The A-Sides - Silver Storms, out TODAY!
Our record, Silver Storms is now out and available for public consumption. It should be available at any fine retailer of music including, your local indie, fye, barnes and noble and best buy stores…
Then again, you can always use the powers of the Internets and get it from:
Thanks much. We leave this Sunday for our mega long ultra tour. Starting with a week with Pinback, who also have a new record out last week. Hope to see you on the road!
UPDATE: THE BEST REVIEW OF ALL TIME.
The A-Sides are a mountain-shattering quintet from Philadelphia, the land where Ben Franklin stood when the future one hundred-dollar bill was lit up by a lightning bolt. Philly, along with the cheese steak, is also the birthplace of Mike Schmidt’s mustache. My friend Hayley attends Temple University, also in Philadelphia, official backdrop of the movie with the same name where a flimsy Tom Hanks won an Oscar for having AIDS. Philly!
A band of leisurely constructionists, The A-Sides manufacture prize buildings of implausible mass on their second effort Silver Storms, the follow up to their 2005 debut Hello, Hello on the Prison Jazz imprint.
After an extended seven-minute opening track maneuvers with the baroque luxury of a Mahler symphony, this heavily proportioned album lightly tiptoes into the pool before demonically swimming to deep end, thrashing like a hungry shark towards a splashing bucket of teenage chum.“A Florida Grove” squeezes out a calcium-enriched squirt of delicious juice from sunshine state with a brisk smatter of ice cubes, chilly enough to make your shivering body want to put on My Morning Jacket. “Diamonds” is a priceless ballad that purchases the hearts of all of us with an animal barbarity comparable to Grizzly Bear or Band Of Horses. “Great American Novelist” begins with energizing blows from a valiant armada of mouths that blow quick, passionate fire onto this well-maintained candlestick, but nothing cataclysmic enough to evaporate your iPod.
Silver Storms is a finely crafted flicker from these ballooning Phillies who somehow traveled from the bottom of the crack in the lower ass of the Liberty Bell and landed all the way on the other side of the country on Vagrant Records, who are pushing yet another Dashboard Confessional and Saves The Day album in this year’s fourth quarter, continuing to be the “punk” label that still mystifies with every signing.
With an escalading savoir fare of the grandiose guitar jam-thems like The American Analog Set mixed with Built To Spill, The A-Sides play mellow rock with just enough politeness to hang ten with The Beach Boys with enough rascally kick to smash an unprotected pair of Shins.
September 18th, 2007 at 1:00 pm
Love the new record. Can’t wait until you come to Canada.
September 18th, 2007 at 6:11 pm
Congratulations! The LP is amazing and that Tripwire review is spot on; but I disagree that it is the best review of all time, this one is:
To say that The A-Sides have taken a step forward with their sophomore album would be the understatement of the freaking decade. Note the string intro, the lush arrangements and the number of string-bend / synthesizer-accentuated / slow-burn epics that exceed five minutes in length. This is no mere step, this is a catapault shot that leaves you wondering what happened to that unassuming group of West Philly kids who did a respectable impersonation of The Kinks. Silver Storms is a self-consciously “big” album, but it never comes off as pretentious or superficial, since the even the most sprawling songs seem sincere and heartfelt. Conversely, there are a number of down-to-earth moments (the sprightly single “We’re The Trees,” the 1950s innocence captured in “A Florida Grove”) that sound huge. This is a solid album to make Philly music lovers proud. Since it’s The A-Sides’ first release in a contract with national label Vagrant (home to The Hold Steady, eels, Saves the Day, et al), this is also an album that can be singularly representative of Philly music for the rest of the country, kind of the way The Strokes’ Is This It represented the Brooklyn boom,Bright Eyes’ Lifted… represented Omaha or dare I say it? Nevermind represented Seattle. Hyperbole, perhaps, but hear me out. Imagine everything that is good and buzzing and promising about the region’s rock bands: Dr. Dog’s fondness for minor chord scales, “woah-oh-oh” hooks and psychedeliaThe Swimmers’ potent indie power popIllinois’ roots leanings and arrangements. Now let’s say you took it all and distilled it into a single album; the result would be Silver Storms. There are no Man Man-style freakouts, but I suppose they can come later. For now, The A-Sides have given us ten songs in 50 minutes that are thrilling on a number of levels, mostly in their excellence.
Review by John Vettese