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photosExclaim! June 2007 (Shrill Falcons)
"Though they flirt with many different aspects of indie rock, San Francisco’s Ral Partha Vogelbacher defy easy categorisation. Essentially an experimental rock’n’roll band enamoured with noise and unpredictable song structures, Ral Partha are the brainchild of songwriter Chadwick Bidwell. Content to make more subdued music in the past, the loss of his father some years ago prompted Bidwell to write this latest batch of songs dealing with mourning, but he pushes them forward with upbeat, propulsive musical flourishes, whose poetic manner owe much to Slint and Pavement. However, it’s really not that simple. “Swimming with the Sturgeon” follows a quaint piano figure and gentle whispering vocals for about two minutes before being submerged in building waves of distorted guitar and feedback. These instances are countered by the askew pop of “Three Gorges” and the wise-ass toss offs of “Messy Artist,” not to mention the Sonic Youth workout that is “Silver Mines.” There’s genuine sorrow in the layered arrangement of “New Happy Fawn,” as well as the improvised leanings of “Party after the Wake,” both of which suddenly erupt like something off of Spiderland. Dark with sharp edges, Shrill Falcons is at once familiar and unlike any record around. "
Vish Khanna
PopMatters (Shrill Falcons)
"If there’s any doubt in your mind that death can make for a powerful artistic catalyst, then just ask Chadwick Bidwell. He’s the lyricist and lead vocalist for San Francisco’s Ral Partha Vogelbacher—and in the past, their records have been tongue-in-cheek affairs about elves and knights and warhorses. But Shrill Falcons is a different story. It focuses on the death of Bidwell’s father, giving the lyrics—dense and literary enough to deserve comparisons to Dan Bejar and Matthew Friedberger—a new sombre weight. And as it turns out, that’s all the band needed to take a impressive creative leap forward. The music, provided by members of Thee More Shallows, is equal to the challenge, building a sound that (like Grandaddy’s) can be sweeping and subterranean, or upbeat and rocking. It might have taken death to do it, but it seems like Ral Partha Vogelbacher have come into their own. (8/10)"
Audioversity March 2007 (Shrill Falcons)
"If you were colorblind, you might mistaken Ral Partha Vogelbacher's new album Shrill Falcons for Iceland. But that green is the flag flown by a band all their own. The San Francisco natives have produced their third album since 1999 (debut The More Nice Fey Elven Gnomes... is probably of the last decade's greatest album titles), and here they've refined their sound just a whisker to produce a coherent full-length that sounds as hazy and as remote at times as Rekjavik in fog. That was bad. Sorry.
The bold cover is what drew me in first, I'll admit it. But it's not all barebones artwork that this album has to ride on it; in fact, Ral Partha Vogelbacher actually share kin with Audiversity favorites Thee More Shallows and, wait for it, Scandinavian Preppy (though Iceland really shouldn't be considered Scandinavian, and if anyone is still doing that, stop). You've already heard Michael gush over the former and maybe someday when we're older we'll have a little chat about the latter (which was the original title for this album, coincidentally). Whether or not this album is "all the better for it" as lazier critics are wont to say is debatable, but I know this: The drones of Fog or the Sebadohian tactics of main man Chad Bidwell are both soothing and engrossing to listen to on repeat.
Oh right, the name. "Dungeons & Dragons" figurine manufacturer + Bidwell's eighth-grade nemesis, one Pierre Vogelbacher = Ral Partha Vogelbacher. One hell of a moniker, isn't it? Just don't mistaken them for a Bollywood pop idol. No, the three men of Ral Partha are firmly rooted in the lo-fi traditions of greats gone by. The good part is that there's a twist of the modern weaving its way in and out of the speakers: Odd Nosdam drops in to add some drones to the album's centerpiece, "New Happy Fawn," and he's not the only one. The band themselves have taken a more ambient, drone-laden look into the mirror and found an acid-folk band that's willing to eschew their previously simpler lo-fi fun in the best way possible. Bidwell wrote most of this album in China and that is evident in some places ("Birthday in Beijing" being the big one, obviously). But instead of crisp Icelandic fog, I imagine more the air of a smoggy Chongqing, where women fight the government until the media is told to stop. Bidwell himself found it more akin to the swamp racket of Florida, and like Wilderness Pangs, it is easy to hear the alligators swimming amongst the feedback of a track like "Party After the Wake."
