Formed through a hodge-podge of internet connectivity roughly three months ago, Chicago musicians Dastardly already have forged ahead as a group, recently releasing their demo for free download online. The Living Room Tapes Vol. 1 is a collection of three original songs, one cover, and is just a taste of what this up and coming band has been brewing.
From the foot stomping start of ‘Exercise in Self-Loathing’, we get a taste of the groups tight harmonies, where in this track, the sole female in the band stands out among her more brassy brethren. Though the style of Dastardly is firmly cemented in such influences as Roy Orbison, Hank Williams Sr., and Gram Parsons, there’s still a hint of indie relate ability found among the six, particularly in Liebowitz’s honest and direct lyrics. Lines like the opener’s “Some nights I want to try, but most nights I disappear with the blink of an eye” is the sort you might find in just about any song written about oneself, but the band manages to put enough of a musical spin on it that it becomes entirely theirs.
‘Last Party’ slows down from its predecessor, mostly led by its harmonies and accordion part, once again catching our attention lyrically with the line, “ I’m thinking about taking the fall, intent on rising to be the king I’m tired of wanting to be” The final original song the band delivers is ‘Brief Thoughts on Death’ which we loved the pattern of Liebowitz’s vocals in, as well as his slightly tongue in cheek observations on life and death. Mostly banjo based with a rhythmic tapa-tapping throughout, this track builds up withpercussive fills toward its end, but unfortunately ends rather anti-climatically, just fading away instead of really going anywhere like it seemed it would.
Wrapping up The Living Room Tapes Vol. 1 is a ‘Rose Marie’, in which for us, the vocals got a little too warbly and twangy, but nonetheless we found it to be a lovely rendition of the song that made Slim Whitman a record holder in the world of music charts. Kudos goes out to the accordion and percussion adds in their version, as well as the subtle slide and twang of guitar in the background of Gabe’s shifting vocals.
Overall there’s a slight echoic quality to this demo that gives the impression that, while dubbed The Living Room Tapes, the acoustics we’re hearing our band in are actually those belonging to a saloon somewhere out west. The gentle imperfections of an organically made record deliver a kind of warm comfort you just can’t add in during production, and its apparent our friends in Dastardly knew their style absolutely required that element of easy going to be captured correctly.
With our two cents about the demo said, when it comes down to it, we honestly couldn’t concoct a better description of this band embodies than the one they’ve written for themselves:
“Stumble into the right alley in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood, and the racket of the nearby club scene will be drowned out by sounds from an unmarked garage—a man croons and howls about death, booze and love over a band that seems to understand what he’s going on about; harmonious voices and instruments of the past collide with a confused and desperate present. Don’t be afraid! These are the sounds of Dastardly, so grab a bottle of whiskey and come on in.”
Not only did we find ourselves agreeing with the above description of the sound emitted by these six, but we also found ourselves wandering into that exact alley in order to find a few members of Dastardly for an interview. It was upon a Lakeview rooftop that we found ourselves sitting in a semi circle with Sarah Morgan, August Sheehy, and Gabriel Liebowitz, just one half of the collection of musicians that make up the band. While all members contribute to the delicate harmonies of Dastardly, its Liebowitz who lends his slightly gritty and southernly soulful voice to listeners, while Morgan plays accordion and Sheehy strums on the bass.
The trio enthusiastically talked to us about their plans for Dastardly, dream collaborations, and what kinds of highs and lows have happened so far on their journey as a band.
Reviewsic: What are your top three influences as a band?
Sarah: Well, number one is tea.
Gabe: No, no we’re a whiskey band! I would say the sound we’re looking for is pre-Beatles pop music, specifically Roy Orbison and things like that, trying to use that with a combination of country music like Graham Parsons or maybe early Hank Williams. Also, some of the newer indie band we listen to like Grizzly Bear and Dirty Projectors, which we sound nothing like but we all love.
Reviewsic: What about individually- what are some of your musical influences?
Sarah: I’m basically creepily obsessed with Dirty Projectors, its kind of a problem. So if I have to pick three, it’d be them, Simon and Garfunkel, and Brahams. So nerdy, but that’s it.
