Loney Dear & Special Guests Gabriel & The Hounds, May 9th

Loney Dear

Plus Special Guests Gabriel & The Hounds

The Grand Social

9^th May 2012

After his last time touring the

United States in support of 2009's Dear John (Loney Dear's fifth album and Polyvinyl debut), Emil Svanangen returned home to Sweden and began to play shows with chamber orchestras throughout the country.To successfully accomplish this feat, he was forced to revisit his earlier material -- re-writing and re-arranging these older songs for performance on a grander scale.This experience had an indelible influence on the writing and recording of the appropriately titled Hall Music, an expansive record that finds Svanangen closer to creating the type of orchestral music he has always sought to bring to life on stage (whether he's actually playing with an orchestra or not).

Above all, Hall Music – Svanangen’s sixth full-length under the Loney Dear moniker -- is a study in merging contrasts, an album of impossible pairings brought to life at the hands of a skillful songwriter further mastering his craft.The pacing is simultaneously fast and slow, with gently weaving harmonic structures propelled forward by quickly moving notes. On "My heart," the frenetic overtones belie the relaxed, scuzzy bass vibrating underneath, while "Largo" matches the musical definition of its name more in its unhurried aura than its actual BPM.The instrumentation is orchestral and synthesized; organic and invented. A church bell paired effortlessly with horns and an analog keyboard. Apocalyptically pulsing bass ("Durmoll") and an angelic vibraphone solo ("Calm down").

At its heart, however, Hall Music is a concise album with an extended vision.

Though at first listen it occupies your ears for just over a half-hour, it is an all-consuming sonic affair. It is intimate music that effortlessly fills vast, empty spaces -- in your head, in your room, in your life -- with a grip so delicate yet unyielding that you can't (and don't want to) escape it.While some songs were conceived over the past year, others have been gestating for much longer -- eventually coming to fruition as the result of rediscovered lyrics and new musical perspectives.  

Accordingly, the compositions on Hall Music transcend any connection to specific times and places and instead, as Svanangen suggests, reside in the "perfect position just in between joy and darkness."As such, in a final paradox, the album becomes a dividing bridge: a link between two sides that doesn't allow full access to either.

Instead, drawing from both of the emotional states it joins together, Hall Music creates its own unique expanse -- one you'll surely want to re-visit again and again.

Gabriel and the Hounds

Brooklyn artist, Gabriel Levine, best known as founding member and singer in Takka Takka is set to release his debut, Kiss Full of Teeth under the moniker, Gabriel and the Hounds.

In the midst of a feverish writing cycle, Gabe realized the new material differed from Takka Takka songs. He was creating intimate sketches, raw and personal, that joined together as stories of disappointment, letting go and of the inevitability of endings, those of relationships, youth and innocence.  Inspired by Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love he found a name for the project and was on his way.

Gabe recorded the album around Brooklyn in living rooms, garages, and in proper studios including community stalwart Seaside Lounge and The National’s garage studio in Ditmas Park. Kiss Full of Teeth juxtaposes the quiet intimacy of its birth via lo-fi field recorder, with the nuanced warmth professional microphones capture of the expansive orchestration later added. Organic sounds of trains, birds, breath, and fingers moving urgently over strings intermix through layered vocals, reverb, and drum parts, all of which blend thoughtfully into the album’s narrative. The impressions of cold stones, worn wood, and rusted steel glide between the actual notes struck. Such is the enveloping power of Kiss Full of Teeth.

Don’t miss your chance to catch these two incredible acts under one roof  At The Grand Social on May 9th.

Tickets on sale Monday 26^th March at 9am priced €16 from www.ticketmaster.ie & Ticketmaster outlets nationwide. 0818 719 300 - Republic of Ireland customers 0844 277 4455 - Northern Ireland customers 00353 1 456 9569 - International customer

www.loneydear.com