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Swimmers releasing darker, harder edged sophomore album late Fall – rave reviews for debut

Following the success of 2008’s Fighting Trees-The Swimmers’ first release on MAD Dragon, which garnered rave reviews from The Philadelphia Inquirer, Magnet, The Tripwire and Time Out Chicago-Steve and Krista Yutzy-Burkey, Scott French and Rick Sieber decided to start fresh by building a home studio from the ground up and recording a new album entirely on their own.

The hard-won results feature intensely personal songwriting couched in distorted synthesizer hooks, crushing electric guitars and dark reverb swells. “It was a very focused and isolated time in the studio, and much of the grit was in the mixing process. These songs were darker and more intricate than the last record, and they demanded a very affected, refined sound,” says lead singer/songwriter Steve Yutzy-Burkey. I’m very much hoping you’ll give your advance copy a listen and consider covering via feature or CD review. Reviews of last year’s debut album below:

The members of Philadelphia’s Swimmer are good what they do, and that’s make straight-up middle-of-the-road indie music. (The band is even named after the John Cheever story and the movie it spawned, which is pretty indie in itself.) .The occasional harp on Fighting Trees fleshes out the classic indie sound. What’s most interesting about the album, though, is that Ryko/Warner is taking a chance by distributing a student-run label: MAD Dragon is based out of Drexel University… Lee Fullington/Prefixmag.com 3/20

This may be the most frigid time of the year in the music business, or what’s left of it. But even with the pop music calendar at a dead-of-winter standstill, there’s much to look forward to in the local music scene.

Rolling Stone recently dubbed the Philadelphia scene the nation’s hottest, and its sounds are rich and varied, from pop to hip-hop to rock to some uncategorizable amalgamations.

We figured we’d take a look at some of the acts from which great things are expected – eight for ‘08.

The Swimmers. Swimmers singer Steve Yutzy-Burkey, a Lancaster native who lives in Northern Liberties, used to lead an excellent roots-rock band called One Star Hotel. With the Swimmers – named after a John Cheever short story that became a Burt Lancaster movie – Yutzy-Burkey has brought his wife, keyboardist Krista Yutzy-Burkey, into the band and blossomed as a writer of bright, harmony-happy pop songs like “Heaven.” Last year, the Swimmers played a memorable four-week residency at the Khyber, and earned themselves a deal with Drexel’s Mad Dragon label, which will release their debut album Fighting Trees March 4. Dan DeLuca/Sunday Philadelphia Inquirer 1/20/08

Fighting Trees is the product of a carpenter from Amish country who goes by the decidedly odd birth name of Steve Yutzy-Burkey. A devotee of British Invasion pop, the Lancaster, PA native landed in Philadelphia to pursue a career tuning pipe organs, and he eventually formed alt-country outfit One Star Hotel in 2000. The Swimmers began as a side project but have since evolved in something vastly more satisfying. Fighting Trees’ decades spanning sonic hues and frequent fixation on the homey, keenly observed elegance of the Kinkds and Harry Nilsson bring to mind contemporaries Kelley Stoltz and Brendan Benson, while its tentative dips into swirly psychedelic pop find common ground with fellow Philly act the A-Sides. Yet the Swimmers have enough personality to transcend comparisions and stake their own modest parcel of indie- pop bliss. Magnet Winter 08

The Swimmers, out of Philadelphia, make pop music that is, on its surface, easy and ear-friendly. Raggedy guitars and raucous drums enliven harder-rocking songs, like “It’s Time They Knew” and “St. Cecilia”. But mostly the rough edges are carefully hemmed up and sweetened with vocal harmonies, handclaps, piano runs and infectious melodies. “Pocketful of Gold” is one of the album’s best songs, frontman Steve Yutzy-Burkey’s voice slowed to a Beulah-ish drawl over chiming keyboards. The song simmers, guitars kept to a pulse, drums subtle and backgrounded, and then it explodes into a triumphant chorus.

Fighting Trees is probably not a concept album, but it has running themes and central ideas. For instance, during the course of this impressive debut, you get three distinct takes on going home. The first, paced by jaunty, nostalgic keyboard chords and pounding drums, is “Heaven,” a daydreamy tribute to the haunts of youth. “Heaven / is the town / where we grew up / all our friends are there,” sings Steve Yutzy-Burkey, in a gently soaring pop chorus. And yet even at this stage, nostalgia is creeping in, as the author notices changes in the local scen:, friends gone to college, bands that have given up the ghost, streets that have become just a bit less familiar. You can go home again, but it won’t be what you remember, the song seems to say.

Later on, there’s a swirling, fairly stunning track that’s actually titled “Home”, where the songwriter recalls lying in bed at age five. Then it morphs somehow into a love song about a girl who comes sporadically, you guessed it, home. “Every time I settle down / she comes blowing into town,” he sings. It’s a jittery chorus, conveying helpless optimism as well as doubt. Still further on, in the lovely title track, Yutzy-Burkey returns to this idea in a much more transcendental way, with harp flourishes lighting the corners and cello lending depth and melancholy. A spiritual connection to home remains. It is a land where “fathers fathers laid with dreams still in their heads.”

