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Amateur Radio Operator"Lonesome sound" stripped to the basics By Tom Scanlon Seattle Times staff reporter Amateur Radio Operator might make you look-over-your-shoulder edgy. It's tense, dark, vaguely sinister -- calling to mind a Tom Waits song. What's this band building in their practice space? Tough to describe. You hear Americana accents and rock rhythms. Perhaps a shotgun marriage between country and grunge. Neil Young, Creedence Clearwater Revival and even a little "Nebraska" Bruce Springsteen reverberate through ARO songs, like flickering spirits in the speakers. Mark Johnson is the creator of haunting lyrics and vocals, with Kevin Suggs on pedal steel. John Faryar plays guitar, Chris Early -- from the original Band of Horses lineup -- is on bass, with Mike Bayer drumming. From simple titles such as "Water Shed," "Broken Trees" and "Snow" emerge complex, twisting songs. "Water Shed" starts out almost like "House of the Rising Sun," then quickly shifts from creepiness into twitching apprehension. Johnson started Amateur Radio Operator as a solo project in 2005, upon the breakup of the promising (though unfortunately named) Yeek Yak Air Force. He gradually added musicians to his band, as "I really wanted a more full sound. I have a deep love of old guitars, tube amps, and warm, fuzzy overdrive. ... We practice weekly as a three-piece, honing the core sound, and Kevin and John join us a few practices before shows to build that strata of reverb and echo that takes the hollow sound over the top." ARO will probably face inevitable comparisons to My Morning Jacket and Band of Horses -- as if either of those invented reverb. The tone Johnson, who came to Seattle from Georgia, is shooting for goes way, way back, to some "old-time" Appalachian music. "The sound actually begins (at least in my head) with Smithsonian Folkways recordings," Johnson said, writing an e-mail from Louisiana, where he was visiting his wife's family. "Dock Boggs and the Louvin Brothers play that lonesome sound that I really wanted to achieve early on, but I did not want to copy it (acoustic instruments + vocals) directly, so I stripped it down to the basics ... "I really like layered histories -- especially those that exist in fable or ephemeral forms that take some imagination to comprehend, so I started building stories around different things I would latch onto from when I was in the South (bottle trees, abandoned factories, rust, obvious passage of time, etc.). That kind of material is everywhere, but the South has such a grittiness to it that is very inspiring to our music. I like to think of reverb as humidity."www.myspace.com/amateurradio |
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