For Folk's Sake » Draw Me Stories

Single: Draw Me Stories — Becomes the Hunted/Oars

FFS writers — Sat, 08 May 2010 12:03:27 +0000

Draw Me Stories have a dark, foreboding, mood that infects their music. It’s a quality they share with cult 90’s emo pioneers Sunny Day Real Estate. It also makes for addictive listening.

Their new single contains the songs ‘Becomes the Hunted’ and ‘Oars’. On ‘Becomes the Hunted’ they shift between spacey, shoegaze melodies and harder-edged moments that recall the coldest parts of Sunny Day Real Estate. ‘Oars’ combines the subtle dreaminess of Radioheads Ok Computer with the experimental passages that have decorated the finest moments of the Mars Voltas back catalogue. The vocals have the emotional dexterity and beautiful fragility of Wild Beasts, Jeff Buckley, and Jeremy Enigk.

This is not to say though that this is an exercise in moodiness alone. Elements of funk and jazz creep in to the songs, meaning that there are times when you want to dance as much as recline. A very enjoyable single from a band who’s eclecticism, and musical proficiency, leaves you wondering whether this could be the beginning of something big.

Words: Damien Girling

Single: Draw Me Stories – Becomes The Hunted/Oars

Ian Parker — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 10:31:26 +0000

Draw Me Stories have turned the power back on. Following up on last year’s album The Unplugged Sessions and The Sky And The Mirror EP, they return with the new double A side single Becomes The Hunted/Oars, and it represents the most sweeping, frenetic material in their diverse output to date.

If they’ve been known to roam from sweet acoustic sounds to funk-infused rock in the past, these latest tracks are definitely at the latter end of that scale. You can go back to acts like Dark Star and Placebo to find a bit of the sound Draw Me Stories are working with here, but as always they’ve added their own tinge to produce two fine tracks.

Becomes The Hunted is a broody, haunting track as swirling guitars top the frantic drumming to back an ominous message, while Oars is more playful, even if the mood of the lyrics hasn’t lifted all that much.

They combine to grab the attention in a powerful double A-side, and you can only wonder what these musical chameleons will produce next.

Becomes The Hunted/Oars is available now via www.rawrip.com/drawmestories

Alessi’s Ark, Treetop Flyers and Draw Me Stories play charity gig at Union Chapel

Lynn Roberts — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 15:07:32 +0000

The enchanting Alessi’s Ark will headline a concert in aid of leukemia charity The Anthony Nolan Trust.

The gig on 28th January will be held at London’s Union Chapel and will feature support from FFS favourites West Londoners Treetop Flyers and the ‘Diff’s Draw Me Stories.

Alessi said: “I met Cheryl, the lady organising the concert, last summer at Southsea festival and she mentioned the concert then and her hopes of it raising awareness of the charity trust through music.

“My aunt has been on the registry for years and it’s something my family and I are very passionate about.

And we can thank Alessi for more than just her own appearance on the line up. She explained: “When Cheryl was looking for another band to join the bill I suggested the Treetop Flyers as they’re a local band and have a lovely sound.”

About the only thing that could top an evening in a beautiful venue with those three bands is perhaps knowing the monies we handed over to see them will be doing some good too.

Tickets are £9.35 (incl. booking fee) if you get them from We Got Tickets. Doors open at 7pm.

Words: Lynn Roberts

EP: Draw Me Stories — The Sky and the Mirror

Lynn Roberts — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 19:49:26 +0000

Already spurred by critical acclaim from their first album and their stonking live performances, the Cardiff trio have released The Sky and the Mirror, an impressive collection of four songs infused with rock, a dash of funk and lashings of folk.

The EP takes us on a journey as the tone ranges from light-hearted and folk-tastic to melancholic. The first song ‘The You & Me Theatre’ is the kind of song made for idle cider Sunday afternoons in the park, crammed with deep bass lines, twee guitars and the ingenious use of a cowbell. However, the songs progress to reveal slightly darker more questioning themes. Songs such as ‘Spider’ and ‘Heart Attack’ bring out a more seasoned and intense sound with delicate lyrics and soulful guitar riffs. We finish on ‘Blindfold’ a crashing climax of a song that will add fuel to the Jeff Buckley comparisons. Repeated lyrics such as “Where is my God?/I’m waiting for my God” and raw backing vocals create a sense of urgency and fundamental questioning, a far cry from the cowbells and tambourines that kick-started the EP.

Overall Draw me Stories, in the space of four songs, manage to conjure a roller-coaster of emotions and with talent and promise such as this it’s no surprise that we want to get on and join them.

Words: Selina Nwulu

Album: Draw Me Stories – The Unplugged Sessions

Lynn Roberts — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 12:12:32 +0000

Fixing you into a lazy haze-filled melancholy from the get go, Draw Me Stories bring their second album of folk infused ambience, this time with added roots. Following on from their debut The Plugged Sessions, the Welsh troupe unplug and play with their voices and more instrumentation to create a delicious album full of transcendental hymns.

