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. WHQ Elf Power, The Phones
*' " WHERE' -40 Watt Club ' '
WHEN Saturday, September 9
> HOW MOCK $5 %
eip powest $10*91
9d'te<VK*es /O $ooo nos/o
“I a. past the hour when the summer sky
vJ Li 5l slips from inky blue to that shaae of
opaque charcoal, we find Elf Power's Andrew
Rieger recharging his bright
tangerine-colored shirt off
the neon glow m the
Grill's facade. There are no
overtly telling signs that
Rieger, engaged in the very
Western pursuits of reading
the paper and quietly sip
ping from a can of ginger
ale, is recently returned
from the Far East and
Scandinavia.
With tne help of friends
in Japan, Elf Power—cur
rently consisting of Laura
Carter, Rieger, Bryan Helium,
Adrian Pinch and Aaron
Wegelin—ran through a
handful of club dates.
"Japan was amazing,"
states Rieger. "It seemed
like theii society seems a lot
more civilized and advanced
than ours, just because in a
big city like Osaka, the streets are completely
dean, people ride their bikes everywhere, and
homeless people are allowed to live in tent vil
lages in parks. People seem like they're making
conscious efforts to make society work as a whole.
And the shows were good. A lot of people came
out"
Leaping across several time zones, the band
then headed off this year's Emmaooda Festival in
Emmaboda, Sweden.
"They have this festival every year and it's
mostly young kids camping out in this field get
ting drunk and having a good time. The organizer:
put us up in this cottage with a pond that was
next to this big forest that looked like Hansel and
Gretel land. It was a really fun, relaxing week that
we had in Sweden and Norway."
Now the agenda falls to the release of a new
LFs worth of material. In mid-October, the band
and its new Chicago-based label Sugarfree [sugar-
freerecordi.com] will issue Winter Will Come, the
follow-up to last year's super well-received A
Dream In Sound.
"We did the last album in New York with Oave
Fridmann, and we only had two weeks to do it,"
remembers Rieger. "It came out great, but it took
a lot to get it recorded and mixed that fast This
time we wanted to have a little more time to
experiment and sit back and listen to mixes. So
we did a lot of the basic stuff at home over about
six months, and then our friend Zak has a home
16-track studio that we recorded ?t for a month."
According to Rieger, the
results have veered some
what fro 11 A Dream In
Sound's more straightforward
pop approach.
"It's a little bit heavier
and a little bit weirder. It's
still pop songs, but there are
some weird psychedelic tan
gents that we qo off on."
Unlike 1997's When The
Red King Comes, which
painted something of a sto
ried fantasy realm into
sound, Rieger holds that this
record is not concept-driven.
"I think we've con
sciously tried to move away
from story telling a little bit
just because we've done
that. It's nice to try dif
ferent styles."
Until October, you can
sample the new track "The
Sun Is Forever" at the band's web site
(elfpower.com], or you can drink down the whole
experience at this week's show.
JoE Silva
K en Bloch, lead singer and guitarist cf
Florida-based groove-pop tend Sister
Hazel, would probably admit that
the group's first major label album
Somewhere More Familiar captured a
group that was still coming to grips B
with its sound. 2
The band was formed in Gainesville *
in 1993 after Block decided to disband >
an acoustic duo he had with guitarist
Andrew Copel and form a full band to
play new songs he had written.
Copeland, who initially didn't know if
he wanted to follow Block into the
band, eventually joined alongside lead
guitarist Ryan Newell, bassist Jeff
Beras and drummei Mark Trojanowski
to form Sister Hazel. The band self-
released a self-titled debut album in
1995 and followed that with an early
version of Somewhere More Familiar a
year later. Although the band by that
time had been touring for a couple of
years. Block feels the group's growth
as a unit had only just begun.
"I think with Somewhere More
Familiar, I could go in and mix the
record, and if I take Ryan's guitar
and I turn him up three or four
dBs, it's a rock record," Block says. "And if I turn
him down three or four dBs, all of a sudden it's
more of an acoustic... high-energy acoustic
record. I think when we made the album we
weren't exactly sure what we wanted to be.
There was a little bit of a battle."
For a record that represented an early
attempt to define a band and its sound.
Somewhere More Familiar became an auspicious
start for Sister Hazel. The album produced two
hit singles for Universal Records, "AU For You"
and "Happy," and eventually surpassed one mil
lion in sales. But when Block and his bandmates
began work on their
recently
released second disc. Fortress, they real
ized Sister Hazel on tour had shown facets wirier,
the early albums had barely suggested. Creating
a new disc that truly reflected the group Sister
Hazel wasn't easy. The band began work with
producer Mike Clink, only to break off the ses
sions and do another round of songwriting
before returning to the studio, this time with
producers Richie Zito and Paul Ebersold.
"What happened was we started getting the
songs down and they were sounding really, really
good, but a lot of them, weren't as diverse as we
wanted them to be," Block says of the Clink ses
sions.
The second writing session pro
duced many of the songs on
Fortress, including the current top
five single, "Change Your Mind,"
while the finished CD brought out
the diversity the band wanted. Where
Somewhere More Familiar was largely
an acoistic-flavored folk pop record.
Fortress frequently displays a harder
edge, especially on the songs "Save
Me" and "Thank You." Block is pleased
with the multi-faceted nature of the
Fortress collection.
"We're one of those bands that
toured with everybody from the Allman
Brothers to modem rock bands like
Tonic and Matchbox Twenty and
Marvelous 3." Block says. "And we can
strip it down and play with Indigo Girls
and do that kind of thing. We can be
very different at different times and we
wanted to show that We wanted to show
there are a lot of different layers to this
band."
Alan Sculiey
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SEPTEMBER 6, 2000