Four years into a ten-albums-in-ten-years vow, Missoula band Secret Powers is still making good on its pledge – and making more good music in the process. Just a few weeks ago, the band’s third album, “Lies and Fairy Tales,” was named the best power-pop album of 2010, by the Absolute Power Pop blog.
Tonight, the five-piece outfit (featuring Shmed Maynes on keyboards, John Fleming on bass, Dan Strachan on drums, and Ryan Farley and new member John Brownell on guitar) will release its fourth full-length record, “What Every Rose-Grower Should Know,” which reinforces the band’s reign as one of the country’s tightest and most adventurous power-pop outfits. [Read More...]
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Shmed Maynes had a simple goal in recording the newest record by his band, Secret Powers.
“I’m just trying to sound better doing the same thing,” said Maynes.
In that respect, “Lies and Fairy Tales” marks a resounding success for the local power-pop outfit, which has now released three full-length, self-produced albums of original music in as many years. [Read More...]
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“2010 is not really what we thought it would be,” sighs East Missoula resident Renee Crow. Coming from her, those words at once vastly understate and yet perfectly encapsulate the lows and highs of the past three months, dating back to the day just before Christmas when her husband, Michael, was involved in a serious car accident.
The accident left Michael with a hemorrhage in his left temporal lobe – an area of the brain where speech and memory are processed. The injury turned the lives of the couple and their 13-year-old son, Ben, upside down.
“If your brain is like a filing cabinet, it’s like someone took all the files and dumped them on the floor,” said Renee. “The information is still there, but it takes a lot more time to sort it all out. The simplest things like cooking or driving, things that ask you to do more than one thought process at a time, are really difficult and must be relearned. It’s incredibly debilitating.”
Adding insult to injury, the Crows lacked health insurance at the time of Michael’s accident. [Read More...]
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Imagine you’re a cop driving around one night, when you notice a van parked in a dark corner of a school parking lot. Stepping out of your squad car, you notice the subtle back-and-forth rocking of the van, the din of rock ‘n’ roll emanating from within. Feeling like you’ve just stepped into a scene from “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” you rap on the window.
The van door opens; and there sit two 30-something women with a guitar and a kid-sized drumset.
“Nothing to see here,” says one bashfully, “just a couple of moms having band practice.” [Read More...]
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After an 18-second snippet of music that sounds more like a station-ID jingle than the opening to a rock album, a strangely manipulated voice welcomes you to the latest album by Missoula band Secret Powers.
“Hi, how you doing,” the voice intones through the digital haze, “this is Father Shmed, podcasting live to you from the compound of the Electric Family Choir.”
So begins a conceit that runs through the rest of the album: Father Shmed as cult guru, interspersing loftily nonsensical proclamations about fateful electrocutions and extraterrestrial afterlife between songs. [Read More...]
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