There are a couple of stories involving the visit of Australia’s fine, fine rock and roll band Dappled Cities on this past July 19. They’re mostly periphery stories not necessarily involving the group’s stop here at the headquarters, but were a direct result of its anticipated arrival and then its having been here. We get many a record sent to us every day via the U.S. postal service, and have had this lovely predicament for many years now. Nothing gets by us and yet not everything is caught either. It’s just the way things are, sad as they may be. The volume of things posted us and the lessons learned through time has made it so that I don’t read those puffy band biographies that get stuffed in the yellow bubbled envelopes with the promotional copies of albums. They are useless ‘cept for the journalist with a billion other things to do, in need of the bullet points, which inevitably turn into the ledes for every piece about a band during the album cycle — good, bad or whatever. I’d listened to the Dappled Cities album enough to know that it would be terrific to have them by, but I knew nothing else about them. I was aware that they were accented and just assumed those were English accents so I told Pat that they were blokes from the old country, when he sought some preliminary info on them. When they arrived, naturally, he greeted them with a quip like, “So you guys are from England, right?” and they replied, bewildered, “Is that a joke?” Priceless. The band stopped in while they were out on the road with our old friends Tokyo Police Club – a tour that we’re sorry we missed seeing – and they were immaculate. It was one of the rare sessions that hit us 10 times harder than we thought it would. They made jaws crack against the floor and still have us reeling nearly a month later. It’s a great feeling. The feeling was mutual because we received reports, days afterwards from various members of their camp that they were sporting our tee-shirts for television appearances and meet-and-greets in the Filter magazine offices. If we had one of their shirts, we’d be doing likewise. – Sean Moeller

First song
Granddance (Dappled Cities) [3.80MB] [1361 downloads]


– original version appears on Granddance
I wrote the opening riff of this song first. The song is meant to seem kind of old fashioned, kind of 50s-based and folky while still having the energy of a guitar band.

Second song
Fire Fire Fire (Dappled Cities) [3.81MB] [1375 downloads]


– original version appears on Granddance
This was a hard one to write since it seemed so simple when we came up with it. But then we just realized how enjoyable the directness of the song can be.

Third song
Color Coding (Dappled Cities) [7.20MB] [1416 downloads]


– original version appears on Granddance
On the album version of this, we hadn’t really finalized an ending. This version has an extended ending which is more like what we would have wished for on the album: big, brash and absurdly psych.

Fourth song
Holy Chord (Dappled Cities) [5.00MB] [1414 downloads]


– original version appear son Granddance
I love a song that builds to a point where everybody feels that a big change has to happen. Again I wanted a kind of folk song with singing partners to erupt into a balls out 70s rock thing. I hope that it works.