Deleted Scenes

Birdseed Shirt (CD)
What Delicate Recordings

Release Date:
January 6, 2009

Bio:

It's easy to write about Deleted Scenes - Birdseed Shirt

1. A DIY bootstraps story. Band (Deleted Scenes) from a town (Washington, DC) that made DIY into a religion begins booking its own national tours, and sets off in a shitty van to play one sparsely attended show at a time.

[more]

Media Links & Downloads:

"Fake Ids" (MP3)

"Ithaca" (MP3)

"One Long Country Song" (MP3)

Hi-Res Photos:

300 dpi JPG
Credit: Alyssa Lesser

Hi-Res Cover Art:

300dpi JPG
4 x 4 in

On The Web:

Deleted Scenes on Facebook
www.myspace.com/deletedscenes
www.whatdelicate.com
www.myspace.com/whatdelicate
"Fake IDs" Video by 17-Year-Old, Kurt Bailey
"Ithaca" Live for All Our Noise blog
"Fake Ids" Live for All Our Noise blog
"Ithaca (Autorock Remix)" - Pillowfight Video
"Ithaca" Live on H Street in DC
"One Long Country Song" Live Video
"One Long Country Song" Live Video by Brightest Young Things
"Turn To Sand" Live at Black Cat

Bio (Continued):

Months after releasing their debut album to little fanfare and no press campaign, a lucky Pitchfork review ("brave and ferocious," 8.0) suddenly makes people listen. Band does it the hard way, develops as a live force over three years, and is said to deserve every kind word. Yards of local column inches tell the story of a band "doing it right," in the words of Washington Post music editor David Malitz.

2. An experimental pop odyssey. Band draws from disparate sources (Radiohead's restlessness, Dischord's angst, Morrissey's sadness, Modest Mouse's not-mere cleverness) to produce something heart-crushingly fun. Preparing to record its first CD (Birdseed Shirt), band discovers an obscure album of monster songs (The Rude Staircase's Sookie Jump) and is compelled to hunt down its mysterious creator-the ingenious, first-nameless L. Skell-to recruit him as producer. After recording basic tracks with DC icon J. Robbins, the band holes up for nine painstaking months in a bedroom studio with the socially abhorrent Skell, hacking and screwing together this beast-a thing made less of chords and rhythms than of hair, wire, and skin. They release it on Skell's own tiny What Delicate Recordings label-a record company run more like an art gallery, with Skell and Andrew Becker (Dischord Records) as its curators. The record's style is variously referred to as "an acid-trip that is absolutely habit forming" (Madison's Isthmus), "gently glazed with cold medication" (The Onion), and "Steeped in a blurry digital haze" (Washington City Paper).

b. An existential coming of age. A former creative writing student quits fiction, and starts singing what he knows-spiritual despair, hope, disgust, and manic-depression. He goes on to create a confessional coming-of-age work that defies easy summary. Suffused with sadness, humor, self-loathing and post-post-modern self-dismissal, his lyrics are notable for contradictions that transcend simple irony. Lines like "I don't mind you lying to me/ If you think you're right, you must be" ("Fake IDs") and "you can fake whatever it takes" ("Get Your Shit Together for the Holidays") offer problematic solutions-the only kind he can begin to accept. Other songs explore moral hypocrisy, romantic disappointment, and loss of faith with statements that double over on themselves: "If the water should rise, I'm going on a vacation" ("Mortal Sin"); "If you were counting on ideals or a dream/ Stay awake, she will steal them in your sleep" ("One Long Country Song"); "Got God, got boring/ Lost God, stayed boring, got drunk" ("Got God").

4. A band of bros. Four high-school friends put funk-rock on hold, part ways for college and/or shitty jobs, and reconvene, a few years older and more adventurous, to start Deleted Scenes. The musical rapport they developed as kids comes back as naturally as if it had never left, and the band is a unit. It plays like one, garnering one fawning live review after another. Songwriting pair Dan Scheuerman (guitar/vocals) and Matt Dowling (bass/keys/vibes/flexotone) explores a tendentious partnership-Dowling a dynamic rhythmic thinker and Scheuerman a quirky melodic one-and develop into a symbiotic unit, contributing equally to each song. Thoughtful and powerful drumming by Brian Hospital, and polyrhythm-heavy guitar playing by Chris Scheffey complete the Deleted Scenes sound.

Press Quotes:

"Brave and Ferocious... 8.0" - Pitchfork"

[Deleted Scenes] has hit its stride in a major way on debut album Birdseed Shirt. It's an album of smart, slippery and varied indie rock songs, but it never feels like the band is forcing things just for the sake of being different. Some songs have the nervous energy of early Talking Heads, while others succeed thanks to intricate subtleties that show an obsessive attention to detail.”
-Dave Malitz, Washington Post

"Birdseed Shirt, the debut LP from Deleted Scenes, is a creative and emotional album of soaring, hook-laden highs and more tempered lows, with each mood skillfully executed and full of rich imagery and metaphors. Taking the odd title from a Jonathan Safran Foer novel, the duo from Brooklyn and Washington, DC make playfully unpredictable songs that veer in unexpected directions while remaining completely infectious." - National Public Radio

"Not since the days of Fugazi and Dischord Records has a D.C. band made such a stir on the national music circuit." - Washington Post Express

"Deleted Scenes' recent album, Birdseed Shirt, often sounds as if it's been gently glazed with cold medication, but that doesn't mean it's creatively sluggish. All that fine-tuned, morose reverb and space opens up on a band that has enough subtle craft to explore everything from its mopey side ('Get Your Shit Together For The Holidays') to psych-rock aggression ('Mortal Sin')." - The Onion

"So go see the Deleted Scenes in a small club while you can." -- Isthmus (Madison)

"The range of emotions - the strength of anger, the saturation of joy - pour out of this new bundle of songs.” - Pasta Primavera

"The first full length album from the Deleted Scenes', Birdseed Shirt, will take you back to a time when indie rock was not just the sophisticated soft rock that it has morphed into in recent years. Each and every song on this album is not only a musical example of song writing at its best, but a lyrically as well. The strongest songs on the album are many layered walls of sound. The more subdued songs create a cyclical rhythm with catchy hooks that will have you bobbing your head or hosting your own personal dance party." - Sen Baltimore

"On "Mortal Sin," the band takes an acid-rock trip that's absolutely habit-forming, while 'Ithaca' features a beat that's weirdly reminiscent of the old Filter tune 'Take a Picture.' Even 'Turn to Sand,' which begins like a pretty straight-ahead pop song, surprises after a few bars thanks to a sneak attack of blues licks." - Isthmus (Madison)

"Birdseed Shirt is one of the D.C. area's finest indie-rock CDs ever released, sounding a bit like the reverbed Americana of My Morning Jacket if that band wasn't always lost in the Grand Canyon, or a more vibrant version of Galaxie 500's gentle psychedelia." - Washington Post Express

"It's shocking that this band isn't huge." - DCist

“Delicately psychedelic Americana that makes judicious use of musical gizmos and gadgets to instill an autumnal stoner vibe. Songs like 'Fake ID' are steeped in blurry digital haze, as if somebody tried to play the Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory song 'Pure Imagination' through a modem circa 1997." - Aaron Leitko, Washington Post Express

"Where are the labels that should be chomping at the bit to release a band like this?" - J. Robbins

On The Web: