Eric Amata--guitar, Mark Carbone--drumming, Drew de Man--songwriting, voice, guitars, Nathan Green--keyboard, accordion & voice, Daniel Winn--occasional bass
Influences
Frank Stokes, Joe Henry, Aimee Mann, Talking Heads, Geronimo, Jon Brion, Moby
Grape, Willa Cather, Dostoyevsky (especially for Chach), Cormack McCarthy, Carson McCullers, Salman Rushdie, Robert Mitchum, Sam Elliot, Jim Croce, Radiohead, Rolling Stones, Jay Bennett, the Band, Mavis Staples, Sid Selvidge, Neil Young, Brian Blade, Daniel Lanois, Walt Whitman, Joe Hill, Emma Goldman, the Diggers, James Tate, Czelsaw Milosz, Zeppelin, Tom Petty, Will Farrell and Jeff Evans.
Which fucked-up genius composer are you?
Tom Waits... charismatic story-teller with a penchant for freaky people and unusual settings. You thrive on the concept of the underdog coming out on top. Take this quiz!
At first listen, No River City's Wolves and Fishes sounds like a musical conversation between Ryan Adams' jangling acoustic guitar and Cracker's electric sloth. But several more plays reveal vivid stories about a scruffy everyman with a chip on his should against rich people and frustrated by his bad luck with girls, who works as a janitor and handyman and whose parents were gun-toting bank-robbing outlaws.
NRC's lead singer and songwriter, Drew de Man, is quite a storyteller. His colorful tales—even more than his folksy, well-rounded melodies—will draw you in and make you want to find out what happens next. As you're becoming hooked, you realize what capable musicians he plays with. The song "Jacy Farrow" tells a simple story of love gone horribly wrong. Boy wants to run away with girl, girl says her daddy won't allow it, boy slaps girl, and girl's daddy shoots boy dead. Told from a young boy's perspective, "Raised By Outlaws" shows nothing bonds a family like a little bank robbery and being on the lam together: "Momma drove a getaway car from the Second American Bank / Smiled as she threw the money under the floor and I held up the plank."
The band formed in 2000 after de Man returned to Georgia from a year of living in Europe. NRC toured the Southeastern states several times, and peaked in 2003 when their first album, This Is Our North Dakota, developed a following on college and community radio stations on the East coast. The band reorganized in 2005 and released Wolves and Fishes earlier this year.
--Boise Weekly, Boise, ID
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When Drew De Man sings about warding off bears on NO RIVER CITY’s second CD, Wolves and Fishes, one can almost see the teeth and claws of his personal demons swatting at his back. De Man leads an alienated procession on a path into country music’s richest, blackest soil. With every character he creates and every twist along the path, the group adapts its dark, bucolic twang to fit the mood. Sometimes songs tumble at a galloping pace, while others move much more slowly. What sets NRC apart from the rural-music masses is a penchant for infusing alt-country songcraft with lost-in-the-moment improvisation. Wielding a nontraditional approach gives a sense of spontaneity to each song, but never at the expense of delivering a genuinely heartbreaking performance. --Creative Loafing, ATL Best of 2007
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Atlanta, Georgia. Dan denk ik aan Joe South, The Black Crowes, Drivin’ n Cryin’ en aan Hot ‘Lanta van The Allman Brothers. Voortaan zal ik ook aan No River City denken. Deze band uit Atlanta, onder leiding van Drew de Man (zanger, gitarist, toetsenist), heeft namelijk een heel goede cd gemaakt. Wolves And Fishes (eigen beheer) is de tweede cd van de band, welke is geproduceerd door niemand minder dan Teddy Morgan in zijn studio in Nashville. Dat klinkt als een aanbeveling – en dat is het ook. No River City heeft van Morgan een lekker gruizige sound meegekregen, waarin vooral de moddervette elektrische gitaar van Eric Amata heel goed tot zijn recht komt. De man levert in bekant elk nummer een knallende solo af. Dan komt er nog bij dat De Man (ja, die zanger en componist) een gave hand van schrijven heeft, waardoor nagenoeg alle nummers de middelmaat ontstijgen. Speciale vermelding verdienen Way Home Soon, dat mij sterk doet denken – zeker ook qua zang – aan Chestnut Mare van The Byrds, de epische countryrocksong Fancy Little Fire en de soulvolle afsluiter Dissolved In Your Whiskey. Niet in de winkel te koop, dit Wolves And Fishes (ook niet in Amerika), wel bij Miles Of Music en tijdens optredens. Mijn advies is dan ook deze geweldige cd te kopen bij een concert van de band – sla je twee vliegen in één klap. Voor de thuisblijvers zoals ik, is er gelukkig nog de internetwinkel. --Alt.Country.NL
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The photos accompanying some of the songs above appear courtesy of Sebastiao Salgado, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, William Gedney and Bruce Davidson. They're all awesome photographers, so you should check them out.
