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Musical Family Tree Delicious Berries, Vol. 1

Monday, July 17, 2006

The regional rock comp has a rather illustrious history in Indiana and surrounding areas, with Bloodstains Across the Midwest and Red Snerts leading the way, but many, many others following behind. For a long time now, the Musical Family Tree has done all of them one better, in a manner of speaking, by basically compiling a dense, searchable online database of like every Indiana rock band ever. The Gizmos are there. So is Antenna. And the legendary Cadmium Orange. And Vinyl Star and United States Three and Old Pike and so on and so on. And now they’ve gone and put the whole thing into the time machine and issued Volume One of what will hopefully become a long-running CD series, so you can hold something in your hand to show your friends. It’s called Delicious Berries, and it covers many of the current bases of Indy Indie rock. Here are a couple.

Vess Ruhtenberg “Is It Good?” (mp3). Ruhtenberg is as close to current Indy Indie rock royalty as you can get unless your name’s John Strohm or Margot or Jason Molina (kinda). He’s played with local legends Datura Seeds and the aforementioned United States Three, fronted the short-lived indie pop gem The Pieces, and played with the reformed Indy punk legends Zero Boys. This song is indicative of his unique MO—fuzzy, effervescent pop with a quick melody that lodged itself in my head yesterday and has yet to leave. I promise it will happen to you as well.

Marmoset “Treat A Boy” (mp3) A minor wonder, Jorma Whittaker is. His band Marmoset has been around since they dropped an EP on Secretly Canadian in 1997, before Secretly Canadian was Secretly Canadian. Since then, well, it’s been spotty from an amount of new material perspective, but stellar quality-wise. I like Whittaker for the same reasons I like Kurt Heasley from Lilys; they both have strong songwriting chops, but they don’t let that get in the way of a propensity toward loose lyricism and rubbery psychedelia. “Treat A Boy” is a demo from an upcoming record on SC that you should look forward to.

Oh yeah, get the full tracklisting and then buy the Musical Family Tree compilation CD here.

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