But the underlying message is that it's an album for all corners of the globe because it comes from all corners of the globe. Bidwell is an Orlando native, but the band is from San Fran; he wrote the songs in China, but the art speaks to a colorblind Icelander. In a way only Dustin Long himself could have stitched together better, Shrill Falcons calls out with the sound every remote corner of the globe knows all too well. You can suck the smog and the fog away from these places, but that eliminates a kind of beauty that Ral Partha Vogelbacher speak to here. This is a beautiful album, polluted and hazy and imperfect. As it should be.
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Babysue (Shrill Falcons)
"Ral Partha Vogelbacher is the name of a band rather than an individual. Shrill Falcons is an intriguing collection of progressive pop compositions that is somewhat reminiscent of babysue favorite Ghost Stories...except the music is more abstract and noisy. This band is driven by the songwriting skills of Chadwick Bidwell, a fellow whose ambitions are obviously not driven by the desire for commercial success. Despite the band's unusual approach to making music, this San Francisco-based outfit has managed to rack up some rather solid reviews from around the globe. What impresses us most about Bidwell and his associates is the fact that they are able to tread that fine line that separates progressive pop from abstract music. While there are some pop elements to grasp onto...there are also plenty of extended noise segments that are bound to scare off shallow airheads. Peculiar and sometimes even slightly soothing, this is an album with genuine depth. Our favorite tracks are "Three Gorges," "New Happy Fawn," "Silver Mines," and "Swimming With the Sturgeon." (Rating: 5+)"
XLR8R Feb 2007 (Shrill Falcons)
"Shrill Falcons is an outstanding drone-meets-acoustic record from these San Francisco tripsters. Aided by the always crafty Odd Nosdam, Ral Partha Vogelbacher shifts from the emotive ambiance of Joan of Arc to the sludge of Sleep with natural ease. This is rad. (Office Top 10 album picks)"
www.tastyfanzine.org.uk (Shrill Falcons)
"Ral Partha Vogelbacher are a band not a person. Just thought that would be a valuable thing to straighten out right off the bat. They are basically the brainchild of one Chadwick Bidwell, a chap from San Francisco with a mind made for bizarre lyrics and eccentricities about events that hover somewhere between the real and fake, the odd and the normal. Lending their invaluable talents to the proceedings and making up the backbone of Ral Partha are the wondrous souls from Thee More shallows Dee Kelser and Jason Gonzales who bring there formidable baroque pop sensibilities to the record. Stick this much talent in a studio and the results were always going to be good. However what actually happened is the result turned out to be really fucking good. The rye wit and turn of phrase that has been present in Bidwell's earlier work is still here in droves as he tells stories of artists, sturgeons, national parks and falcons, stories full of paranoia and humour, joy and bitterness that are baffling and wonderful. It ends up being a bit like Bill Callahan but with a sense of fun. Musically though this record far exceeds anything Ral Partha have done before. With the watchful eye and talent of Dee Kelser the songs on Shrill Falcons are complex pop scattered with discord and noise that swell and ebb till they are bursting at the seams. Its like listening to audio worms that burrow into your mind and then lay there fetid music eggs directly into the part of your brain that makes you love music. It don't matter if you want to hate it or not, the worm won't let you. 'Shrill Falcons' is simply and purely a marvellous record, far more that the sum of its parts and every bit ( in fact dare I say on occasions better) than its entire members previous musical output. Ignore all those bastards in the popular music press telling you this and that is the 'first essential album of 2006' and listen to me. THIS is the first essential album of 2006 and I know what's best for you all. Besides I'm pretty sure if you don't buy it then you will die with a small nagging feeling in your soul meaning you will never truly be able to rest."
