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For a limited time, we are offering a free download of the Bye Bye Blackbird's Apology Accepted EP. The EP features the band's cover of the classic Go-Betweens song plus three other exclusive tracks.
To begin download click here.
Please Note: Depending on your connection, the download may take a minute or two. You are downloading a zip file and may need some sort of decompression tool such as Winzip or Stuffit to access the files. Both of these programs are available as free downloads from their respective sites.
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The return of classic, progressive pop heralded by The Shins, Beulah, Ted Leo and the Pernice Brothers has produced many followers. But too often today’s young, literate power-pop groups are simply meeting the expectations of their genre without exceeding them. A great guitar-pop band needs to add something special to the canon; the line must be straddled where a song remains universal, while offering inspired innovations from within. The Bye Bye Blackbirds are a great guitar-pop band. On their debut full-length, the band has created a powerful testament to pop music's capacity for depth, beauty, and expressiveness.
With multiple songwriters, each with their own style, the group draws easy comparisons to Big Star, Teenage Fanclub and Buffalo Springfield. The band are true students of song-craft, as eager to cite the influence of consensus progressive-pop geniuses like Elvis Costello, The Go-Betweens and Prefab Sprout as they are the more obscure ones, like recluse song architect Bill Fox, transcendent choirgirl Judee Sill, garage-pop masters The Reigning Sound and criminally ignored Kiwi-rockers Sneaky Feelings.
The band make good on these influences, delivering involved, developed songs built from interweaving guitar hooks and intricate vocal harmonies. The sharp, contemplative lyrics are opaque yet revealing; particular yet universal. The overall sound is graceful and lush, without ever descending into mawkish romanticism. This is the type of pop band that the great John Peel would have championed: a group that offers intelligent and dramatic songs whose charms reveal themselves fully on repeated listens.
These are record store employees with eclectic musical vocabularies; would-be music historians whose compulsive need to explore the foundations of a genre has translated into a talent to rival that of their heroes. The Bye Bye Blackbirds does for guitar pop what Yo La Tengo did for art-rock, Taj Mahal did for the blues, and Bela Bartok did for European folk music.
An album built on integrity, poetry, and intelligence that transcends mathematic precision to touch the soul: sounds like a recipe for obscurity to me.
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