Let New Days Dawn $0.47

About Let New Days Dawn

With brooding intensity and multilayered influences, A Cautionary Tale’s songs range from hard edged to intricate, powerful to delicate, haunting to joyful. Their sound packs a cerebral yet satisfying punch, offering unexpected details and surprises at every turn.

The Willamette Week:
"Gleefully unmarketable" is how A Cautionary Tale's own website describes the madcap quartet. That's pretty damn accurate, and also a glorious endorsement. The band slaps together enough influences to create a virtual anthology of the past 40 years of music. Lounge jazz gives away to maniacal forays into punkish electricity; saxophones wail over split-time beats before descending into hard rock and melodic musical breakdowns laced with classical guitar. It's a remarkable monsoon of musicianship—a relentless sonic sucker punch that leaves you salivating for more.

The Portland Tribune:
“Indie rock” has grown to encompass such a wide diversity of sounds that it’s almost useless as a description. Local art-rockers A Cautionary Tale liven things up with the addition of instruments like saxophone and xylophone, creating music that’s at once hypnotic and complex. While members boast impressive credentials and backgrounds in jazz and flamenco, the resulting creative output is more akin to the mesmerizing sounds of bands like Morphine and Pinback, and equally accessible.

The Portland Mercury:
A Cautionary Tale is made up of Chris Glaab (bass, sax), Rich Boles (classical guitar, xylophone), Nick O'Donnell (bass, jazz guitar), Kevin van Geem (drums), with each member handling vocals. The local combo cites acts like Pinback, Pharaoh Sanders, and Black Eyes as influences, and their sound is somewhere in the midst of said heavyweights with a little loungey, Latin flavor to sweeten the deal. Much like the Black Heart Procession's salsa-fied Amore del Tropico, when these locals are on, their mix of indierock and world music is downright intoxicating.

The Portland Mercury:
Too bad for A Cautionary Tale, that they missed the lounge resurgence of the mid '90s as their skillful blend of bossa nova, cocktail jazz, and indie ballads would make any tiki head salivate. Tonight marks the release of their debut album, Let New Days Dawn, a sophisticated pop music bounty, adorned with xylophones and smooth flamenco guitar licks...A damned impressive piece of work, boys! JB