Originally printed in
Independent Online
March 24, 2004
Releigh Rhythms
By Grayson Currin
It seems that after making music together in some form for over a decade, any sort of a fresh start would be virtually impossible. But don't tell that to Ticonderoga, the Raleigh trio of Iowa City transplants Wes Phillips, Mark Paulson and Phil Moore that hopes to use their new hometown and new three-man format to make their most ambitious and honest music yet.
"Hopefully, we'll be releasing a lot of music here because we've decided that we don't want to self-edit as much as we thought we had to in the past," says Wes Phillips, who moved here two years ago and immediately started longing for his childhood friends, Mark Paulson and Phil Moore. "Everything we do, it's going to be released."
And they do a lot. Though they've only played a handful of shows so far, they gained instant attention for their plans to have burned discs (sometimes an entire album or EP) of their new material for those interested at each of their shows. For their Raleigh premiere at Kings two months ago, the band recorded their entire set in advance and produced dozens of free copies for the people at the show.
"I'm not sure we're going to be able to keep up with the pace of a new CD at every show...we may have set the bar a little bit high for ourselves on that one," says Paulson, sitting in the band's house on Ashe Street in Raleigh.
The bulk of the material stems from the band's songwriting philosophy: Phillips, Paulson and Moore all write songs individually and then present them to the group with the idea that they'll immediately be split apart at the seams and reconstructed.
The formula, as indicated by the band's two releases to date, works. The "folk aesthetic" inherent in the group's songwriting is twisted around a Sophtware Slump-type seamlessness and John Vanderslice-size smarts.
The band--whose reception in the downtown music circuit has been extremely warm (deservedly so)--headlined the Cat's Cradle Sunday Showcase last week and already has five more shows booked for the next month. They will play April 2 at Bickett Gallery.
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