Beaten By Them announces tour!

New album, Signs of Life slated for physical release in Fall of 2008.

Multinational band, Beaten By Them, plays dynamic, cinematic poems. A surprising fusion of classical-meets-rock music that takes you places you want to be. Their latest album, Signs Of Life, is releasing November 11th on Logic Pole via Thrill Jockey and the band is hitting the road this month in the United States.

Tour Dates

08.21.08 - Denver, CO - Hi Dive
08.23.08 - Kansas City, MO - Record Bar
08.25.08 - Madison, WI - High Noon Saloon
08.26.08 - Chicago, IL - Empty Bottle
08.27.08 - Des Moines, IO - Vaudeville Mews
08.29.08 - New York, NY - Knitting Factory
08.30.08 - Washington DC - Velvet Lounge
08.31.08 - Philadelphia, PA - Manhattan Room

When Andrew Harris and Max McCormick decided to move from San Francisco back to their home country of Australia at the end of 2006, it seemed they were sounding the death knell for Beaten by Them, the fledgling band they had spawned just a year earlier. But before long the two guitarists were hatching plans to perform with their old band mates: cellist Boima Tucker, drummer Ulf Bjorkbom and bassist Lee Matheson. By mid-2007 Beaten by Them were on the road, making their first tour of the US West Coast.

At the end of the tour the band entered John Vanderslice’s Tiny Telephone to capture some of their musical energies on tape. Recording in analog seemed a natural choice for a band whose music is so reliant on tones and textures.  Engineered by Aaron Prellwitz and mixed by Max McCormick and Andrew Harris at their Logicpole studio in Melbourne, the result is a classic sound of timeless musical quality. In this era of hooks and short attention spans, this is an album, writ large, that works as a complete whole rather than a set of unrelated tracks. From the cinematic opening of “Town too Small” to the space-jam outro of “Pioneer 10”, Signs of Life moves at a stately pace, but with a clear destination always ahead.

Though fundamentally a rock band, Beaten by Them do not seem particularly attached to that genre. All of the music originates in the gritty tones of Andrew Harris’s guitar and is filtered through the sensibilities of Max McCormick, whose arrangements owe more to beats-based electronic and world music than rock.  Beyond a few hard-and-fast rules the band are free to improvise at will, an approach which allows the music to breathe and sparks real magic. Cellist Boima Tucker is a key ingredient in Beaten by Them:
his performances, which are lyrical and fiery, truly define the band’s sound.  The spaciousness and power of Beaten by Them’s music owe much to the spontaneity of drummer Ulf Bjorkbom, a regular player in San Francisco’s jazz scene.

With the release of Signs of Life at the end of 2007, Beaten By Them have made good on their musical promise. At a time when seemingly little contemporary music piques the imagination, Beaten by Them have created a surprising fusion of classical-meets-rock music that takes you places you want to be.

Beaten By Them is:

Andrew Harris - guitar
Max McCormick - guitar and keys
Boima Tucker - cello and vocals
Ulf Bjorkbom - drums
Lee Matheson - bass

Track Listing