Luke Drozd
Touch (Shrill Falcons)
"Picture the scene. You're at the bus stop with Ral Partha Vogelbacher on your iPod. Its freezing, you've lost your Oyster Card and its starting to hail. That's right: grizzly grey-as-fuck February needs a dirty soundtrack, and "Shrill Falcons" is most certainly the right bird for the job. All that bitter British wind and gnashing of teeth makes perfect sense in the context of morose lyricism, desolate soundscaping, and deeply unnerving feedback. Funny because the band are from San Francisco where the weather is more clement. Still, they've got the gnashing of teeth bit right. In fact, there are some genuinely horrible sounds on this record, and I'm sure you're going to enjoy them as much as I did. Brilliantly morbid anti-music."
Comes With A Smile (Shrill Falcons)
"Inspired by the death of his father, a trip to China, and time spent listening to "doomy metal and droney, noisey stuff," Chadwick Bidwell's Ral Partha collective has created a concept album of sorts; but one far from the gloomfest foretold by such dark themes.
With labelmates David Kesler and Jason Gonzales of Thee More Shallows making up the core RPV trio, and Kesler's role expanded to provider of music to Bidwell's lyrics, "Shrill Falcons" is a more immediate set of songs than its occaisonally ragged predecessors, "Kite vs Obelisk" and "The More Nice Fey Elves..." whilst maintaining the oddball ingenuity that drew all those Pavement comparisons for the earlier records.
On the record's most sombre track, the lengthy drone-led New Happy Fawn, Bidwell reinvents a scenario from his life in which his mother asks him to kill a neighborhood stray cat, a task his father failed to accomplish before he passed away. Perched on the ramparts of his castle home, with binoculars and rifle in tow, poised to shoot [the cat having become the grazing young deer of the title], Bidwell's attention is drawn to "ants climbing my bald legs and the breeze troubling the trees / I smelled something burning in the distance." The inference is one of reincarnation, accentuated by the following refrain, "I never considered my mother a widow," repeate mantra-like while Odd Nosdam's tapestry of drones build toward a dreamlike denouement. The mood is soon lifted by the subsequent Garden Assault, some Grandaddy-esque light relief, reminiscing about misspent youth in Florida.
Potential single, Silver Mines, makes much of a minimal lyric, buoyed by a driving, chugging rhythm and the repeated line "shooting strychnine in the silver mines with the Black Panthers and the lazy, lazy Buroughs," appearing to throw any concepts out the window until a snappy second half proclaims, "I'm gonna have to run down the street until I find a way to concentrate on each of those words you stuck all over the night [a reference to Burrough's cut-up technique?] scattered all over my family tree," while the two-minute CDB National Park leaves little room for such doubt ["I'm standing before the future location of the Clifford Donald Bidwell National Park"], albeit suitably abstract. The call and response with Kesler here is one of the album's most satisfying moments, providing a dreamy interlude and black comic levity: "I caught myself pretending I was boarding a ship" / "HMS Audacious" / "And as the shells ripped through my breast" / "Barely missing my heart" / "I let go of the fence and I fell to the sidewalk, shattering my wrist."
When, on the propulsive Messy Artist, he sings of work "obscured by intentional obfuscation," Bidwell appears to be turning the tables on himself, mocking his own methods by comparing them to the slipshod manner of a "caged and giggling" painter, "smoking a filthy pipe when he couldn't find rolling papers hidden under his front seat." The song is reflected in the cover art, a hand-painted flag that reveals its brush strokes upon closer inspection, with an inner sleave that reveals nothing but random paint daubs on the rear of the canvas.
Bidwell's life may permeate his work and give it its all-important personal credence, but it's the "intentional obfuscation" that elevates it to an art form, with 'Shrill Falcons' open to multifarious interpretations and inspired repeat viewings."
Matt Dornan
www.lodownmagazine.com (Shrill Falcons)
"Props for the bandname of Chadwick Bidwell and his Thee More Shallows collabo. Props for the music. Props for featuring Odd Nosdam. Some more general props. But why not continue with such a fantastic album title like their earlier "The More Nice Fey Elven Gnomes Are Hiding In My Toilet Again"? It just fits so much better to those fantasy dronescapes."
