When I was blessed with the oppor­tu­nity to become part of the Sea­sons fam­ily almost a year ago, I asked my face­book friends, “What band would you like to see come to Yakima?” The unan­i­mous answer was The Cave Singers. As well as Blitzen Trap­per, The Head and the Heart (Work in Progress), Aero­smith (really peo­ple?!?) and The Devil Makes Three (I’m still work­ing on that one). Since that post on a win­tery after­noon in Jan­u­ary, I have been work­ing fever­ishly to get the Cave Singers to come to Yakima. It lit­er­ally has been an 11 month project with almost 100 emails, at least 20 unan­swered voice mails, posts on the Cave Singers web­site, and des­per­ate cries to the gods at ungodly hours to make this hap­pen. I’ve been turned down twice by their agent. I’ve had my hopes up and my heart crushed try­ing to book these guys. I lost hope when their agent stopped reply­ing to my email attempts. Then I offered the said agent a sub­stan­tial offer to have Mum­ford and Sons come to Yakima. They declined the offer, but I think it was this offer that let the said agent know that I meant Busi­ness. Within about a month, he asked if I was inter­ested in host­ing the Cave Singers on Decem­ber 3^rd.

Decem­ber 3^rd is a tough date for a cou­ple of rea­sons. First being that we already had a show booked ((Randy Oxford Band will now play in April)(A per­sonal thank you goes out to Randy who was so hos­pitable con­sid­er­ing he sched­uled a tour around our show here!!)). Sec­ondly, it only gives us 30 days to pro­mote, which isn’t a lot of time to pump up a con­cert that should be a sell out show if we had more time. But con­sid­er­ing I have been work­ing on this idea for so long, and they only had one date avail­able to come and play, I felt I had to jump on the oppor­tu­nity and just hope for the best. And hope for the best I will!

The Cave Singers are the epit­ome of the Seat­tle indie ‘folk’ music scene that is emerg­ing. They are the life blood of a band that lives on the road. The black pave­ment fuels their cre­ativ­ity. It’s unknown if they live on the road as pay­ment for their craft or if they are sim­ply try­ing to escape the rainy days of Seat­tle. Unlike a lot of other indie bands from seat­tle who sound like sad sui­ci­dal soap-boxers, the Cave Singers pos­sess a sound that uplifts the spir­its. They have found a way to tap into time­less­ness. Cre­at­ing a sound that you know you’ve heard before. Did that song remind me of a song from the Sev­en­ties? The Fifties? The Twen­ties? And the answer is yes, while the truth is their lat­est album was pro­duced only 9 months ago. They now have three albums in just over four years.

 Eric Grandy, Pitchfork.com’s music reviewer wrote, “[Pete] Quirk has grown into his voice, retain­ing his nasal sting while open­ing up a fuller and more flex­i­ble tenor, while Fudesco’s finger-picking and Lund’s drum­ming are com­ple­mented by some of the most gen­er­ous pro­duc­tion the band has had. Like their revival­ist peers, Cave Singers aren’t rein­vent­ing a genre here, but they lend their local folkie scene a wel­come dark side, and No Witch is their strongest album yet.” On that note, here’s some cut and paste Wikipedia stuff…

“The Cave Singers is an Amer­i­can band from Seat­tle, Wash­ing­ton. Ris­ing from the ashes of Pretty Girls Make Graves after it’s dis­band­ment in 2007, for­mer PGMG-member Derek Fudesko teamed up with Pete Quirk (of Hint Hint) and Marty Lund (of Cobra High) and began play­ing in the Seat­tle area. Soon after the band’s con­cep­tion, the Cave Singers signed with Mata­dor Records on June 11, 2007. Invi­ta­tion Songs (Their debut album) was released on Sep­tem­ber 25, 2007 and met crit­i­cal acclaim. On August 18, 2009 The Cave Singers released their sec­ond album, ‘Wel­come Joy’.”

Just to add to the cool­ness that this show will be, there is icing on the cake! The Cave Singers are hav­ing The Builders And The Butch­ers open up for them. The first time I saw TBATB was on ‘Last Call with Car­son Daly’. He’s a hor­ri­ble inter­viewer and it makes me cringe to watch him ‘do his job’, but he does have a pretty good ear for up and com­ing artists. Com­bined, both bands have nearly one mil­lion hits on youtube. So these aren’t Nobod­ies. They are famous. Youtube said so. Look it up. Here’s some bio stuff I copied and pasted from their website…

“Over the five year his­tory of The Builders and the Butch­ers – from their begin­nings play­ing on rainy Port­land, OR, streets for ran­dom passersby, to the early unplugged Mis­sis­sippi Pizza and Valen­tines’ shows, to the last three years of end­less tour­ing – the band has lived and died for its con­nec­tion with the audi­ence. Whether play­ing bar gigs for 50 peo­ple or open­ing arena shows for 3000, the band strives to con­nect with the audi­ence, and for the audi­ence to con­nect with one another, every time they take the stage. It’s that beyond any­thing else that keeps the Builders going.

