ARTIST: Dredg
TITLE: Catch Without Arms
LABEL: Interscope Records
GENRE: Rock
BITRATE: 218kbps avg
PLAYTIME: 0h 51min total
RELEASE DATE: 21 June 2005
RIP DATE: 20 May 2005

Track List

01. Ode To The Sun                  4:12
02. Bug Eyes                        4:14
03. Catch Without Arms              4:11
04. Not That Simple                 4:56
05. Zebraskin                       3:26
06. Tanbark                         3:45
07. Sang Real                       4:29
08. Planting Seeds                  4:12
09. Spitshine                       3:34
10. Jamais Vu                       4:56
11. Hungover On A Tuesday           4:06
12. Matroshka                       5:38

Release Notes:

If you wonder too long about where to place a band like dredg, you'll miss where
they're going. The band slips between the cracks of whatever rock classifications
you try to stuff them into. Likewise, the Bay Area is just a mailing address;
dredg isn't evocative of any particular place or scene. So what do we make of a
band that makes music that's heavy, pretty, experimental and tuneful - sometimes
all in the same song? You can be frustrated that dredg rejects the idea that the
goal of music is to be easily described as a couple of buzz words. Or with
attentive ears and an open mind, you can enjoy the hell out of catch without
arms.

One thing that's clear about catch without arms is that, where the pleasures of
2002's El Cielo were more mysterious, occasionally lost in exciting but sometimes
confounding experimentation, catch without arms is perfectly, easily enjoyable.
These songs - especially "Matroshka," "Bug Eyes" and "Spitshine," - don't shy
away from big melodies. The tracks are as crammed with ideas as ever, but they're
also concise and immediate.

"It wasn't a conscious decision at all to be more accessible," says guitarist
Mark Engles. "We started looking at ourselves like, 'what are you afraid of? If
something sounds a little pretty or obtainable, don't be so afraid of it.'"

"I look at it as our writing maturing," adds singer Gavin Hayes. Together since
early high school years, this band has done nothing but mature together. They
recorded their debut, Leitmotif, in 10 days in 1998; Interscope signed the band
in 2001 and redistributed Leitmotif while sending the band into George Lucas's
Skywalker Ranch Studios to record El Cielo. Throughout, dredg toured
relentlessly.
"We've literally driven our van into the ground," says drummer Dino Campanella.
"We bought it brand new, and now the thing is totally dead, smelly, disgusting
and rat infested. We did 170,000 touring miles in that van and even more before
that and in Europe. Even a little mouse lived in the van for a few weeks, as we
discovered it one day while loading into a club somewhere I can't remember."
Essentially growing up together has built dredg's solid foundation of trust,
which gives each musician the freedom to experiment and push the music in new
directions. The trick for this disc was, after the expansive creativity of El
Cielo, to rein those impulses in.

"On catch without arms, we concentrated more on the flow of the songs, as
opposed to 'I want to throw in this weird part just because I want to do it.'
It doesn't mean that on the next record we won't do even more obscure stuff."

The result is an anything-goes approach to playing that now coheres around
Hayes's ascendant vocal melodies. Take "Bug Eyes": the song begins with
Hayes's shredding slide guitar, then shifts into a melody so honestly lovely
that you'd not necessarily notice Campanella's sexy way with a high-hat. The
fierce drumming and guitar crunch on "Tanbark" fit just as neatly under Hayes's
soaring tenor as it does the sly groove of "Zebraskin," which sounds like
something like a cross between Faith No More and Boz Scaggs. "Matroshka" is the
most openly pretty thing the band has ever done, built around acoustic guitar
and Campanella's piano (on stage, he'll sometimes play drums and piano
simultaneously) and anchored by bassist Drew Roulette's subterranean groove.

"Matroshka" may sound like a sunny spring day, but as is to be expected of
dredg, it's all a good bit more heady than that. The track takes its title from
Russian nesting dolls. "I thought that was a great visual for our whole universe,
the scale of things and how you perceive scale," Hayes says of the song. "We had
finished recording the record and we went back to record that song. It felt like
a closing song, it had a conclusive feel to it, and we didn't have a song that
did that, yet."

The need for a closing track was especially important given the theme of the
record. "The whole underlying basis of the lyrics and the music is opposites,
contrasts," Hayes says. "I'd written some lyrics that are based around
conversations or arguments, so we thought about a record with two halves that
contrast each other. The whole basis of the record could be about objection to
ideas, and contrast. On 'Planting Seeds,' one of the verses is from one person's
perspective and then the second verse is from the other person's perspective; the
chorus is the resolution of those two outlooks."

This overtly artistic take on life is unsurprising given dredg's steadfastly
creative bent. The band is as influenced by film, books and art as any kind of
music. Hayes and Roulettes did all the artwork for the new record; the band often
displays their paintings on stage. (An entire gallery of those paintings is
available at www.dredg.com/art.) The band recently scored the film Waterborne.

It's equally unsurprising, then, that the band would view its own situation
through this artistic prism with the track "catch without arms." Part of the
inspiration for lyrics like "sing about love, sing about lust/so they will care"
that's what happen when you compromise your art" was, according to Hayes, "The
expectation, what I feel I need to do to make people care about a song, rather
than just writing for what makes me happy. You always have this underlying worry
in your head - are people going to enjoy this? We want to make ourselves happy,
but it's not only about writing a good song, it's being able to connect with
people in some manner. That one was probably the most literal thing I've written
in a long time."

With catch without arms, dredg has succeeded in bridging the yawning chasm between
commercial viability and underground cool. "We've talked together about how we
find ourselves in that void between 'commercial' and indie hipness," Engles says.
But instead of looking at that void as a trap, the band embraced the idea that with
space, there's also room to grow.

"I think a word that sums up the record would be 'cleansing,'" Hayes says. "I think
the music has done that for our band. Not just a theme of the record, but what we
put forth for ourselves as musicians. I feel more confident in this record and what
we achieved with it. No matter how it's perceived or accepted, at least just for us,
it's been a step forward."

Forthcoming Album Catch Without Arms featuring Bug Eyes June 21, 2005