Listen to Ral Partha Vogelbacher

Biography

“We placed silver dollars over each eye — 1972 silver dollars pulled from my collection.”

Following 2003′s ‘Kite vs Obelisk’, San Francisco’s Ral Partha Vogelbacher return with a third album, ‘Shrill Falcons’. Ral Partha Vogelbacher are a ‘they’, not a ‘he’: frontman and founder Chadwick Bidwell is once again joined by friends and collaborators Thee More Shallows. Tearing up the usual template, this time around Bidwell wrote the lyrics (he provides almost all the vocals on the record) and gave them to TMS’ Dee Kesler who composed most of the music. Musically more hi-fi and lyrically less oblique than both ‘Kite vs Obelisk’ and 2001′s self-released ‘The More Nice Fey Elven Gnomes Are Hiding In My Toilet Again’, ‘Shrill Falcons’ uses a vibrant palette of musical instruments, electronic drones and fuzz guitar to create a rich, multi-hued album of very personal and very memorable songs about loss, family, friendship, feedback and sturgeon. With dusted atmospherics reminiscent of Bill Callaghan’s Smog and a dense yet dextrous lyricism akin to Dan Bejar’s Destroyer, ‘Shrill Falcons’ is thematically a weightier album than the previous two. Where they were both largely fantasy- and/or imagination-driven (elves; knights; historic battles; tales of olde) this time inspiration is rooted in bleaker reality – the album is concerned chiefly with the death of Bidwell’s father a few years ago. All sounds were played by TMS and Chad Bidwell, besides where Anticon artist Odd Nosdam creates a dreamscape in the middle of ‘New Happy Fawn’.

“Your sidelong glance will never have its way again with my heavy warhorse”

Listening to Ral Partha Vogelbacher’s latest album, Kite vs Obelisk, one can’t help but wonder how the world must appear through the eyes of Chadwick Bidwell, the impishly creative driving force behind the San Francisco band. If his recordings are anything to go by, you might try twisting everything and everyone you know at skew-whiff angles, then turning them upside down to get some idea. It’s probably safe to say that his fantasy life is alive and well and firing on all cylinders. But given that his previous album (the limited, self-released ‘The More Nice Fey Elven Gnomes Are Hiding In My Toilet Again’ on his own Megalon label) was inhabited by drunken knights, dying kings whose greatest regret is not having read all the math they could read and overworked angels striving to protect the brains of hummingbirds, one needn’t be overly insightful to arrive at such a conclusion.

On Kite vs Obelisk, he casts his imaginative and musical nets wide, and drags in a heaving shoal of weird yet strangely endearing characters to populate a richly diverse musical landscape. There’s ‘Aral Sea Regulars’, a tenderly mournful Will Oldham / Songs:Ohia-style ballad about terrified soldiers on an ancient battlefield awaiting their moment of glory; the Pavementesque slanted and enchanting ‘I’m a Jai Ali Kinda Guy’; ‘Night Stinger in the Night Shade’ – a rocking tale of a taxman who sells his infant son to a dark wraith in exchange for a comfy life; the whimsically macabre ‘Take Me to Your Dacha’, with it’s jingly upbeat tune and black humour worthy of Monty Python; the breezy and surreal ‘Kite Carry Obelisk Over Lake Victoria’; the gentle quirky humour of ‘Walking a Sickly Bobcat South of Your Cedar Infested Estate’; and the dazzling pyrotechnics of ‘Red Hot Tugboat’, plus a half-dozen other songs of equal splendour.

Ranging from stark acoustic to fuzzed out electric guitar and squalling feedback via waltz, frantic folk, syncopated rock and drunken drum machine, and containing lyrical references to the Stones, Palace, the Smiths and Pavement, Kite vs Obelisk almost defies classification.

To flesh out the songs that began their lives as acoustic demos, Bidwell enlisted members of other San Francisco bands, including David Kesler and Tadas Kisielius from Thee More Shallows, Wendy Allen from The Court and Spark and Chris Palmatier and Brian Frazer of Brian_and_Chris. Most of the tracks were recorded by Scott Solter (Tarentel, Court and Spark).

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