aldenbarton

When Andrew St. Aubin moved to New York in the summer of 2004, he had a picture in his mind of what he wanted his new world to look like. He’d come of age in New Hampshire on the fringe an accidental music scene; playing in The Princeton Reverbs Colonial, he recorded his first album with The Olivia Tremor Control’s Bill Doss. Athens was no more home than Vegas had been, and California beckoned with promises of sunny new musical projects that were eclectic but scattered.Enter the cacophony of millions: people cramming into train cars at rush hour, prancing down streets singing to themselves, heading alone to crowded bars in the hopes of speaking to one another. St. Aubin’s streamlined notions of New York life began to adapt to the city’s cleverly orchestrated sense of loneliness. While looking for fellow musicians to play with, he sat at his piano and created melodic puzzle pieces, trying to figure out how they would fit together. He began to play solo shows under the name Aldenbarton, using a guitar or keyboard and a backing track to fill in the musical blanks.Eventually, people connect, puzzle pieces begin to fit together, and New York’s individualism gives way to a sense of shared space. The end result is Exodus of the Eldest, a mini-album centered around the strangeness of our everyday lives. As Aldenbarton, St. Aubin captures the sense of displacement between grown and growing siblings, the irreversibility of one’s upbringing, and the explosion of feeling that comes from seeing your favorite band live for the first and final time. Even the simple act of waiting for the morning train is captured here in jubilant song.The result pairs elegant harmonies with rowdy drumrolls, raucous pianos with irresistible melodies, and the general feeling that every ordinary moment is characterized by its unpredictability. These songs change course when you least expect them to, but the path they follow is simply pop at its finest.In a city full of musicians, full of the business of music, and full of its critics, Aldenbarton is a purveyor of the idea that at base, “simply pop” is the best thing we can hope for.--"aldenbarton plays a certain brand of indie power-pop that requires an amount of skill and charm that not every musician is capable of exhibiting, no matter their level of talent. So it’s a good thing these guys are all excellent musicians with skill and charm to burn. Their sometimes/somewhat-retro sound, with its big rhythms and dramatic shifts, is played with a sincerity that stands in stark contrast to much of the ironic tendency seen and heard in many bands today. They’ll soon be releasing their first album, Exodus Of The Eldest."--- www.stereoactivenyc.com