“In the stu­dio, the most dif­fi­cult ele­ment for a band to achieve is a fusion of the live per­for­mance with the record­ing. The act of record­ing is quiet, serene, and con­trolled – the oppo­site expe­ri­ence of a live show. Sound engi­neers, stu­dio builders and audio­philes work their hard­est to make a ‘dead room’ to record in,” says singer Ryan Sollee. “It’s no won­der so few records cap­ture a band’s true identity.”

The Builders went into the stu­dio with the idea of peel­ing back lay­ers to where the essence of the song lies, and to try and finally fully encap­su­late their rau­cous, impas­sioned live show. Join­ing up with Adam Selzer (The Decem­berists, M. Ward, She & Him), who worked on their sopho­more album Sal­va­tion is a Deep Dark Well, and engi­neer Dylan Magierek (Mark Kozelek, Star­fucker, Thao Nguyen), the band cre­ated their third album Dead Reck­on­ing using the record­ing style of the 1950s and 1960s, where the magic of a song was cap­tured by the band play­ing together live and with min­i­mal over­dub­bing. The Builders tracked almost all of Dead Reck­on­ing in live takes, with Sollee han­dling vocals and gui­tar in one room and the rest of the band play­ing in the other. Only a few minor over­dubs were allowed and they played all of the instru­ments on every song, save for two guest vio­lin parts laid down by friends Amanda Lawrence and Zy Orange Lynn. With track­ing and mix­ing tak­ing a total of only eight days, the energy and inten­sity of time spent in the stu­dio is imme­di­ately appar­ent on each song.

A dead reck­on­ing is an age-old method of sea nav­i­ga­tion that involves using past posi­tion, speed, and drift to cal­cu­late cur­rent and future loca­tion. Dead Reck­on­ing, with its clas­sic, time­less sound, is a mea­sure of where the band and its music, as well as these times in which we live, have been, are now, and where it all might be going. “I thought it would be a per­fect title for the album given its stripped down sound, and how most of these songs tell sto­ries, many of which are set in the past, “ Sollee reveals. “Like our pre­vi­ous records, the set­tings of the songs fol­low a few main ideas: the father and the son, early 1900s Amer­ica, absolute good and evil, addic­tion, and reli­gion. On this album, I really thought a lot about the end of the world and the dark times we live in, how the feel­ings we feel and the world we expe­ri­ence is not that dif­fer­ent from 1930s Amer­ica, and I thought about the music that was cre­ated at that time. This is where the inspi­ra­tion for these songs originated.”

The Builders and the Butch­ers have toured with Heart­less Bas­tards, Por­tu­gal. The Man, Amanda Palmer, Brand New, and Mur­der By Death, to name a few. Their heavy tour sched­ule begins in Jan­u­ary of 2011 and the band will likely per­form at more than 250 venues this year.

The Builders and the Butch­ers are: Ryan Sollee (vocals, gui­tar), Bran­don Hafer (drums, vocals, melod­ica), Willy Kun­kle (bass, vocals), Ray Rude (organs, drums, vocals), and Har­vey Tum­ble­son (banjo, man­dolin, vocals). For­mer bassist Alex Ellis per­formed on the record as well.”

“…this isn’t music built on the­ory: It’s music to dance, sweat, weep and rejoice to. Like their spir­i­tual ances­tors in 16 Horse­power, The Builders and the Butch­ers’ mem­bers don’t so much make church music as deliver the ser­mons them­selves.”
– NPR’s Song Of The Day, “Devil Town”

“In the foot­steps of Cor­mac McCarthy on a leash, Sal­va­tion is a Deep Dark Well unfolds as a col­lec­tion of South­ern Gothic nar­ra­tives whose tales of death, red skies, god and his other half are caked with the dusty blood of too many sunrises…a bloom­ing bal­ance of dark nu-folk instru­men­tal lay­ers weave with Americana-rooted romps.”
– Filter

“The Builders And The Butch­ers’ musi­cal out­put is some­thing of a Pen­te­costal throw-down—the musi­cal under­pin­nings are rem­i­nis­cent of blue­grass, but the per­for­mances are raw and unschooled, with Sollee in par­tic­u­lar throw­ing off a mani­a­cally eccle­si­as­ti­cal sort of energy…dark, sparkling, Leadbelly-like ter­rain cov­ered by death-fixated epics…”
– PasteMagazine.com

All this said, please join me in wel­com­ing two amaz­ing bands to a town not known for it’s music scene…yet! If we build it they will come. I brought the tools, I just need some help lay­ing the frame work.

–Nick Orlando

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