Dusty Rhodes and The River Band – Palace and Stage

Well, thanks to receiving an awesome “advance copy” of the album (meaning a CD with a white piece of paper that lists the song titles), I had absolutely no information to go off of here. Repeated listens have shown me that Dusty Rhodes and the River sounds like they could be, oh, seven different bands or so – there’s a plethora of styles explored and about three or four different people singing leads through the album.

I’ll tell you this – the band sounds, through repeated listens of Palace And Stage, like Modest Mouse, a ferociously unashamed Beatles rip-off band, a Caribbean party band getting wasted around a campfire, and the more straight-forward moments in an Arcade Fire album if that band was into using a violin all the time. It’s a strange album, hands down.

Wikipedia and Side One internet research shows that the band’s from Anaheim, that this is their 2nd full-length, that they dress like a bunch of “wacky” musicians in bowlers and buckskin shirts and that they do apparently have three vocalists. “Andy” sounds like something straight from the Beatles catalog, almost eerily so, while “Sorry For Now” is reminiscent of something plaguing alterna-rock stations back in the 90s alongside Blind Melon (whom DR&TRB have apparently toured with). “W.W.M.D.?” dives deep into the pool of classic rock riffs and guitar/vocal tradeoffs – probably the best tune on the album – and “Davidians”, with its undercurrent of keyboards and lilting vocal rhythms, could be an outtake from the last Modest Mouse record. “So Low” showcases violinist Andrea Babinski’s voice in a song that sounds like the trailer for a movie about Candyland and the last song, “Quejao”, is the one that sounds Seu Jorge getting wasted in his sleeping bag. The record is, from the first note to the last, just all over the goddamn place. While the schizophrenic nature of the vocal changes lends a certain scattershot feel throughout the record as a whole – like I said, once you start to get used to a certain vocalist, someone entirely new seems to be singing the next one – Palace And Stage is essentially a strange amalgamation of Americana worship and reasonably heavyhanded British Invasion knockoffs.

Palace And Stage seems a strange outing for Side One Dummy, though they should, I guess, be congratulated on their willingness to sign a band that falls under that ever-expansive umbrella of “indie rock.”DR&TRB certainly aren’t easily definable, which may be to their credit – Palace And Stage felt like a sampler with at least three different bands spread throughout; if you don’t care for one song, chances are good the next one will sound completely different.