Just Announced: The Albertans and Neighbors

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You could say The Albertans are from Vancouver, Canada, and in a limited way you wouldn’t be wrong. You could also say they lay claim to a creative pedigree from the Brooklyn autoclave and expect only one retort: Right you are. Musical polyglot and songwriter Joel Bravo, a native of Milwaukee, and bassist Ian Everall, Albertan by birth, met while members of New York’s Bravo Silva. When that outfit ended they, along with a large and talented rotating cast of players, began playing in New York City under the name Sex with an Angel. They played CMJ in 2007, they moved to Vancouver in 2008, took up the name The Albertans and, along with a few new fellow travelers, took on the challenges of realizing a pop vision.

The Albertans, though, are not about place or pedigree. It is passage, the extremis of transmitting real bodies across the tangled wires and abstracted networks of space and person, that comes through when they play. Their songs are a cartography of North America mapped on the trail of human footsteps’ fading heat signatures. It is traveling music, and they sing their songs in search of a road through territory made uncertain by love, dreams, and strange frustrations, the few directions to be heard tuned in dubiously on the last working AM radio.

Legends of Sam Marco, follow-up to ‘08’s “Sex with an Angel” EP, is a trembling journey through the mystery of pop, a fugue of fifty years of Americana, rock, blues and soul that finds us after that journey in no place other than the weird intersection of here and now. It is an offering, a concept record that comes into your life as only pop music can, gifting listeners the moments of its progression to acknowledge that we are all bound together- sometimes bewildered in fear, but also dazzled by hope.



Neighbors

Noah Stitelman’s world-weary lyrics (“Suck it up kid, life’s a mixed, mixed bag at best”) and deadpan delivery (Doug Martsch comes to mind) leads you to think he’s pretty much over it, whatever “it” may be, but the backing instrumentation implies otherwise. Primarily a solo project, even Neighbors’ slower tracks are alive and full-sounding, with layers crashing and tumbling all over each other like a psychedelic Arcade Fire. Stitelman spends the majority of his time playing guitar for NY-based Jacksonknife, but we’re salivating for some solo shows. - from L magazine

More information here.