campus. The album starts at Maggie’s apartment, ends at the lake. Both scenes take place during the evening. On the album, these evenings are divided by night, represented by a nocturne.]
"We Rifled Through" made me think of growing up in an immigrant family and pretty much existing on the bottom rungs of middle class. All the family cars were ones that my dad's boss gave him, don't get me wrong they were marvelous cars. Clothes came from Sears, Kmart. I built my own 'high end' bike from parts accessed at frequent visits to the Swap meet, painting it myself and ordering the Schwinn metal label so no one would ever know. When I was in highschool my artful acquisitions were vintage guitars and drum kits. Frequenting thrift shops in Hollywood and elsewhere was a mild obsession. Buying used became an ethos. The combination of 'the find', of saving money and also capturing an essense of history within an intimate object still offers me something mystifying. I passed this 'thing' to at least one of my kids while my son would never ever buy anything used.
I thought about all this and more after repeated listens to "We Rifled Through". This is why I love impactful songs.
Lyrics taken from the poem Evening Song: lines 93-103.
“Your parents give you this?” “Which? No that’s mine.
I’m the lone church goer.” “How does that happen?”
“One day, I went to church. I stayed. That’s it.”
“That’s it? How did you know to go?” “I stole
a book with an address.” Chris laughs. “You what?”
“You know those bins that sit outside of schools—
you put your textbooks in them when you’re done,
maybe a blanket; someone comes and drives
them off to needy kids? One day, my friends
and I—we’re young, we’re bored—we rifled through.
There, at the bottom, four or five of...”, she points.
-Robb Donker Curtius
THE FACTS AS WE KNOW THEM
https://soundcloud.com/the-chairman-dances
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZj4QeMvNkt9quMGd0Nx-Aw
https://thechairmandances.bandcamp.com/album/evening-song
https://www.instagram.com/thechairmandances
https://www.facebook.com/thechairmandances/
https://x.com/chairmandances
https://thechairmandances.com/
https://www.facebook.com/thechairmandances/
The Chairman Dances is an indie band based in Philadelphia. Their music has been featured by Bandcamp, the BBC, Magnet, PopMatters, and many others. Jon Doyle, editor of Various Small Flames, writes of the group: "The Chairman Dances have developed a distinctive amalgamation of indie rock, art pop and folk. Led by songwriter Eric Krewson, the band direct this sound into a compassionate and searching style, drawing on a range of literary and theological themes to explore political and spiritual ideas, and ask questions as pressing now as they have ever been."
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