Misty Monday VII

Today its up to Lost in the Trees to give us a nice start up of this week.

Lost in the Trees is an American orchestral folk pop band from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Their current line up consists of: Ari Picker (writer/vocals), Emma Nadeau (french horn/vocals), Drew Anagnost (cello), Jenavieve Varga (violin), and Mark Duamen (tuba). Lead singer Ari Picker cites diverse influence such as Beethoven, Radiohead, Vivaldi, Neutral Milk Hotel, Saint-Saëns, and OutKast, among others. In march this year they released a new album called: "A Church That Fit Our Needs" In the summer of 2009 Ari Picker – writer, composer, and architect of the band – lost his mother, an artist in her own right, when she took her own life. Picker was in the midst of releasing his band’s debut album, All Alone in an Empty House, a collection of folk-inflected songs that surprised with its orchestral arrangements. Picker took the loss of his mother and set about transforming the events into a tribute, composing, writing lyrics, his mother’s picture above his writing desk: the same picture that now graces the album’s cover.

“I wanted to give her a space, in the music, to be, and to become all the things she didn’t get a chance to be when she was alive.” Here's the video of the song "Red" While this might sound on paper like a somber affair, A Church That Fits Our Needs is anything but. Picker, a classically trained composer, has Shostakovich and Stravinsky at his fingertips, but the music on this album speaks just as much to his love of Phil Spector and old film scores. The swooping strings on “Golden Eyelids” could come straight out of an old Drifters hit, while the orchestral breakdowns in the midst of “Red” recall the haunting soundtracks Bernard Herrmann composed for Alfred Hitchcock. It's a beautiful album, nice arranged songs and choirs. It has a real misty monday feeling and it wil allso be a nice christmas record due to the nice choirs. Here's a soundcloud link.