August: Charles Mingus, my dad, and Stavinsky is pretty awesome. I recently bonded with someone over Bad Religion, and that makes me want to include them too.
Gabe: Roy Orbison, Harry Nilsson, and Red House Painters.
Reviewsic: If you could book a tour with any three bands, past or present, who would you pick and why?
Sarah: Let’s tour with The Who, I want to party with Keith Moon.
Gabe: I would honestly want to play with Dirty Projectors. One of the best current and live bands I’ve ever seen. I’d also like to see Sarah pee her pants over it.
August: How about Mingus?
Gabe: I would also want to tour with David Bowie during the Ziggy Stardust tour, or with T-Rex when The Slider came out.
Reviewsic: What are a few of your favorite local bands?
Gabe: Glittermouse is a favorite of mine. They do the best version of ‘Love Gun’ by Kiss that I’ve ever heard. There’s also these two bands we’ve been playing with a lot, Teenage Rage and Merriweather. Its really crazy/weird but beautiful music I just like. Color Radio too, they’re doing great things and taking that whole indie thing that Grizzly Bear is doing but really making it their own.
Reviewsic: How about past projects? What other bands have you played with?
August: I played in a power pop band in Boston, and I was also in this punk band in high school, called the Cute and Fuzzy Bunnies. But it turns out there was another band with that name and a writer for this little magazine put out a hit on us, saying “If anyone knows these name stealing bastards from Wisconsin, send me their spleens.”
Gabe: Here in Chicago I was in a band called Line of the Notary but that only lasted about 5 months, and before that I did a sort of solo thing called Gabriel Lion, which also lasted about 4 or 5 months before I got frustrated and quit. So I guess what I’m saying is: expect us to be around for a few more months before I quit and start up the next project.
Sarah: I never played in bands before this band really. I played in marching band and like…wind ensemble, and I played some traditional Irish music with some friends I made when going to DePaul music school, but this is the first official band I’ve done.
Reviewsic: What was the first album personally bought?
Gabe: I can probably say…twelve years old, The Number of the Beast by Iron Maiden.
August: I think the first CD I actually bought was Metallica, The Black Album.
Sarah: Mine was No Doubt, Tragic Kingdom, which I’m pretty proud of considering I think the second was Ace of Base.
Reviewsic: What are some of your favorite places to play?
Gabe: We haven’t played a ton of places with any notoriety, but we have gotten to do to the Bottom Lounge. I would say that Martyr’s has been the best place for us so far, but personally I’d say it was playing theSubterranean because it’s got a big place in my heart. When I first moved her from Rhode Island the first Chicago show I went to was there, and it was Grizzly Bear, with the Dirty Projectors. It was also the first place that I played a show in Chicago, when I was probably 19? And I thought it was the hugest deal. I think somewhere we’d really like to get though is Schubas, that’d be awesome for it.
Sarah: I love playing the Gallery Cabaret; it’s like my favorite place in the world. You go to Gallery Cabaret and its like Cheers, everyone knows your name. It’s probably the only place I’d go alone, and leave with a million friends.
Reviewsic: Is there a particular creative direction you’re moving in with Dastardly?
Gabe: Right now our songwriting is pretty basic, it’s mostly been me demoing a song and then bringing it to the table with everyone. But lately we’ve been working toward being more collaborative, and we’re definitely finding a way take the old with the new. Right now we have a really old Americana sound, but we’d like to add with a style like Grizzly Bear and Local Native.
August: I see my job as just throwing a wrench in the works with whatever is happening. Sometimes I just look directly at someone and say, “Play something that doesn’t work.” Well, actually I only did that once and we got rid of it immediately. But the point is we are trying to be more collaborative.
Gabe: What he’s trying to say is that August is in the band for eye candy, and that’s it.
Sarah: I think right now we’ve just kind of played the song pretty straight forward, but what we’re working on now is actually arranging things and working thematically.
Reviewsic: What would say your best/worst band moment is so far?
August: We had this one show where every possible equipment malfunction you could imagine happened at once.
