Wrong Along music video made by Ivo BystricanIt Is Not Me music video made by Jan PavlatskyI am Afraid Of You music video by AH AmakPLEASE THE TREES debut album LION PRAYER is OUT NOW at Absent Hour Records!!
The record credits: The band:
Zdenek Kadlec – guitars,
Karel Sychra – bass,
Vac Havelka – vocals, guitars,
Jaroslav KlÃpa – drums ( exchanged after the recording for David Koukal ),
Dan Cerny – keyboards
Guests:
Lenka Krobotová – vocals,
Anna Geislerová – vocals,
Bethany Lacktorin – vocals, violin,
Jirà Panschab – banjo,
AH. AMAK – synth., strings programing, keyboards, vocals and editing
Music by Please The Trees except Wrong along, I..m afraid of you and It..s not me by Vac Havelka and Please The Trees
Lyrics by Vac Havelka
Produced by AH. AMAK & Please The Trees
Recorded live by AH. AMAK ( aka. Michal Stastny, bassplayer of the band Sunshine www.sunshinetrash.com ) and Patrick Kucera at the AIRHEAD STUDIO PRAGUE at the
white nights of 25th November 2006 and 7th March 2007
www.airhead.cz - www.absenthour.cz - www.myspace.com/absenthourrecords
YOU CAN ORDER THE RECORD through: [email protected] All the members of Please the Trees may have been born in the Czech Republic, but when they take the stage, some concertgoers may be surprised to find their melodic sound has little to do with Prague. It might be because the leader, songwriter and co-founder Vaclav Havelka have always taken inspiration from the outside. Although he's referring mostly to his songwriting, every aspect of Havelka's production, touring and artistic direction reflects a careful distance. Emerging on the Prague scene in 2004 as the founder of solo songwriter..s project selFbrush, he navigated an odd, compelling mix of alt-country and eclectic
lo-fi that continued through the project's 2006 release Three Names (on Havelka..s own Absent Hour Records). Havelka's identification with the geographic frontiers of rock is as much by circumstance as by choice. "I'm not from Prague, I was born in Pardubice," he says. "My interest in music started with grunge and the Seattle scene, back then I was living in the woods." The woods he refers to are the north Bohemian mountain resorts, where his parents made a career as traveling hotel workers. Because of this semi-nomadic past, Havelka's diverse musical taste owes more to the rural post offices near Harrachov than anything broadcast from the Prague-centered media. His formative years of trading homemade cassettes by mail left him with a colorful and complex musical background.
Explaining his continuing preference for roaming tastes, Havelka says, "In Prague, it's hard to get fresh air. When Joanna Newsome or Coco Rosie plays in Prague, it's presented like the newest thing. But the entire free-folk scene is a 5-year-old movement. With the Internet today, though, it is all there for the digging and I'm happy to dig for new music, even going to Germany or elswhere in Europe to see shows. But what is the inspiration for young bands here? It's London and MTV, as if England is the center of the musical universe. It is in many ways the center, but you also have scenes in Australia and New Zealand, and just beyond London there is Manchester, Bristol and Ireland. I felt always closer to the american alternativ scene."
And a mere two hours beyond Prague there is a small town Tabor, where Havelka's current band mates formed a group called Some Other Place in 2003, and in 2004 released an internationally distributed CD, To be continued ... (on Free Dimension Records). Stripping down the grandeur of '90s rock into minimalist dynamics and textures, Some Other Place remains one of the country's more distinctive and enjoyable stage acts. In fact, it's a mystery why they haven't gained more local or even global attention.
Further adding to the puzzle, with Havelka being the sort of person more likely to have a Woody Guthrie biography tucked into his knapsack than a stack of Tortoise CDs, it was a bit of a shock to hear he had teamed up with an experimental spin-off from Tabor's predominately hard core-influenced scene. The connection between selFbrush and Some Other Place, Havelka says by way of explanation, is "more personal and spiritual than anything else."
Whatever the chemistry between these two seemingly disparate spirits, both onstage and on their 2006 debut CD Lion Prayer (on Absent Hour Records), the results are timely enough. Within the post-'90s currents of their sound ripple echoes of everything from the expressionism of Germany's Popol Vuh and Scotland's Mogwai to the experimental '60s folk epics that American artists like Ron Elliot, Neil Young and Jack Nitzsche dabbled in. That Please the Trees is benefiting creatively from what at first seems an odd coupling grows increasingly apparent on the group's newest material, which leverages their airborne synthesis to ramble even further off the musical map. Although Please the Trees' sound may have something of the drama former Bob Dylan producer Daniel Lanois mastered in his work with U2 and Belladonna, Havelka and his band mates are far from being Dylan folk-rock acolytes. Rather, their dedication to originality is reminiscent of what Dylan once said to The Los Angeles Times' Robert Hilburn: "You can't just copy somebody."
For The Prague Post written by Darrell Jónsson can be reached at
[email protected]
