20,000 Streets Under The Sky...

I've been a fan of Marah for a very long time. It's been a relationship of ups and downs that's for sure. In 1998, pretty much the center of my alt-country phase, I picked up the Marah album Let's Cut The Craps and Hook Up Later Tonight. I thought it was about one of the best things I'd ever heard. There was (and still is) so much honesty and energy in the songwriting. The band's main core are the brothers Bielanko, Serge and Dave. They write powerful songs involving guitars, banjos, drums, bass and Dave's bleeding throated vocals. Marah are from the city of brotherly (that's Philadelphia if you dropped out of school in 2nd grade) and fiercely proud of it. Their songs are filled with the denizens of the city and their exploits. Marah is the kind of band that really punches you in the gut. When they do everything right their songs are powerfully explosive. The songs ride on a thick bed of emotion. The music recalls early Bruce Springsteen (they often site Bruce as an influence)but replacing sax with harmonica. It's in a lot of ways straight ahead rock and roll in the best sense of that phrase. Over the years they've shed a lot of the alt-country trappings. Marah followed up Let's Cut The Crap... with 2000's Kids In Philly a rocking trip through the alleys, ball parks and cheese steak stands of their hometown. Then something terrible happended. The boys enlisted the producer of Oasis for their 2002 album Float Away With The Friday Night Gods and came up with Oasis lite. There was maybe one strong song on that album. Despite loads of good songwriting the album is buried in grandiose production that ruined the bands ability to pull you into their songs. It's become apparent that Float Away... had tons of potential as the bands live performances of those songs have been stellar.

That brings us to 2004 and the release of 20,000 Streets Under the Sky. A true return to form the record is rollicking good fun, Dave's tales of everything from Transexuals to simple broken hearts are well accented by the bands driving guitars and galloping beats.

Todays tunes are taken from 20,000 Streets Under The Sky. Buy all of Marah's music Here

Apologies, I just realized that these files are in Apples AAC format and I've no time to convert them. So if you've got iTunes you're good to go, just download link to disc and open. Otherwise I'm sorry. It won't happen again. The entire staff humbly begs your forgiveness.

Feather Boa

East

Tame The Tiger