8.9/10
BBC Radio 3 'Mixing It' (Kite vs Obelisk)
"If you have a taste for unusual rock you should definitely go and drink deeply from this particular well."
Mark Russell and Robet Sandall
Mojo (Kite vs Obelisk)
"Tragi-farce meets warped fantasy meets skewed, angular guitar-rock. If we need a scuzzier, fuzzier and sillier successor to Pavement and their oblique strategies, let it be these San Franciscans. Guided By Voices and Monty Python fans can also apply, while title of the year goes to Walking A Sickly Bobcat South Of Your Cedar Infested Estate"
Careless Talk Costs Lives (Kite vs Obelisk)
"Listening to Kite Vs Obelisk is like falling into an imaginary kingdom, like Morgenstern’s The Princess Bride or Narnia, a world with it’s own fully formed maps and characters. We follow our noble hero Ral Partha Vogelbacher through scuzzy, fractured garage rock, frazzled folk and dark tales of corrupt taxmen and undead wraiths with only his warhorse and overactive imagination for company. From the sound of things, Ral Partha may have met such folks as Pavement and David Grubbs on his travels and borrowed some of their skewed pop secrets. Like in all great stories, there are knights, broken hearts and giants. Stay till the credits roll."
Comes With A Smile (Kite vs Obelisk)
"The second album by the suitably bizarrely named Ral Partha Vogelbacher, ‘Kite Vs Obelisk’ contains some of the strangest song-titles and lyrics in recent memory. A San Francisco outfit centred around Chadwick Bidwell’s schizophrenic ramblings, RPV have partly inherited Pavement’s grasp of skew-whiff melodies, where lo-fi doodles are matched by fully fleshed-out abstractions. Yet it’s always Bidwell’s way around surreal sentiments and firm grasp of Will Oldham’s impenetrable turn of phrase that stands out, often confusing as much as enlightening. At times, these words are so oblique and quirky that it can become extremely trying, yet songs like Walking A Sickly Bobcat South Of Your Cedar Infested Estate and Kite Carry Obelisk Over Lake Victoria are two of the most memorable things not written by the likes of Bill Callahan in some time. For tunes that venture all over the place and yet somehow find their way back out again, Ral Partha Vogelbacher are certainly the boys to seek out. And truth be told, it’s been some time since Steve Malkmus warbled over anything quite this pleasingly perplexing."
Flavorpill (Kite vs Obelisk)
"The strangely named Ral Partha Vogelbacher — the San Francisco band helmed by singer Chadwick Bidwell — favors songs as uniquely shaped as the angular forms invoked by the title of its most recent release, Kite vs Obelisk. Tumbledown guitars collide with shuffling drums in a coal furnace, melting down country, folk, and indie rock into a smoldering mass of bed coils and watch springs, while Bidwell half-sings, half-murmurs about tugboats, bobcats, and jai alai. This is music that's lo-fi, homespun, and hard not to love."
Time Out (Kite vs Obelisk)
"The wilfully awkward and obscurist title of the this début LP by San Francisco's RPV - one Chad Bidwell, plus members of Thee More Shallows, among others - recalls Pavement's more slanted (and enchanted) flights of fancy. Bidwell is clearly a big fan of their breezy but bolshy alterno rock and can sometimes sound like a smart-arse (when was the last time you heard the words 'churlish' and 'saturnine' in a pop song?), but he does take the pee out of himself (in the title track) and offsets his sharpness with fucked antifolk, the odd moody, jazz breakout and lo-fi scratchiness."
Flux (Kite vs Obelisk)
"I know nothing about Chadwick Bidwell, the San Franciscan whose album this is, but I can't help wondeping how well he is - the imagery is so very personal, the music does that waiting-for-the- words-to-catch-up that Syd Barrett's last album had. I hope I'm wrong and it's his equally obvious humour pushed to extremes; whatever, I recommend you hear this, for the diamonds in the lyrics and the fine, very leftfield, arrangements."