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NRC has released "Wolves and fishes" themselves on a very limited basis. You can hear it on college and non-commerical radio, and you should request it all the time. You can buy the disc at shows--both a standard jewelcase and a hand-printed, signed and numbered version--but you won't find the disc in stores or online outside of Atlanta yet. A good idea would be to go to www.MilesofMusic.com and buy our record, "This Is Our North Dakota". You won't regret listening to "the old one." People say it's good for drinking, driving, long, lonely nights and road trips especially. Some songs might be good for f*ckin', but we'll leave that up to you.
At Eyedrum (www. eyedrum. org) on Wednesday November 20th at 7:30 pm, for $5.00, The Nonsense Company presents "Great Hymn of Thanksgiving / Conversation Storm", an award-winning pair of urgently intricate pieces blurring the boundary between experimental theater and avant-garde music, both written by internationally-known composer and company member Rick Burkhardt.
"Great Hymn of Thanksgiving" takes place at a dinner table, where the sounds of conversation have been replaced with fragmented news reports, scraps from the Army prayer manual, faux-Middle-Eastern folk tales, and disembodied cries of emergency. The sculpted sounds of the table itself — scooting chairs, singing wineglasses, squeaking forks — force this “conversation” into a confrontation with material reality.
In "Conversation Storm", three friends from three sides of the political spectrum unwillingly argue their way through a ticking time bomb scenario, revising, dissecting, and even brutalizing their own positions in the process — but time has either stopped or entered an ugly loop, and as the friends assign and reassign roles, the scenario begins to dissolve the boundaries between real and hypothetical, past and future, day and night.
Best New Play — San Francisco Fringe Festival, 2007
Audience Choice and Best-of-the-Fest awards — Frigid Festival NYC, 2008
“Artists to be reckoned with…. hilariously funny and awesomely tragic at the same time.”
Martin Denton, nytheatre. com
“Moving, funny, and provocative… theater at its best.”
Joey Seiler, Austin 360
For more information: http://nonsensecompany. com
Note: This performance contains extremely graphic adult language and is not appro
Come out for a hootin', hollerin', good time with folk music, workshops, good southern home cookin', apple bobbing, brew, friends, family, and great stories to tell!
A benefit for George Sossenko, Spanish Civil War Veteran, to publish his book, The Idealistic Adventurer!
Played one of your tracks during last week's show and had about twenty reported cases of steering wheel rock outs, nearly fifty cases of rocked off socks, and a countless numbers of booty shakes.
man, sad to hear that you guys are breaking up. Some shit in life just don't make sense. Thanks for the great cd, it's stayed in rotation for 2 years now. Good luck with everything.
don't make me use emoticons on yo asses! I feel gravely lugubrious that NRC never ever ever ever ever made it up to Michigannnn!! Just because we've got more syphillis in a square mile than anywhere else in the world and our city was recently honored with the "Most Dangerous City in America" award, it doesn't mean we don't know how to get down to some goodddddd ol' music! The Ark in Ann Arbor is a wicked place to play and gets a crowd every night, though they'll probably buy more of your merch than your attention.
When are you all coming to Madison next?? I missed you last time. That means I don't have Wolves and Fishes yet. Do you know if any of the stores in Madison sell it?
