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'First thing you should know about the Letterpress Opry is that they don't hold anything back. They get out there near the edge, they play their instruments with abandon, and they make earthy, emotional roots-rock……. The gothic is apt 'cause this ain't music that tiptoes-it's dark and brooding like the weather that often rolls across the Iowa flatlands they call home. A band that rocks this hard is worth catching in concert, and the kind of extended songs they favor go over better live than canned. That's why a group that's only been together since 2000 and are just releasing their first CD have already been on the bill with people like Asleep At The Wheel, Greg Brown, and Alejandro Escovedo. Patrick Brickel, main songwriter and bassplayer, Annie Savage, Celt-tinged fiddle, Stacy Webster six string and lead vocals, James Robinson, drums and percussion.'~ Flying Shoes Review 'The Mayflies play Kurt-Weill-loses-a-bet-to-Waylon-Jennings alternative country that veers from darkly funny to severely powerful. Their lead singer, Stacey Webster, has an idiosyncratic, classic country voice. They exist in some righteous corner of the universe that illustrates what might happen if a jam band stopped smoking weed long enough to pay attention to the music and concurrently started listening to a lot of The Band.
'~ Amazon.com 'The Mayflies (Letterpress Opry) are really quite a remarkable group. Very much in the alt-folk/country genre, this Iowan quartet reminds the listener of why they used to like REM.
Driven by steel guitar with fiddles a-plenty, Americana Gothic offers a complex listening pleasure with not even a hint of hillbilly, but there is more to it than meets the ear on fist listening. As befits a band who hail from the plains of Iowa, the aural experience is cinematic in scope with wide vowel-like string solos and a metre that slowly builds into a crescendo of duplicitous joy and anguish.
The maturity of the music belies the band members’ ages — Stacy Webster’s vocals sound as though they are the result of thirty years of hard drinking and a tracheotomy — yet American Gothic is their debut album. Standout tracks include the metaphysical paean to ageing, obsolescence and the strength of geography, Iowa and the marvelously indolent Junk Barge.
Wapsipinicon is an allegorical tale of the alienation of the perennial outsider, described in the colloquial American liturgy of Baptist and Catholic revelation. The lyric has shades of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds at their most tragic, mired in the desperation of the novels of Harry Crews or early Cormac MacCarthy. Americana Gothic? This is no joke.
'~ East Belfast Observer |
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