Bang Magazine (Kite vs Obelisk)
"Inspirations: Pavement, Syd Barrett, Oxford English Dictionary
Anti-folk, lo-fi bedroom mumblers are 10-a-penny on the tiny US labels currently out there grubbng for nickels, but San Franciscan weirdos Ral Partha Vogelbacher could out-quirk almost any of them. It's not the scuffed, Pavement-esque arrangements or the fretful singspeak of frontman Chadwick Bidwell that marks them out, but rather the way in which they shy away from the ho-ho cuteness of say, Moldy Peaches. Sometimes the resulting deadpan humour, such as the droll 'Red Hot Tugboat' ("I got a nursing degree in the mountains/While you were off serving a seven year sentence") calls to mind Otis Lee Crenshaw without the punch lines. Subject matter-wise we're in the trippy adventureland of The Flaming Lips tempered with Elliot Smith's bitter soulsickness, while lyrics as Shakespearean as "This saturnine waif speaks with churlish accent" belie a keen poetic urge. If all of this sounds contrived, that's because it is - but fascinatingly so."
Sponic (Kite vs Obelisk)
"This San Francisco collective playfully cuts unpredictable indie gems for stoners and English majors alike. Leader Chadwick Bidwell, also the head of Megalon Records, knows when to boldly fuck with the mood and when to let it simmer. Ral Partha Vogelbacher is his near-indescribable music project dedicated to that end. If The Jesus Lizard were fronted by a high school composition instructor, they’d write songs like “Warhorses Provide Presumptive Perspectives,” one of the weirdest opening tracks I’ve ever heard. It’s not that the music is obviously quirky or intentionally obtuse. It’s that Bidwell’s fearless exploration of slippery chords and deeply personal lyrics is so unexpected that you’re not sure what to make of it. This album operates on a logic all its own, and it takes a bit of open-mindedness to allow it to sink in. Once you’re ready, the spirits of The Silver Jews and Jad Fair float by leisurely in “Red Hot Tugboat.” The weary, intelligent “Kite Carry Obelisk Over Lake Victoria” brings to mind more experimental forefathers of indie rock. And if you find “Spanish Ambassador” disturbingly calm and appealing, you’re not alone. The album is dripping with intentionally disjointed fusions of folk, pop, and white-boy blues, fitting remarkably well with the self-conscious, spoken-sung lyrical delivery. Every track was supposedly conceived as a three-minute story set to music, which makes sense if you’re Robert Pollard, gobbling pages of Webster’s dictionary on acid. Where Mr. Bidwell came up with horns, accordion, synths, and trebly lo-fi acoustic stunts is beyond me. This is dense stuff, and far more approachable than the clever art-rock I’m making it out to be. If you’re ready to engage in a bit of melodic head-scratching, Kite Vs. Obelisk is ready for a semi-permanent spot in your CD changer."
The Void (Kite vs Obelisk)
"As the band name may suggest, this is odd. the product of mainstay Chadwick Bidewell’s brain, it is completely bizarre. By now, you may realise it is a strange album. Lyrically matter-of-fact, the tunes are nothing to shout about, boasting erratic playing and sporadic bursts of noise. Even so, this is somehow endearing. Music with the make-up off. It would be unnecessary to interview Mr Bidwell, his life experiences are told for all to listen. Indeed, the effect is like that of a minstrel. Modern folklore is provided to the sound of guitar, interspersed with advice. All the while some kind of darkness looms overhead; as rhyme and rhythm are twisted, skewed and sometimes forgotten altogether, the lyrics are accented. The edgy lack of structural coherence actually adds to the curiosity of this work. More talking and shouting over music than singing, drums and electric guitar keep some kind of order, but when the unplugged tracks are allowed to wander, they meander as if created on the spot. Somehow, but don’t ask me how, this directionless farce captures the ear and the imagination, satisfying a gap that never used to be there The latter tracks calm and sound like more recent Beck. Impossibly bizarre and tragically talented, it is hard to say whether this is a masterpiece or a load of rubbish. Personally, and it always comes down to personal opinions, I’d call it genius. Odd genius."
4/5