The Knells debut album - really wonderful

[rob martino]

Hello,

News of this release may not have been noticed in the "What's On, What's New" forum, but I wanted to mention what a great release this album is. I had the honor of opening for this band at Orion in Baltimore this past Saturday and they made a really strong impression on me.

They describe themselves as "post rock, neo-psychedelic chamber prog band" and I think there is a real compositional and sonic depth that sets this apart. Really interesting use of intricate three-part female vocals and string quartet, all grounded in Andrew McKenna Lee's compositions and guitar work. It's fairly dense and really opens up with repeat listens.

It's the best new album I've heard this year, and sonically a real treat, recorded and engineered by Andrew at his own studio - this is easily Änglagård-level audiophile quality, with excellent separation, warmth and dynamics.

http://theknells.com/music

[Boceephus]

Thnx Rob. I'll check them out!

[walt]

I like what i've heard from this cd.Thanks for the heads up.

[Baribrotzer]

Reminds me a bit of the Northettes, but taken quite a bit further. Also Louis Andriessen's De Stijl; and maybe even Dirty Projectors - but taken much further and with almost no interest in pop music.

[Mike Potter]

Sort of as an interesting side story - after first making contact with Andrew regarding doing a show here, and having listened to what was then available on-line, my first question to him was ".. can you actually pull this off live?" I knew they had not done many shows (did NOT realize that Orion would be their debut). I'd have to say that, indeed, they could pull it off live. Not to say there weren't "moments" during the set, but over all it was a pretty amazing show.

[Koreabruce]

Based on the recommendation in this thread, I went over to bandcamp and listened to several tracks. I bought & downloaded it, and am thoroughly enjoying the ride as I type this. http://theknells.bandcamp.com/

The description of the music that Rob quotes is spot-on. Yes, it is indeed a densely-packed, but oh, what a tapestry of aural delights! This is precisely the kind of music that rewards continued revisits. It's truly excellent stuff and will no doubt provide a perfect soundtrack for the rapidly approaching (and long) Korean winter. Thanks much for the tip, Rob!

[kristi]

I highly recommend this CD as well! The Orion show was great and I bought the CD, curious how the vocals and instrumetals worked in the studio. I must say, the CD brings into clearer focus the vocals (they are singing in English!) and the whole is a tight package that is really unclassifiable, hence the long descriptor above that almost covers it. I personally don't know any other band I can compare this to in terms of sound. Very interesting and well worth the listen!

[Baribrotzer]

One thing worth bringing up:

Even though it may sound similar at points, this is not "prog" of any sort, at least not in the usual sense. "Prog" as we know it is (very roughly) an attempt at a stylistic fusion of rock with classical composition, jazz, and a number of other musical genres. It is almost always the work of musicians from the rock world - most of whom are primarily self-taught, and picked up what they know about composing classical music by ear, or from books, or from reverse-engineering their piano studies.

But Andrew McKenna Lee is the farthest thing from self-taught - he is a real-deal classical composer, whose training includes a PhD from Princeton, and who has a serious career as such, including extensive orchestral commissions. He has a couple of parallel careers as a classical guitarist and as a recording engineer, as well. And so, despite their rock-band-like instrumentation, name, and genre-description, The Knells really come a lot closer to the Philip Glass Ensemble or to Steve Reich and Musicians - a specialized classical chamber ensemble organized by a composer, and dedicated to the performance of his own work.

Now I realize that there's a gray area between that sort of ensemble, and single-writer avant-prog bands like Thinking Plague or Present. But to me, there's a substantive difference in the music. On the one hand, you have those like McKenna Lee, who learned the whole classical tradition early, learned it systematically, and don't have to guess at a working, flexible answer to any musical problem, or settle for an approximation of one. On the other hand, you have people like Daniel Denis, who had to figure out the answers for themselves; who may have a limited vocabulary but go quite deeply into it. A different set of tools and a different sound. You also find a different type of cliche - the stylistic quirks, the personal solutions, and the rules-of-thumb carried over from rock songwriting, versus the "correct" classical approach (which often really amounts to a fancier set of rules-of-thumb). And, at least to me, an audible difference.

So, what, precisely, is that difference? It's hard to quantify. However, I'd say that one part of it consists of a textural transparency even when the music becomes quite dense, which comes from a trained composer's extensive schooling at writing true polyphony in multiple independent voices - as opposed to a rock musician's reliance upon homophonic chord progressions, or occasional home-made approximations of polyphony built by elaborating upon such progressions. Another part might involve a sort of aesthetic clarity, a sense that a "real composer" knows exactly what he is trying to accomplish and accomplishes it, rather than a rock musician's experimentation and struggling toward something not entirely known. Still another could be that someone with McKenna Lee's level of training does not overdo or underdo it, that he knows exactly how far to go and goes no further, whereas rock musicians frequently go too far or not far enough. And lastly, in music like this the structures grow "organically" from the requirements of the thematic material, rather than defaulting into set patterns like verse-chorus form because the self-taught rock musician never learned to "hear" musical construction any other way.

