AEM092 Uncles

Uncles is a col­lab­o­ra­tion between Dan Bate­man and Will Schwartz, two Queens-based song­writ­ers who grew up together in Yonkers, NY.  Seri­ously? If you’ve jumped straight to the music and are only now read­ing these words, as I’m wont to do, you’re prob­a­bly think­ing to your­self, “bull­shit, these guys are from the far­thest reaches of Appalachia.”  But sure enough, Bate­man is a born and bred New Yorker and his thick south­ern accent is present only when sings.  So, it’s con­trived? No, it’s quite the oppo­site.   As a child, he would often go down to his family’s acreage out­side of Birm­ing­ham, Alabama, where he was intro­duced to music by his grand­fa­ther who would sing for him in that same thick south­ern accent.

When you’re a baby, you don’t know how to cat­e­go­rize.  You see an apple and it’s an apple.  You see an banana and it’s a banana.  You see a car­rot and it’s a car­rot.  As you grow up you learn that the apple and banana are fruits while the car­rot is a veg­etable.  Sim­i­larly you learn that the bow­ing of a vio­lin and the beat­ing of a drum are music while the revving of a motor­cy­cle engine and the rustling of the wind through the trees are not—at least until you study musique concrète in col­lege and unlearn it all.  But I think that even as an adult, we’re prone to a sort of biased essen­tial­ism, through which our def­i­n­i­tion of the cat­e­gory is skewed by our expe­ri­ence with the spe­cific.  When I think city, I think New York City.  When I think cat, I think tabby cat, because my fam­ily kept one as a pet when I was young.  And I sus­pect that when Bate­man thinks music, he thinks of the music his grand­fa­ther used to sing for him as a child in Birm­ing­ham.  And so, while Uncles is plays a lot more than just folk, it’s clear that folk is at the core of the music that they create.

Bate­man and Schwartz have been play­ing together since mid­dle school.  Bate­man would return from his child­hood trips to Alabama and work with Schwartz to develop the songs he had writ­ten there.  By early high-school they had begun seek­ing out band mem­bers among the reg­u­lars at open-mic clubs, and they played their first show together at the ten­der age of 16 in Yonkers.  After pos­i­tive reviews from cowork­ers, they soon took their act to New York City, where they both even­tu­ally attended col­lege.  As time went on they broad­ened their musi­cal hori­zons and began to drew inspi­ra­tion from more var­ied sources.  In par­tic­u­lar, they cite the influ­ence of clas­sic 90’s indie rock out­fits such as Pave­ment, Guided By Voices, and The Pix­ies, and C&W singers like Hank Williams, George Jones, and Townes Van Zandt. By adult­hood, each had devel­oped an eclec­tic musi­cal and com­po­si­tional voice and together they gained recog­ni­tion per­form­ing at New York City’s folk and indie-rock dives, as well as at nearby Wes­leyan, Bard, and Vas­sar col­leges.  In addi­tion to Bate­man and Schwartz, Uncles uti­lizes a rotat­ing ensem­ble to back their songs which includes a dou­ble bassist, vio­lin, pianists, and drum­mers.  Their per­for­mance is musi­cally diverse, with dif­fer­ent mem­bers of the ‘Uncles Ensem­ble’ bring­ing their train­ing from free jazz, clas­si­cal, and folk idioms to sup­port the songs.

But vocals are the cen­tral fea­ture of Bate­man and Schwartz’s song­writ­ing, thanks to their sur­pris­ing  deliv­ery (Bateman’s rough coun­try drawl) and their their con­tent, which spans all top­ics, from the most mun­dane to the pro­found.  “There’s a lot of sex,” they  explain, “some urban grit, a fair share of plain­tive mid-western bal­ladeer­ing, tales of nursing-home demen­tia, and plenty of vio­lence, too.”  Basi­cally, there’s some­thing for every­one.  Only when you lis­ten to the lyrics does it really hit you that this band is not from Alabama but from the Big Apple’s exten­sive sprawl. I would never have made the com­par­i­son after only hear­ing their music but after see­ing the lyrics on paper, I instantly thought Tom Waits. The sex and urban grit are expressed in a pierc­ing but beau­ti­ful beat­nik prose.

A-side “Settler’s Song” begins with a sen­ti­men­tal and folksy gui­tar gui­tar riff which Bate­man’s vocals cut through.  Grad­u­ally atmos­pheric tex­tures and per­cus­sion (really, it’s  just a few well placed clicks) flush out the sound.   Schwartz’s har­monies also give the song a lot more punch.  But it’s the lyrics that hit hard­est. They’re impres­sively vivid.   Phrases such as, “I wanna hear my shit pump­ing from an SUV down a side street bend,” sound a bit funny in Bateman’s sig­na­ture Appalachian drawl but try and look beyond the irony, because this isn’t The Gourds’ cover of Snoop Dogg’s Gin & Juice—it’s a por­trait of a neigh­bor­hood.  Bate­man begins, “In the days of Settler’s Songs,” an image which evokes a dis­tant past, but as the song unfolds, it describes the mod­ern day set­tlers of a decid­edly urban environment.

“Babysit­ters feed Hi-C
To lit­tle for­eign boys scream­ing and
suck­ing on their sweat­shirt strings…
Cracked and torn, faces scorn
Domini­cans sip­ping 40 ounces
Sit­ting bent up on the metal grate on the nail salon”

The imagery is fresh and pre­cise.  “Settler’s Song” cul­mi­nates with the most resound­ing  image of all, a grand­mother singing her settler’s song to God’s son upon the man­tel.  Evok­ing a Russ­ian folk tune and the Amer­i­can west­ern fron­tier, she sings:

“Kalinka maya have I done wrong by ya
Is there some­thing for us in these yawn­ing miles
Creases of Ohio, kalinka maya, have I done wrong by ya.”

B-Side “Where Does It Sleep” fea­tures Schwartz in the song­writ­ing roll. It’s less catchy (read: less poppy) but every bit as potent. Acoustic gui­tar, elec­tronic tex­tures, and a bowed upright bass pro­vide a solid foun­da­tion for the vocals. Again, the lyrics are the focus and because the song is rhyth­mi­cally more sparse than “Settler’s Song” and with pauses between most phrases, it’s a lit­tle eas­ier to digest each image sep­a­rately. My favorite verse:

“He who howls in the wilder­ness
To pave way for no room
No mat­ter how he speaks or what he eats
He’s still an ani­mal in his sleep”

Uncles’s debut album, Replac­ing Words with Other Words—inci­den­tally one of the most won­der­ful album titles I’ve heard in recent years—will be released on Fri­day, April 24th and will be avail­able for free down­load on Ampeater for a lim­ited time.  To cel­e­brate the release, Uncles will also be throw­ing a party at Littlefield’s in Gowanus at 8:00pm.  It’s a telling sign that Bate­man and Schwartz have been play­ing together since mid­dle school and are only now releas­ing their debut album.  Replac­ing Words With Other Words is the prod­uct of a many year cycle of writ­ing, record­ing, and sub­se­quently scrap­ping orig­i­nal mate­r­ial and the ten songs that made it through that process are spot on.

Nate Green­berg

[[[Down­load the 7-inch]]]