Valley Advocate - 9/28/2000

Springfield, MA

This is an excerpt from the article by Sean Glennon

     The thing that always struck me about Kevin O'Rourke back when we were working together was the way he always had a book in his hand. So when absolutely everyone I know who's in any way connected to the Northampton music scene started buzzing about Kevin's band, Lo Fine, I just assumed that one of the outfit's charms was smart lyricism.  O'Rourke's Lyricism turns on a subtle poeticism that neither flaunts the writer's intelligence nor shuns it.  There's no cleverness for the sake of cleverness in his words.  There's no self-conscious referencing of pop culture, nor self-aggrandizing referencing of high culture.  There is simply the honest effort of a lyricist who writes because he has something he needs to say, and who knows,  seemingly by instinct,  the best way to say it. 

     It is also expertly performed.  O'Rourke, who plays guitar and sings,  is supported by some stellar musicians - Mark Schwaber of Hospital on guitar; Bruce Tull,  formerly of the Scud Mountain Boys on pedal steel; Thane Thompson of the Figments on bass;  and Brian Todd of the Aloha Steamtrain and the Figments -  all of whom know how to let the music speak for itself.  O'Rourke effuses praise for all four,  expressing thanks for what they bring to Lo Fine and awe at what they've done in their other bands. 

     O'Rourkes songwriting is pop inflected with an undercurrent of sadness, it neither weighs you down nor wears you down, but it does settle you down.  It is music for those hours when it's much too late to be early.   I've never heard O'Rourke utter so much as a single word you could interpret as boastful.  You don't have to know him very long to recognize that he's just too real for that.  Impressing people is just not one of his priorities.  While they may be wintry, however, O'Rourke's songs aren't all glum.  O'Rourke has a sly sense of humor that creeps in from time to time.  In "Stay In Bed" he yearns to be paid for doing nothing.   "Part of it is me saying how I feel and the other part is me making fun of how I feel". he says of the song.  "It's sort of a quote from someone at their most defeated:  I just want to roll over and go back to sleep, because I hate people." That is an honest sentiment. It might not work for the kind of guy who dreams of becoming a rock star, mind you.  But for the kind of guy who walks around with a book in his hand, it's probably right on target.

Lo Fidelity

bomb pop

By Sean Glennon

Published 11/16/00

I can't stop thinking about Lo Fine. It's been almost two months since I wrote about the Northampton band and its smart, quiet, pretty and subtly twang-inflected brand of pop, a little longer since Lo Fine frontman Kevin O'Rourke gave me a CD with some rough mixes of the songs that will make up the band's debut long-player (which O'Rourke tells me is almost completely mixed), and I still think about the band and its music regularly. I also still listen to that disc at least twice a week.

It just seems like there's always something going on that reminds me of Lo Fine.

I read about how the Willard Grant Conspiracy has just released its fourth album in the United Kingdom (where the Boston-based band, still mostly unknown here at home -- and still trying to secure some notice for it's criminally overlooked third CD, Mojave -- has achieved a significant measure of success), and I think about how Lo Fine should and could be huge in Britain too.

Indeed, I've spent some time thinking about how Lo Fine should be signed to Slow River Records, the Rykodisc subsidiary that counts the Willard Grant Conspiracy, Josh Rouse and Charlie Chesterman among the artists on its roster -- which is to say it's a haven for terrific but underappreciated bands and songwriters.

And when I ran into Matt Hebert (of the Ware River Club) last week and we got to chatting about the Valley scene -- the same old conversation about who's gonna make it out of here, which for some reason never gets tiresome -- it was Lo Fine that came up first, and most strongly.

I was glad it was Hebert who brought them up, because that means maybe I'm not crazy -- I mean, you know, obsessive. (I'm not.) No doubt about it, Hebert knows music. He knows indie music. And he knows the local scene better than just about anyone (he proves it weekly on his Sunday-night local music show on WRNX).

I told him about how I think Lo Fine should do some shows with Willard Grant Conspiracy, and he piped up immediately. "They should be on Slow River," he said.

Great minds.

There's not a lot either Hebert or I can do with that opinion, of course. I have no involvement with Lo Fine whatsoever, other than knowing and liking most of its members (I've still never had more than a two-second interaction with bassist Thane Thomsen, but he seems a likable enough character). I have been and remain a fan of just about all of Lo Fine's members' other/main projects: Hospital (guitarist Mark Schwaber), the Figments (Thomsen and drummer Brian Marchese), the Aloha Steamtrain, the Potatoes and the Greenburgs (Marchese; and by way of disclosure, I should point out that I'm doing national publicity on the Steamtrain's new CD), and the Scud Mountain Boys (pedal steel player Bruce Tull).

Of course, that's neither here nor there, really, unless you figure it made me predisposed to like Lo Fine. But that's beside the point, which is that no one in Lo Fine has any reason to listen to me when I say they ought to do anything.

Hebert knows most of them better than I do. He's also, by way of Ware River Club, their partner in the Natural Disaster label/band collective (which also includes Treefort, Clementine and the Johnson Boys). And that, according to him, gives him absolutely no more influence than I have.

So, neither Matt Hebert nor I is going to be able to talk Lo Fine into approaching Slow River. And even if we could get them to make the first move, there's no way to persuade Slow River to see things our way.

It's frustrating, because this is a band that ought to make it out of here, a band that ought to be heard. And if American tastes are such (or, more to the point, if the American music industry is such) that Lo Fine isn't going to be heard or appreciated at home, the band should make it all the way to Britain, where it almost certainly would be embraced.

Willard Grant Conspiracy, which works a sound in many ways similar to Lo Fine's (soft and melancholic, melodic with country-ish instrumentation set in arrangements that are both spare and lush at once), is a terrific band.

But Lo Fine is better.

Indeed, Lo Fine is every bit as good as a number of acts that have made names for themselves working in that same vein, bands like Lambchop and Giant Sand.

O'Rourke is a better lyricist than Lampchop's Kurt Wagner (though Wagner's arranging talents are virtually unassailable). He's also better than WGC's Robert Fisher and Paul Austin and Giant Sand's Howe Gelb (though Gelb's rabid fans no doubt would howl in protest at the mere suggestion of this). I've even heard a few people whose opinions I respect suggest that O'Rourke is a better songwriter than Northampton/Scud Mountain Boys legend Joe Pernice, though, frankly, I'm not willing to go that far just yet.

Neither would O'Rourke, I'd wager. I wouldn't even go so far as to ask him about it.

O'Rourke is unerringly modest.

Actually, I think it's more than that. I don't know him all that well, but it seems to me that O'Rourke is a classic example of an artist who fails to recognize the scope of his own talent.

He's the kind of guy whose music makes you happy and sad all at once. You rejoice to hear that music, and you rejoice to know that it was created by a person as unassuming as O'Rourke. But then that makes you think about how the music world is full of semi-talented and untalented chest-thumpers (think Kid Rock or Eminem), who succeed due entirely to an unearned self-confidence -- and you wonder how things got all turned around.

And then you remember that it's a trap, that no one with the kind of swagger it takes to make it big in music could possibly write songs as sensitive and delicate as O'Rourke's.

When I do that, as I do all too often these days, I have to stop myself, remind myself that Lambchop, Giant Sand, Willard Grant Conspiracy, Vic Chesnutt and a bunch of others all have found an audience -- here and abroad. Or, more accurately, their audience has found them. All they had to do was resist the urge to run away.

So, I'll just sit back and hope that when a Slow River or a Merge does come across Lo Fine, O'Rourke and company will let themselves be found. Because everyone who loves good music should have a chance to hear this little Northampton band. *
-- By Sean Glennon