[Mike Potter]

I didn't know that McKenna Lee had studied at Princeton, home of another really great "chamber prog" band Newspeak.

[bill g]

Very cool. A bit Canterbury-esque. Agree there is a Northettes vibe at times. A good suggestion for the 'More Proggy Indie tracks please' thread. Sounds to me like about 2/3rds prog, and 1/3 indie, if I was going to put labels on. Which i'd just as soon not.

[Baribrotzer]

If anyone in the NYC area is interested, they're playing this Thursday,
at:
SubCulture New York,
45 Bleecker St.(downstairs),
New York, NY 10012

[rob martino]

Actually that show is tonight! Hopefully the weather doesn't affect the turnout too much. They are really worth seeing!

[progeezer]

If anyone in the NYC area is interested, they're playing this Thursday,
at:
SubCulture New York,
45 Bleecker St.(downstairs),
New York, NY 10012

Actually that show is tonight! Hopefully the weather doesn't affect the turnout too much. They are really worth seeing!

After listening to about 10-15 minutes, I bought it.

Kay & I just flew back from NYC last night. Missed them by 1 day & would've been there had I heard them before.

[No Pride]

Based on the recommendation in this thread, I went over to bandcamp and listened to several tracks. I bought & downloaded it, and am thoroughly enjoying the ride as I type this. http://theknells.bandcamp.com/

Thanks for the link, Bruce; I'm about halfway through the whole thing and it really is quite good! It's along the lines of what I sort of hoped prog would be 40 years down the road; you know... a bit more evolved!

[Baribrotzer]

It's along the lines of what I sort of hoped prog would be 40 years down the road; you know... a bit more evolved!

For the last 40 years, I’ve been asking myself this question: What would prog sound like if it was written by a “real composer” – someone with all the legit training in counterpoint, harmony, and musical structure – rather than an artistically ambitious but unschooled rock musician? Up until this album, I hadn’t heard a conclusive answer. Music occasionally appeared that might impinge on one, but it always mainly answered some other question. And the reason for that comes down to several historical quirks:

At the time prog was rising in popular music, Minimalism was the coming thing in the classical realm. So most of the generation of classical composers contemporaneous with Fripp, Squire, Banks, et al became Minimalists - Philip Glass, Steve Reich, John Adams, Louis Andriessen, and others. Their pop music references, in turn, tended toward minimal pop genres: modal jazz, funk & soul music, Afrobeat, Indian music, the Velvet Underground (who actually had ties to the early Minimalists through John Cale), disco, punk/postpunk/indie rock, electronic dance music, and the like. In turn, after the Minimalists came the Postmodernists – Schnittke, Del Tredici, Ades, John Zorn – for whom pop music was just a few seconds of pausing on the radio dial somewhere in between straight-up serialism, electronic noise, fake medieval plainchant, and a hundred other brief stylistic evocations. Not much room for prog in any of that. Progressive music, sure, and plenty of it, but nothing very close to what we might recognize as prog.

Also, the Great Prog Uncoolness of the late Seventies through the Nineties played a part: Composers would have tended to listen to the same pop music their friends did – and at the time, that wouldn’t have included much prog. Also, those who depended on grant money for commissions had to keep an ear to the ground for what was “happening”. Specifically, for what the excruciating professional urban hipsters who administered those grants might applaud as up-and-coming, or reject as intolerably passe. That could mean the difference between a full-on career as a composer or a professorship at an Ivy League school – or teaching piano at a community college. Between getting your music played, or having the scores gather dust in a drawer. Again, not too much room for anything to do with prog – the Nadir of Uncool – in there.

So it wasn’t until the thaw of the last five or ten years that professional, academically trained classical composers seemed to start taking a second look at the prog legacy. To them, as to many in the younger generations, it was just another style of the past. It was no hipper or less hip than Wire, or Gang of Four, or Remain in Light Talking Heads, or any other of the Flavors of the Month that had once consigned it to the scrapheap. Prog bands could be enjoyed or dismissed on their own musical merits, without the emotional loading of terminal uncool they bore for some thirty years.

And so, finally, after skipping a generation and a half, we’re starting to hear a few answers to that initial question. This album is one of the first, or at least one of the first I've heard. Note that Andrew McKenna Lee is in his late thirties, and is thus just young enough for those past culture wars to not mean much to him. And the music here reflects that: You hear half-a-dozen kinds of rock styles very precisely blended together, then presented in the context of a song cycle played by a classical chamber ensemble.