Let’s just pretend it’s tomorrow already

Because I’m going to be gone all day tomorrow and right now I’ve got something really exciting to post – my feature interview with Clogs. This is a three-person interview piece, which is obviously technically difficult and time consuming, but I think it’s always more interesting to show things from different perspectives, don’t you? And also, it’s just such a beautiful, wonderful album, so even if I had completely screwed up the interview and writing, you should still read it so you’ll want to hear the music.

Here’s the first bit:

The Creatures in the Garden of Lady Walton (Brassland), the fifth full-length for classically-influenced quartet Clogs, begins two voices, at first staccato and spare, a little later lush with madrigal harmonies and finally oddly birdlike, the main melodic line twittering and fluttering over complicated counterpoints. This is "Cocodrillo," and the singers are Clogs composer Padma Newsome and My Brightest Diamond's Shara Worden. It is the first of eight songs to feature vocals. That's a departure in some ways for this guitar, strings, bassoon and percussion ensemble which shares members with indie rock's The National, and yet, says guitarist Bryce Dessner, also a continuation.

"As we've been working as Clogs there have been songs," said Dessner, in a recent phone interview. "You can hear some of the instrumental pieces as songs, and actually, some of them maybe were songs where we removed the singing, so it's been there. We write songs."

The whole thing


“On the Edge” (with Shara Worden)


“Red Seas” (Padma Newsome sings this one)