Carl Hodgetts’ hauntingly poetic voice really begins to cascade through the veins on ‘Secret War’ as the sound of an accepted fate carries you through a story told through hurt filled sighs and groans. The Unplugged Sessions really does do what it intends, by stripping everything down to its purest form, beginning with the vocals and continuing throughout the bongo percussion and the strumming of the desolate acoustic guitar.

Echoing Damien Rice at his spirited best, Draw Me Stories fill their songs with tales of personal failure or love long lost, and it remains just as captivating. ‘Heart Attack’ and ‘Comes & Smiles & Leaves’ could have been plucked from a 1960’s heyday of mid-English folk nostalgia, with or without the possibilities of hallucinogenics.

When the guys plug in, they’re known for switching between the tempo of an indie anthem or a twee folk tune, and creating the same kind of opposed musical paces is more difficult while stripped to the bare essentials, but with added creaks in the voice, fastest number ‘Shake’ adds a welcome change of pace to the album, however short lived.

The delicacy and intimacy of tracks such as ‘The Oak Tree’ are not uncommon, but they are rarely done as well as evident here. A misty summer fate is perfect accompaniment to a record of such ambient melodrama as The Unplugged Sessions.

Words: Peter Clark

FFS Ones to watch: Draw Me Stories

Lynn Roberts — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 07:45:36 +0000

“There’s a difference between a Welsh band and a Wales-based band,” says Draw Me Stories singer, Carl Hodgetts. “Wales can be a bit insular and much of the music that comes out of here is pigeonholed. People are often surprised that we’re not Welsh.”

Indeed, the three men sat around me in Cardiff’s Buffalo Bar are decidedly un-Welsh. One of them, Mat, is French, for a start. The other two, Carl and Sam, hail from Birmingham and Cambridge respectively, and none of them have even the faintest Welsh twang to their accents, despite having lived, worked and studied here for years.

Draw Me Stories (named so by Sam following an afternoon of boredom induced scribbling in a GAP storeroom) formed in January 2008. Their music, Carl says, is “Really tricky to define. We’ve got a lot of clean guitars and driving beats and it’s got a lot of an Americana sound. But we’ve also been described as ‘quirky’.” Certainly, this almost rockabilly tone is apparent in ‘Comes & Smiles & Leaves’ but contrasts with tracks like the more sombre ‘Secret War’ and funky jazz inspired ‘The Windows in the Hearts of the Guilty’. This fusion of genres under their umbrella of a prevailing folk sound can only really be described as ‘quirky’, yes. However, asked to describe their music in one word, the band chooses ‘organic’.

“We never sat down and said, ‘Let’s start an indie band’ or whatever,” says Carl. “Every time we go to the practice room what we do just comes out.”

“We never run out of songs to work on,” agrees Sam, described on their MySpace pages as ‘The Vibration Maker’. “We’ve got about four or five songs that we’re working on.”

“We’re already sitting on 16 or 17 songs and we’ve still got more to come,” Carl adds, enthusiastically. “It’s possible that in the next two or three months we could have enough songs for two or three full albums.”

Given the sheer variety of songs the band already has under its collective belt and in light of the many more yet to blossom forth in an organic burst of creativity, Draw Me Stories are clearly unafraid of playing with their music. Influenced by a rainbow of artists ranging from Chemical Brothers to Sons of Noel and Adrian (“They blew me away,” says Carl. “I haven’t heard anything like them in a while.”), they are, as Mat says “open to a lot of different music.” (Mat even lists Slipknot on his current playlist, “The others hate it though”).

It’s this liberal musical thinking that has enabled them to experiment freely with both acoustic and wired tracks and to create albums, ‘The Plugged Sessions’ and ‘The Unplugged Sessions’ (both available on www.rawrip.com).

“I do enjoy the plugged sessions,” says Carl. “I enjoy standing up and dancing around. If you sit down and play an unplugged set and everyone’s listening it can be amazing, but sometimes you find that people think that you’re a lounge band and they forget that you’re there.”

But it’s because of their decision to actively pursue an unplugged sound that the band has been able to, as they say, “explore their own music.”

“At the beginning we just used to play the usual bass, guitar and drums,” says Mat. “But when we started with the unplugged stuff we started to use other instruments. I started with the glockenspiel and Sam started with the spoons.” (Sam interjects here to confirm his spoon-playing status as ‘expert’). Mat continues, “Because it’s acoustic we were able to record it ourselves. If you go into a recording studio you only have like, a weekend to record your sound and it has to be done, unless you want to pay more, of course. This wasn’t an issue for us and so we had the chance to spend a lot of time on the music and be really happy with it. There was no rush and we could play around with harmonies and different sounds.”

Draw Me Stories will be going into the studio in a couple of weeks to record their “big, as yet un-named EP,” which they hope will be out around June or July, “ready for the summer and sitting in parks and chilling out,” says Carl. No doubt the title will eventually present itself to them as naturally and organically as their wonderful unique brand of folk music already has.

Words: Rachel England

For Folk's Sake » Draw Me Stories

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