Listen, this is pretty much how it went: Dubious Ranger all started with Alexander Eccles. Alexander was a classical piano prodigy who dreamed of nothing more than writing music like Robert Schumann and owning his own amusement park. Everything was going swimmingly until about 2002, when two very important things happened. First, he got real bummed out about stuff and junk and dropped out of the institution of higher education where he was currently enrolled on a strenuous curriculum of staring at the clock and patiently waiting for whatever he was currently doing to be over. Second, he received, as a birthday present from his ne're-do-well younger brother Jon, a copy of David Bowie's The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars. For Alexander, who had never given the fool's pursuit of rock and roll a passing thought (other than "ow, loud"), Bowie's ode to ambiguous sexuality, cocaine and being the coolest guy on the face of the planet was nothing short of a revelation. Alexander quickly bought every album Bowie ever made, even the crappy ones that Bowie himself doesn't even have copies of, and listened to them over and over non stop for a year. (Kids, don't try this at home). At the end of the year, he emerged with a new dream: to make rock music so good that it opens up a hole in the space-time continuum back to 1984 which he will travel through to kill Sarah Connor. You know, metaphorically speaking.
Over the course of the next couple years, he (along with Jon, who produced) made two attempts at this. The first, To Begin With, They're Very Tall, is an album full of dark and brooding terror-ballads about Andy Warhol's Dracula and serial killing astronauts. The second, Even These Things Tell Stories, is a day-glo pastiche of classical chops, proto-punk aesthetics and epic silliness that would make They Might Be Giants blush. Now, they were getting somewhere but they had a problem -- two guys does not a rock band make. Luckily, years earlier, Jon played in a band called Dr. Def & Sexual Educators (a furiously high-energy garage rock quartet hell-bent on blowing people's minds by taking early Beatles songs, covering them in battery-acid distortion, and forgetting to tune their guitars) while in high school and knew that the old rhythm section (bassist Aaron Sankin and drummer Brendan Ahern) had nothing better to do and, voila, Dubious Ranger was born.
The newly formed four-piece took the already present creative juices and burned them on the altar of rock. The band's sound builds off of giants like Bowie, Iggy Pop, Television and the Talking Heads while also paying homage to indie-rock touchstones like Blur, Pavement, the Super Furry Animals and Ween. You know, exactly the pretentious bullshit that you'd expect from a band with current or former rock critics outnumbering mere mortals by a ratio of 3 to 1.
The newly formed four-piece quickly recorded an EP entitled Haircut For A Music Montage, started gigging at venues across the Bay Area from the Fillmore to the Great American Music Hall, bought spiffy new hats, lost their keys, started a record label (the Nothing Room), found their keys under the couch, and conquered the world.
The band spent this past summer recording their monumental new LP, Uneasy Truce At The Watering Hole, at John Vanderslice's Tiny Telephone Studio in San Francisco. The album features 11 brain-bitingly good songs plus 4 intermezzi (Alexander insisted on calling them that because, much like his hero Squidward, he enjoys using those kinds of words). The album art was designed by local artist Eric Oldmixon, who somehow survived such band directions as "make it more pineapple" and "invert outerspace" to craft a seriously killer visual aesthetic.
