MIRACLE PARADE @ Echo

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Neutral Uke Hotel || Listen || Watch
It wasn’t long after Shawn Fogel worked on the recording project “The Beatles Complete on Ukulele’’ that he hit on a similar idea involving the instrument: performing the songs from Neutral Milk Hotel’s 1998 masterwork, “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.’’

“It’s one of my favorite records ever,’’ says Fogel (right), whose guitar-pop outfit Golden Bloom sounds nothing like NMH. “And the album doesn’t just have fans. The people who love that album are obsessed with it.’’

It wasn’t until he listened to the album in the back of a tour bus with his pals in Guster after a show at UMass-Amherst that the work registered. “It was unlike anything I had ever heard,’’ Fogel recalls. “I was blown away. It wasn’t like any music I was listening to at the time.’’ Much like Amanda Palmer did last year when she enlisted students at her alma mater, Lexington High School, to stage a production of the album, Fogel’s recasting of “Aeroplane’’ on ukulele seems as ambitious as the album itself.

“I think its easy for people to look at it and say, Oh, it’s a gimmicky, shtick-y thing — and it’s not,’’ Fogel says. “One of the things that makes the ‘Aeroplane’ album incredible is the layered production and all the really fuzzy distortion and tape loops, and the nonpolished nature of it. But under all of that, these are unbelievable songs. That’s the goal of the project: to strip these songs down and get people in a room to share their love for this album. If everything goes well, it’ll feel like a campfire singalong.’’ Boston Globe

Michael Epstein Memorial Library || Listen || Watch

Like any other flourishing skill, many musicians believe that in order to improve and progress, practice can never hurt. For a few, this includes consistently releasing music in a timely manner: staying fresh and alert. For others, this includes immersing yourself in various projects where your talents remain attentive and invigorated. While dreaming about the vastness of music Michael J. Epstein realized that creating a cast of women – some chosen because of their outgoing personalities, in spite of their musical ability – would offer the opportunities to attack music with a new perspective. A literal professor on hearing science, as The Michael J. Epstein Memorial Library, Epstein and Co. have delivered Volume One for a project that looks to have many solid moments in the future…Adequacy

Golden Bloom || Listen || Watch

Remember the name Shawn Fogel. It sounds like in the recent past he’s had some innocuous bands and I believe this is the first record he has done under the Golden Bloom moniker. Still, don’t let the rookie tag scare you off and don’t hesitate to give it a listen as Fan the Flames is terrific. A pop record all the way with hooks that are both occasionally obvious yet totally effective.

Opening cut “E.H.M” starts with some catchy roller rink organ and then a searing guitar hook to equal one of the catchiest songs you’ll hear all year while on “Doomsday Devices” you might mistake his vocals for Jeff Tweedy but Tweedy hasn’t delivered anything this snappy since Wilco’s debut record. He slows thing down a bit for “She Leaves Me Poetry’ which ends up diving into a lush pool of orchestration and melody while “The Mountainside Says” seems to veer off a bit into Dylan/The Band territory and again, to near-perfect effect. In the press kit Fogel stated that “these songs come from a frustrated optimism or an optimistic frustration.” They say the greatest art comes from the most pain and while I don’t claim to know where Fogel’s head was at when he wrote Fan the Flames , it’s ok. I don’t want to read too much into it. I just want to listen to these 9 superb songs and marvel at their simple beauty. Blurt

Miracle Parade || Listen || Watch
Christopher Pappas might be primarily known in tastemaker circles as the frontman for the sorely underrated Boston-based indie rock band The Everyday Visuals, not to mention the musical director of the award-winning theatrical production Pope! An Epic Musical, which was all the rage at the New York International Fringe Festival last year. But the New Hampshire-born songwriter/multi-instrumentalist begins a new chapter of his decade-and-a-half-long career with Miracle Parade, a rustic one-man project whose sound echoes the heady harmonies that billowed from California’s Laurel Canyon in the days when Judee Sill, Gene Clark and David Crosby held court in the hallowed halls of the Hollywood Hills. After sending a cache of homemade demos to Little Record Company, the label helmed by Rilo Kiley bassist Pierre De Reeder, Pappas’ Parade was quickly signed aboard the budding imprint. The musician subsequently moved to the inspirational heart of his new sonic muse, Los Angeles, to record this exquisite debut album with De Reeder behind the engineering desk.

What came out of these sessions is 11 tracks of shimmering rural beauty that showcases Pappas’ imaginative storytelling prowess with a sincerity that can be heard clearly on tracks like electrically enhanced “The Dying Physicist”, a song which could be construed as a more somber, melancholy spin on the life of Back To The Future’s Dr. Emmett Brown if he wound up going back to 1885 on purpose, as well as “Change of Heart”, a tune that appears as if it could have been lifted from a lost reel of the first Fleetwood Mac album with Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. And how could one speak of Hark! … and other lost transmissions without acknowledging the presence of its most beguiling track, “Regarding the Haunting at 16 Fairfield”, a tune that may or may not be about the presence of ghosts at the notorious Connecticut mental institution, but whose lucid melodies split the difference between Elliott Smith’s Either/Or and Simon & Garfunkel’s Bookends in spite of its disturbing lyrical origins.

Hark! is an album whose soul runs as deep as the sap that flows through the Douglas Firs permeating the landscape of its audible backdrop and aerated by weighty odes of sorrow that are kinetically buoyed by a remarkable sense of depth and grace. Blurt

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