DAPPLED CITIES - Granddance Review

It used to be that you could put your faith in, well, Faith. There was the notion that The Truth was everlasting, constant and handed down from the big dude himself. Then theologians started literally messing with the gospel: After figuring that dooming those unbaptized babies to an eternity of semi-existence was pretty cruel, Limbo was taken off the books. With mounting evidence for evolution, creationists changed their tune and came up with "intelligent design" as a less lunatic alternate to hard-core creationism. Let's not even get into how much trouble those ideas of a flat Earth and geocentricism gave the world as science deflated old-world ideas....full text I had the pleasure-- the privilege, really-- of seeing Dappled Cities live on their home turf of Sydney, Australia, several months ago. It's not every day or even every decade that I get to go to a concert in another hemisphere, and they put on a good show both times I saw them, once in an art gallery/clothing store and once in a club so sweaty the walls were dripping. What struck me even more, perhaps, was the row of utterly smitten expressions on the faces of the girls who crowded up to the front of the stages, sang along to every song and screamed their lungs out in the gaps between....full text Australia's Dappled Cities (formerly Dappled Cities Fly) open their sophomore album, Granddance, with "Holy Chord," a quasi-mystical pop anthem which has lead singer David Rennick raising his voice to a falsetto to match the pitch of jingling ritual bells, while the rest of the band supports him with rhythmic clapping and hypnotic drone. Throughout Granddance, Dappled Cities favor martial drums and grand gestures, looking to capture the bigness and dewy wonder of acts like The Flaming Lips, The Shins, and The New Pornographers. In fact, Dappled Cities may be too derivative of those bands, and more preoccupied with sound than songs. But Granddance has its share of good songs too—like "Work It Out," which buoys spirits even through shades of regret....full text