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
1. Town Too Small
2. Signs Of
Life
3. The Asiatic Capital Vista
4. Verge
5. Yangtze
6. Pioneer 10