Music: D. Biddle CD-release party at Hi-Dive

D. Biddle is getaway music, the kind you listen to when everything you cherish has burnt down, then before the dust even settles you pack-up whatever’s left and head for oblivion. The tension between oft-haunting melodies and lyrics that edge towards the poetically elegiac, quiver with urgency as well as immobility. D. Biddle traces the fallen structures of disaster, capturing in slow motion the gesture of catastrophe. Guileless emotional pitch tends to crescendo from an almost tender, though dark nostalgia into a series of aching blows and repetitions. In the title track of their newest CD, twisted imagery of “spiders” under the “moon bloody with violence” tips over into “rabbits all gather(ed) by the roadside.” This object-world that evokes childhood (no doubt textured with the sinister) coupled with the recurring theme of escape (packing up, dreaming into a place where “the world sings along out of key,” and death) collapses into a sort of innocence, echoing that adolescent narrative of running away from home. But D. Biddle doesn’t just make it a few blocks down the street until mom calls, this band edges into a territory where the landscape is singed at the rim and the weather is gloomy but close to painful in evocativeness.

Incidentally, front man, Duncan Barlow is also the author of Super Cell Anemia, published last year by Afterbirth Books. Tinted surrealist, drenched in horror, a guy ever on the verge of sudden (and a truly unique) death, wants a girlfriend (who has her own quirky web of issues).

Tomorrow evening (9:30pm), Friday June 13th, at Hi-Dive, 7 S. Broadway, local band D. Biddle will release newest CD, “Rabbit and the Moon.” (Sao Bento Music).

For more info:
www.dbiddle.com
www.myspace.com/dbiddle
www.saobentomusic.com
www.hi-dive.com
www.afterbirthbooks.com