Greeting Committee - It's Not All That Bad/Meeting People Is Easy - VINYL LP

Greeting Committee - Everyone's Gone And I Know I'm The Cause [VINYL LP] date 10/04/2024

The Faux Paws once again embrace the unpredictable on their new album, No Bad Ideas, expanding their singular take on roots music and modern grooves. Andrew VanNorstrand (vocals, guitar, fiddle), his brother Noah VanNorstrand (vocals, fiddle, guitar, mandolin, feet percussion) and Chris Miller (vocals, sax, banjo) first started playing together in the traditional contra dance scene, slowly building a reputation as a top dance band. Also featured on the album is friend and powerhouse collaborator Zoe Guigueno, who joins the trio with stunning vocals for a cover of Ron Sexsmith's InchSneak Out the Back DoorInch. Their collective backgrounds inspire a reckless confidence on the No Bad Ideas (as alluded to in the title), effortlessly employing three- and four-part vocal harmonies, dynamic builds, and expansive tonal ear-candy. As a special treat, The Faux Paws include two carefully picked cover songs, of course reimagined with their hallmark treatments that zig and zag through their varied influences. Perhaps most striking about No Bad Ideas is the band's complete disregard for appeasing the mighty algorithm, on which much the music industry precariously teeters in 2025. Instead, the group allows each track to evolve organically. It's an immersive journey inviting the adventurous listener into the sonic world The Faux Paws have been building for nearly fifteen years.

M.C. Taylor recorded this spiritually devastating, austere antecedent to the widely celebrated Hiss Golden Messenger albums Haw (2013) and Poor Moon (2011) direct to a portable cassette recorder at the kitchen table of his pine-entwined home in rural Piedmont, NC in 2010. It was the dead of winter and the pit of the financial crisis, a moment when the dire ramifications of debt - in it's economic, political, and personal senses - had assumed a rank immediacy and terror for many working people around the world, not least of all in the American South. Taylor, his one-year old boy Elijah sleeping in the next room, was compelled to chart the sacred valences of debt, doubt, and family in fresh ways, in the process stripping bare and reinventing his songwriting idiom.