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September 05, 2006
Twin Cities natives Dropping Daylight drop new album, tour
While there is no shortage of bands from the Twin Cities who spend most of their time on tour, Dropping Daylight hasn’t been home for more than a day in almost four months. Immediately after their 11-song record Brace Yourself hit the shelves on June 13, they started spinning the odometer on their new RV spending most of their summer on Warped Tour, and the remainder of it supporting acts such as Breaking Benjamin, Crossfade, and Staind. “Warped tour is really fun, but its also a lot of hard work,” said Seth Davin, 18, the band’s guitarist. “They’ve got so many stages that you have to work hard to get people to watch your show. Supporting these well-established bands is nice because the people are already there.”
The opportunity of playing to such large audiences rarely comes to bands without years of touring under their belt, and Dropping Daylight is no exception. The band started out on the road in 2002 under the name Sue Generis with a 10-track self-titled album that sounded as if they had scored a Broadway musical. It was well done within those bounds, and begun to win them some regional attention, but didn’t reach into the rock column very much.
Sue Generis’ second disc, Back to Nowhere, was slightly edgier and won them plenty of opportunities to wow crowds on a national level with their exciting and emotional live show. The band’s new sound had them playing with acts as disparate as Papa Roach and Jason Mraz only a few days apart. After changing their name to Dropping Daylight, appearing on MTV’s “You Hear it First,” and signing with Octone Records (Flyleaf, Maroon 5), the band spent three months in New Jersey recording their latest effort, Brace Yourself.
The best thing about Brace Yourself is that it doesn’t lack the piano-rock sound that Dropping Daylight shaped in their early years. It includes catchy piano riffs that one might expect from Ben Folds Five through a veritable meat grinder of tuned-down guitars that are nearly Slayer-esque.
“[Producer David Bendeth] kicked our ass,” said Davin. “He reprogrammed us in terms of playing together as a band. He loves to work on songs which is why we went with him.” Bendeth, a platinum award-winning producer who has worked with artists as diverse as Vertical Horizon and In Flames, was well suited for the project.
Brace Yourself’s sound, brutal and benevolent, possesses the rare duality of being both familiar and distinct. Despite the catchiness and pop sensibility displayed on this record, the music is anything but basic. Dropping Daylight are modest musicians in the sense that their routine is to make abstract time signatures and complicated chords sound enjoyable and simple.
It’s not very easy to pick out phenomenal musicians in the top 40 charts these days, but Dropping Daylight impresses the music snob who spent the entirety of last week listening John Zorn records just as easily as they do the 14-year-old girl who spent most of last week at the mall.
Lyrically, Brace Yourself is an exercise in effective simplicity. It certainly isn’t as heady as listening to Bad Religion, but doesn’t leave out intellectual stimulation completely. One of the greatest strengths of the lyrics is that they provoke often-untouched situations that are common to the human experience without getting too political or mushy.
Although it would be nice to say that Brace Yourself is an impeccable album, the 10th track, “Answering our Prayers,” falls a bit flat. Placed second-to-last on the album, before the energetic rock-out session “Til You Feel Something,” the electric-piano ballad stalls the motion carried by every other song on the album and recalls the “broadway days” of this band a bit too much. It is a well-written song and its inclusion isn’t exactly bizarre, it is merely a dull spot on an otherwise polished album.
Dropping Daylight’s hard work and expert musicianship is starting to pay off as fans far and wide begin to take notice. They average several thousand plays every day on their myspace page (www.myspace.com/droppingdaylight), and are releasing their first single “Tell Me” to commercial radio nationwide this September.
Posted by dwright at September 5, 2006 08:33 PM
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