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We are very pleased to announce the release of our second album, Houses Shine Like Teeth, available April 15, 2009. We worked quite hard on it, and are happy that it’s finally out in the world.
The band recorded basic tracks at New, Improved Recording in Oakland, CA and Tiny Telephone in San Francisco. Band members live on both coasts, and the remote collaboration between San Francisco and New York required the band to work in a new way. As a result, much of the recording took place in the homes of the various band members, where they built upon and edited each other’s work like a musical version of exquisite corpse.
To celebrate the album’s release, we are inviting the first 500 respondents to download the album for free.
As a special treat, the album comes with a bonus mp3 mixtape of songs curated by the band and featuring many of our talented and rather good-looking friends.
If you prefer, of course you can also buy the CD!
cheers,
The Invisible Cities (Sadie, Han, Gary, Tim, and Goh)
“Houses Shine Like Teeth” track listing
01 Lizard Brain
02 Corpus Callosum
03 Saints
04 The Only Reason The Club Was Made
05 Flipped Out
06 Marine Parade Road (Soupy)
07 Carrier Pigeon
08 49 Red
09 Oh, Drone
10 Pythagorean Theorem
11 San Jose
12 Everybody Sits Around The Table
13 Nowt
14 Tube Song
Mixtape track listing
01 Alex Caton - Bob-tailed Mule
02 The Rhombus - Can’t Stop
03 The Matinees - Best World
04 Goh Nakamura - Somewhere
05 School for the Dead - Periscope
06 Pancho-san - There Were Trumpets Blaring
07 Nuclear Waste Management Club - Pill
08 Sonny & the Sunsets - Too Young to Burn
09 Love is Chemicals - Meet Me on the Tarmac
10 Terese Taylor - By My Grave
11 The Nightland - Lonely Breezes
12 Scrabbel - Isabelle
About the band:
The Invisible Cities are a San Francisco-based band that makes incandescent rough-around-the-edges sometimes-quiet sometimesloud rocknroll pop music with wiry guitars and boy/girl harmonies. Their first album, Watertown, was released in 2004 and made it's way onto some cool best-of-the-year lists. In 2005, they got voted Best Indie Pop band by San Francisco Bay Guardian readers, and in 2006 they made it onto the SomaFM Indie Pop Rocks! sampler. They have played at several local festivals: NoisePop, Mission Creek, piNoisePop 8, and APAture in 2003, 2004, and 2008. They feel lucky to have had help from Matt Yelton (Pixies, Frank Black) when they started recording Watertown, and from Jon Evans (Tori Amos) for mixing it. Their 2nd album, Houses Shine Like Teeth, is due to be released in April 2009.
The Invisible Cities got started when Han Wang and Sadie Contini met on Craigslist and began listening to each other's tunes, adding tracks, and sending them back and forth to each other. They continue to collaborate, often remotely, with Han's brother Gary and drummer Tim Bulkley in NYC, who shape their sound considerably. The Invisible Cities play in different configurations, letting the musicians reshape the songs each performance. People who have played an important role include Gary Wang (NYC), Tim Bulkley (NYC), singer-songwriter Goh Nakamura (SF), Wil Hendricks of The Lofty Pillars, Nick Mirov and Dan Baber of Love is Chemicals, and Dan Lee of Scrabbel.
Reviews of Watertown, the first album:
"despicably infectious." -- West Coast Performer
"Few bands these days can create melodies like these folks, and even fewer are fronted by a singer as blissfully-voiced as the Cities' Sadie Contini. I'm tempted to fit this under the "bliss" category at times, though Watertown's mix of styles calls for a less typical tag like "sometimes dreamy indie pop/rock. But who cares about classification when an album is this enjoyable? At times loud, at times quiet, these twelve songs take the listener on a fun trip through the band's unique brand of pop songwriting.... As far as self-released indie pop debuts go, this is about as good as it gets. Don't miss out." -- Indieville.com
"Tonight’s top new tune was ‘Instaglo’ by The Invisible Cities, taken from their cracking debut album, ‘Watertown.’ It’s a classic indiepop album, full of thrumming geetars and honeyed boygirl singing. It’s also very varied and full-sounding for a debut, sounds to me more like a third album in terms of the breadth of songwriting." -- Bzangy Groink (Jyoti Mishra)
Watertown and Live Show Review:
"[Watertown] has been in non-stop rotation at work and at home for the last month or so. Like I said before, this band has a huge talent and tons of potential. The live show covered all the same emotional territory as the album, and I was glad to experience in person the unique moments of reckless joy, doubt, humor and quiet resignation that made Watertown so special. The absence of some of my favorite cuts was mitigated by a run-through of what seemed like a newish song, “A Squared Plus B Squared.” It’s about triangles, among other things, so awesomeness immediately followed. Anyway, reviews (even informal ones) make it nearly impossible to communicate the nature of the music, so I’ll again fall back on the tired old mainstay of accessible-but-still-slightly-insiderist comparison. Ahem: The Invisible Cities sound roughly akin to a mixture of Exile in Guyville, Life’s Too Good by the Sugarcubes, and Yo La Tengo’s mid-nineties LP, Painful. If that doesn’t explain it, I guess I’m not surprised because writing it certainly made no sense. Anyway – buy the CD and do your best not to completely adore it, I dare you." -- New Plastic Weblog
Listen at http://www.theinvisiblecities.com
CD available at http://cdbaby.com/cd/invisiblecities
and at amazon.com
Tracks also available at iTunes
http://twitter.com/theinvisicities
And tho we're not exactly sure what this does, another fun link for you to click on should your little heart desire to: last.fm
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