Lake Street Dive - Side Pony

Bitrate: MP3@320K/s
Time: 40:19
Size: 92.3 MB
Styles: Pop/Soul/Funk
Year: 2016
Art: Front

[3:47] 1. Godawful Things
[4:17] 2. Close To Me
[3:25] 3. Call Off Your Dogs
[2:31] 4. Spectacular Failure
[3:37] 5. I Don't Care About You
[2:45] 6. So Long
[2:13] 7. How Good It Feels
[3:02] 8. Side Pony
[3:22] 9. Hell Yeah
[4:07] 10. Mistakes
[3:24] 11. Can't Stop
[3:43] 12. Saving All My Sinning

The four band members drummer Michael Calabrese, bassist Bridget Kearney, singer Rachael Price, and guitarist/trumpeter Michael "McDuck" Olson—worked with Nashville based producer Dave Cobb (Sturgill Simpson, Chris Stapleton, Secret Sisters) on the record. Cobb's working method was to keep the recording fast and loose, as live-in-the-studio as possible, and to embrace the unorthodox. This provided Lake Street Dive with a welcome challenge: an opportunity to experiment with sound and arrangements and to collaborate on songwriting in a way the band had never attempted before.

Side Pony takes its name from a song on the record that refers to a whimsical hairstyle, but it also serves as a metaphor for Lake Street Dive's philosophy and personality as a band. As Kearney puts it, "When we were settling on the album title, that one just stuck out to us as embodying the band's spirit. We've always been this somewhat uncategorizable, weird, outlying, genre-less band. That's the statement we wanted to make with this record: be yourself."

Olson echoes her sentiment: "It has also come to mean anything you're doing for the sheer joy of it. We have always 'rocked our side pony.' Now we have a convenient phrase for it." Calabrese says of the recording process, "Dave's process was mercurial, changing direction quickly, going from 'we don't have anything' to 'we've got it!'" He continues, "We weren't always so sure. But then we'd listen to a comp and we'd agree that he'd heard something we hadn't." Price adds, "It was great to see, through this particular recording process, how beautifully our individual strengths complement each other."

Side Pony

---

Lake Street Dive - Bad Self Portraits

Bitrate: MP3@320K/s
Time: 39:11
Size: 89.7 MB
Styles: Pop-Soul
Year: 2014
Art: Front

[3:22] 1. Bad Self Portraits
[3:32] 2. Stop Your Crying
[3:35] 3. Better Than
[2:12] 4. Rabid Animal
[3:27] 5. You Go Down Smooth
[3:57] 6. Use Me Up
[3:29] 7. Bobby Tanqueray
[5:02] 8. Just Ask
[3:39] 9. Seventeen
[4:14] 10. What About Me
[2:37] 11. Rental Love

Lake Street Dive is powered by the voice of Rachael Price; it's what hits you first when you listen to this quartet. It's a ringingly clear, strong voice, a sound that's at once beseeching and in control. Price regularly harmonizes with the other members of Lake Street Dive bassist Bridget Kearney, drummer Mike Calabrese and Mike Olson, who also plays guitar and trumpet.

When Lake Street Dive performed "You Go Down Smooth" amidst all the big stars T-Bone Burnett had gathered for his Inside Llewyn Davis tribute concert, it provoked cheers. The song, like much of Lake Street Dive's material, looks to the past in this case, a driving pop-soul '60s sound. One thing that raised Lake Street Dive's profile was a YouTube video of the group performing the Jackson 5's "I Want You Back" on a Boston street. It's racked up more than a million views, popular for the way it not only displays the group's talent, but also frames it as something both spontaneous and studied, a throwback to doo-wop groups crooning on street corners. This is the kind of thing that plays to the least interesting thing about Lake Street Dive: the privileging of technique over originality, the domestication of music that was once more unruly. You can sometimes hear this on Lake Street Dive's original material, in a song such as "Rabid Animal," which is catchy but hardly embodies the fervid intensity implied by rabidness.

Price also has a career as a jazz vocalist, performing with musicians such as Joshua Redman and T.S. Monk. And she's released solo albums that include interpretations of standards like "Skylark" and "Serenade in Blue." There's a mood to this music that Lake Street Dive occasionally captures in a song such as Bridget Kearney's composition "Better Than." When you look at YouTube videos of Lake Street Dive performing covers such as The Mamas and the Papas' version of "Dedicated to the One I Love," what you get is not a fresh interpretation of a song initially made famous by the 5 Royales and the Shirelles, but rather a very nice Mamas and the Papas impersonation. But enough times on this album to make it worth your while, Lake Street Dive powers past nicety to connect with the passion that brings blood and sweat to the tears that heartache songs need in order to thrive. ~Ken Tucker

Bad Self Portraits

---