The thing about swagger is, when it doesn\u2019t work\u2014when there isn\u2019t enough substance behind it to make it credible\u2014it\u2019s a recipe for disaster. But when it does\u2014when the songs and arrangements and performances deliver the goods and draw you in\u2014a little swagger becomes the cherry on top, a knowing smile shared between performer and audience.<\/p>\n
Texas natives Dovetail\u2014the brother duo of Philip Creamer (lead vocals\/guitar) and Daniel Creamer (keys\/harmony vocals) with Aaron Haynes (drums) and Scott Lee (bass)\u2014are rock and roll classicists of the first order, borrowing flavors from the Beatles, the Byrds, the Band, and Big Star to create their clever, intoxicating songs. (The former influence is accentuated by the band\u2019s having won the 2012 John Lennon Songwriting Contest in the \u201cRock Song of the Year\u201d category.)<\/p>\n
This dynamic and very impressive debut album kicks off with the contest-winning song, \u201cJulie,\u201d an alternately woozy and apocalyptic little gem that manages to move through three or four distinct moods in under four minutes, deploying acoustic rhythm guitar, piano and organ, bass, drums and newest member Tucker Cauble on lead guitar. What pushes the song from good to great, though, is that little bit of swagger, the confidence with which the band propels the song through its changes.<\/p>\n
Vocally, Philip Creamer has a bit of the, well, keening quality of Keane\u2019s Tom Chaplin, but the influence I hear even more\u2014not in the songwriting, but in the performance\u2014is Jeff Buckley. As a vocalist, Creamer seems fearless, swerving, diving and soaring through these songs, extending syllables, building drama and leaving you guessing about how he\u2019s going to play off the melody next. (He also sounds a bit like Monterey\u2019s very own Casey Frazier [link], though it seems unlikely they\u2019ve ever crossed paths\u2026) <\/p>\n
As a band, one of the things Dovetail do best is understand how to break a song down to the essentials and build it back up, as they do on \u201cBig City,\u201d highlighting how the lead and harmony vocals, lead and rhythm guitars, keyboards and rhythm section fit together. The arrangements always feel loose and organic, yet they\u2019re consistently detailed and layered. <\/p>\n
Classic rock influences are all over \u201cHey Hey Mama,\u201d whose playful arrangement behind Creamer\u2019s unpredictable lead vocal suggests nothing so much as the aforementioned Jeff Buckley fronting the Black Crowes. Album highlight \u201cHeavy\u201d is a potent, inching-toward-psychedelic power-pop number that Creamer propels into the stratosphere on the choruses, turning the song\u2019s one-word title into a four-syllable mini-aria as little fullisades of acoustic guitar punctuate the lines.<\/p>\n
And so it goes through the gauzy, off-kilter ballad \u201cSee The Sun,\u201d the vintage echo of \u201cCan\u2019t Feel You,\u201d and the slithery, powerful \u201cHurricane.\u201d As you move into the latter third of the album, the boys throw a wider range of ideas and influences into the pot and stir, with \u201cStory\u201d sometimes feeling like a lost U2 ballad with its dreamy, echoey guitar and unsettling vibe, while \u201cGet Down\u201d features a melancholy, hitching melody at the core of a dense, greasy arrangement that\u2019s punctuated by sharp squalls of electric guitar. The closing title track ventures briefly into Tin Pan Alley territory with a playfulness and bravado suggesting Queen.<\/p>\n
For a listener of a certain age, Dovetail sounds like a memory of summer nights by the water, sitting on the trunk with the car stereo turned up and all the doors open. It\u2019s a classic sound, affectionately rendered, but what really makes it work is how thoroughly the band inhabits it. There is not a false note here, just pure passion and considerable talent and, yes, a little bit of swagger that carries this album to the promised land.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":31794,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[9321],"rating":[5613],"class_list":["post-43509","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-dovetail","rating-rating-a-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/43509","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43509"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/43509\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31794"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43509"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43509"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=43509"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=43509"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}