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DENALI

(JADE TREE)

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Given Jade Tree’s predilection for overcooked emo rock, the last thing anyone should expect from this Delaware indie stronghold is a cycle of post-punk torch songs from a quartet of good-looking Virginia kids who probably own as many Joy Division bootlegs as import-only Massive Attack singles. Yet that’s exactly what Denali delivers, its coolly subdued fervor taking on a mature, sophisticated luster next to the sweaty emotional bloodletting that characterizes most of Jade Tree’s output. Credit singer Maura Davis, a trained opera singer with an electric-piano jones who formed Denali by asking her older brother Keeley, who plays in the Richmond hardcore band Engine Down, to help her give some heft to the songs she’d been writing over the past couple years. The Davises (along with their two bandmates and producers Mark Linkous and Alan Weatherhead, both of Sparklehorse) keep Maura’s voice at the center of these songs, where she uncoils cryptic poetry like an undergraduate niece of Portishead’s Beth Gibbons while allowing the sympathetic instrumental din to billow around her like fog. Solid proof that denim-wearing indie-rockers haven’t run out of ideas quite yet.

BY MIKAEL WOOD

Issue Date: August 8 - 15, 2002
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