Like Lightning To The System...

Scott Sellwood’s Drunken Barn Dance takes preconceptions of folk and alt-country and bends ‘em, lays ‘em out, chops ‘em up, kicks the table over, walks away and swigs some whiskey and comes back the next morning with deathly sobered focus, sprinkles some shoegaze and ambient dream-pop on top and then utilizes it all to tell you, plaintively and confidently, that he’s made up his mind about this whirled waltz of life and here it is…
Decidedly writing and recording outside the box, DBD’s debut was recorded with numerous room-mics on the same track and achieving a natural distortion by overwhelming them; ring modulators help fuzzify harmonicas and plenty of dreamy delayed guitar feedback aids Sellwood's high-range blares that pang with earnestness.
The aim of this project was to “recording quickly and decisively” and keeping it “loose and natural," and also taking in a good (or overly) measured amount of alcohol. In this swift, almost ruthlessly fast song-creation process, some songs were left behind - if things didn't work under a limited number of takes than they were lost, adding even more esteem to these ballads 'cuz you know they ended up meaning the most to their creator.
World-weary and philosophic, but never melodramatic or mystic, this music stares you right in the face. There’s the golden jangle of acoustic guitars but far from derivative coffee-house folk, it's transmogrified by a somber closeness into an unfound ethereal beauty. As able for soft-strummed, pensive and numbed accounts of ruined hearts as he is to belt out an independence declaring, nihilistic indictment of the world and it's fucked up ways.
Check out his myspace for some samples: www.myspace.com/drunkendance
Next up he's going to re-release his self-titled effort on PedalBark records: www.pedalbarkrecords.com/

^photo by doug coombe