Gabe: It was our second show, and it was at Ronny’s, and I borrowed from this other musician we were playing with, Jared Bartman, I borrowed his guitar, and ended up breaking a string during the second song, then August’s microphone stopped working. Then we played this really nice ballad before realizing the venue owner had started playing like…Creedance Clearwater Revival over the speakers and nobody had heard the song.
Sarah: I wasn’t even thinking of that…I was thinking Reggie’s.
Gabe: Oh that too…Well, we were playing the music joint, and it was this kid’s 21st birthday and got completely wasted with all his friends, screaming for us to play these songs which was really annoying because it was supposed to be this intimate setting and he just yelled through the whole set. It got to a point where half way through the set I put down my guitar and went up to him with the original plan to punch him in the face, then thought to splash a glass of water in his face instead, but fortunately collected myself enough to walk up, hand him a glass and say, “Here, drink some water, it will help you sober up.” So that was kind of rough.
August: On the flip side, our 10 minute show at Gallery Cabaret was really, really good.
Gabe: I’d say the best we’ve played, as a unit was Martyr’s, because it was the first time we really nailed the harmonies and thought to ourselves, “Yeah, this is good.” It was the first time Sarah sang lead on a song, and she sounded fucking fantastic too.
Reviewsic: If you were to record an album that was purely cover songs, what are few songs that you’d have to put on that album?
August: A lot of the songs I love are kind of just untouchable. It’s hard to choose because there’s such a long list of songs that are great songs we need to cover.
Gabe: One song I’ve been dying for us to play is this Roy Orbison song called ‘Falling’. What he does is take three minutes, usually even less than that, and makes these dramatic, mini-operas. He goes from a low point to a high point and back and can get so much accomplished. We have a cover on the demo, ‘Rose Marie’ by Slim Whitman, but that feels like cheating as an answer. Maybe we could do ‘In Dreams’, because of that scene with Dennis Hopper lip-synching to it in Blue Velvet.
Sarah: Can we just do Blue Velvet? I would totally sing that.
Reviewsic: What goes into your writing process?
Gabe: Basically I’ll usually structure the song before I start writing the lyrics and have kind of a game plan for the things I want to do. It really depends on what I’m listening to, and that will get me to write a song in that same vein but put my own spin on it. I think its lame to write things that you only feel passively about, and now it’s mostly based on real thoughts and things that are going on.
August: It’s really interesting that it starts with structure first and then lyrics, because then when a song comes to the band and starts to become more collaborative it’s exactly that first structure that starts to get kind of thrown out as everyone adds in their own parts.
Reviewsic: If you could work with anyone in the music business, be it a band, label, or producer, who would it be?
August: My first instinct is Tom Waits, that’d be amazing.
Sarah: I would love to work with David Byrne, even to just be one of his back up singers.
Gabe: As far as an artist I would like to work with Harry Nelsson, if he were alive. But as far as a label I’d love to be on Subpop, in a perfect world. Bloodshot records would be sweet too, they’re Chicago based. Really, I’d like to be on a label, someone to say, “Hey, we can pay you to do this, don’t worry about it.”
Reviewsic: Where would you like to see yourselves as a band in the next year?
Gabe: I’d like to be able to play shows and have people regularly showing up who aren’t are friends, just people who actually want to see us and aren’t just being nice. It’d be nice to be super successful, but just to get to the point where we could make somewhat of a comfortable living doing this.
August: I’d like to be at the point where we don’t even have to advertise. Where we could play under another name, and the information would just leak and people would be there.
Sarah: Now, come on let’s be realistic. I agree with Gabe, I think it would just be nice for people to come out.
Tags: Album Review, Free Event, Free Music, Free Show, Interview, Local Music, New Music, Video
November 14, 2010 at 11:04 am |
[...] that Dastardly is a band that is constantly improving. Having made such big strides over the past seven months since I first interviewed them, I can only imagine what these six have in store for us [...]
October 16, 2010 at 10:03 am |
[...] Read our interview with Gabe Liebowitz, Sarah Morgan, and August Sheehy [...]
June 19, 2010 at 12:02 am |
[...] Check out our past interview with Dastardly’s Gabe Liebowitz, Sarah Morgan, and August Sheehy. [...]