The image of home is interesting. Through its single lens, Yutzy-Burkey has focused on three of the great themes of pop music: lost youth, thwarted love and the fear of death. This is serious stuff, yet couched in such likeable, easily absorbed musical settings that you hardly notice the angst. And in a way, isn’t that the secret of great power pop? You’re humming along to philosophy’s most serious questions…but with a big smile on your face. Jennifer Kelly/Popmatters.com 3/7/08

When I was growing up in the Philadelphia area, and for many years after, the city was hardly a hotspot for interesting music. Oh, there were exceptions, but by and large it always seemed pretty moribund. The situation has been changing in recent years-there are good live music presenters, more record labels, and a much broader and deeper array of musicians, from the psych-folk axis of the Espers crew to the free jazz centered around High Two Records to the giddy pop-rock of Dr. Dog. The forthcoming debut album by a quartet called the Swimmers, Fighting Trees (due in March from MAD Dragon, the student-run label at Drexel University that also signed the Redwalls), ought to put them right next to Dr. Dog, with strong, delicate pop hooks somewhere between the Shins and Wilco. I know that doesn’t sound like the most original formula, and no, there’s probably nothing about the Swimmers that you haven’t heard before, but if they’ve got melodies that fill your ears like warm water and attach to your brain like leeches, who cares? The group plays tomorrow night at Subterranean and Saturday night at the Empty Bottle. They’ll also play a live acoustic set on Friday at 4 PM on WLUW. Peter Margazsak/blogs.chicagoreader.com 12/6

Long streaming on the band’s website, the Swimmers’ Fighting Trees is finally coming out on Drexel’s Mad Dragon label early next year. Good thing too, because it’d be silly to drag your computer everywhere once you got hooked on their songs. And you will get hooked. The Swimmers aspire to a shiny model of power-pop, bright-eyed and ringing but with just enough melancholy to remind us of frontman Steve Yutzy-Burkey’s late alt-country idols One Star Hotel, who are referenced in “St. Ceceilia.” Yutzy-Burkey’s wife Krista, meanwhile, ties the room together with spirited yet weighty keys. The Swimmers’ big hit so far has been “Heaven,” but there’s plenty more where that came from. Doug Wallen/Philadelphia Weekly 10/24

The Swimmers play modestly accomplished pop/rock with a sense of bounce and whimsy on their debut album. Steve Yutzy-Burkey, who wrote all but one of the songs, has a slightly Paul McCartney-esque sense of melody and daintily fanciful phrasing. The artful background harmonies may recall late-period Beatles and the late ’60s/early ’70s in general, and the arrangements vary between the power poppish and the kind of mildly eccentric piano-dominated midtempo ditty (like “Heaven”) you might associate with McCartney or, to throw out a more unusual reference, Thunderclap Newman. Upper-register, plaintive vocals are in abundance, and the light chamber-like orchestration on “Fighting Trees” is a welcome, less expected baroque touch. Richie Unterberger/Allmusic.com

Like The Kinks? Sweet tooth for XTC? Blown your lunch money on the New Pornographers? Well, Philadelphia’s The Swimmers belong in your stereo and quick. Fighting Trees (released March 4 on Mad Dragon Records) is supersaturated with keening vocals, sugar hooks and oodles of other lovely touches that’ll have your head rocking like a bobble head doll on the dashboard of a Vista Cruiser out on an open highway.

There’s an irresistible rise to cuts like “All The New Sounds” that’ll perk up a weary soul, and there’s plenty of that pixie dust mojo here. The Swimmers don’t so much forge into brave new territory as draw us a new map to places we thought we already knew. They show there’s still life in Athen, GA jangle and moody-but-bright Boston punk-pop. A track like “St. Cecilia” shows they’ve also spent a little time in the razor sharp spaces of the Gang of Four. “Your Escape” is reminiscent of Girlfriend-era Matthew Sweet, which is always a plus. While the vibe is warm, inviting, even a little giddy at times, the lyrics are full of chill, foreboding and disconnection, like a pop Peppermint Patty. Yummy!

While a simple thing to say, if a band writes good songs and plays them well it’s hard to beat. The Swimmers do both throughout this 12-pack. Sometimes it’s the sunset shimmer to their harmonies that woos, other times it’s the bopping keys and crunchy guitars that do the trick. Each three-minute gem is shoehorned with lean, cool touches that reward repeats in a big way. Delight ain’t easy to score these days and they’ve boxed up a bunch of it. Resistance might not be futile but why would you refuse such a gift? Dennis Cook/Jambase.com 4/4

Joining the long list of bands stretching from the Doors and the Velvet Underground to Belle & Sebastian and Modest Mouse that have taken their name from a work of literature, the Swimmers go one step further. Not only is their name derived from John Cheever’s “The Swimmer” but their debut full-length release was initially designed as a concept album to explore the themes of disillusionment and meaninglessness in that surreal 1964 short story. And while the final version of that album is hardly a point-by-point recreation of Cheever’s definitive work, hidden inside its immediately engaging indie pop melodies are startlingly dark echoes of that existential tome. Listen closely, and Fighting Trees is a metaphor for finding yourself in a place that isn’t exactly what you wanted or expected.

“It’s a surrealistic journey,” explains vocalist and main songwriter Steve Yutzy-Burkey, discussing the text that inspired his writing. “It’s about a guy that wakes up after a party away from his home, and he’s an upper crust New York suburbanite guy. And he decides to swim home through all of his friends’ swimming pools. So, as he goes, the seasons change, and his friends start to not be his friends anymore, and he’s aging. By the time he gets to his house, it’s all boarded up and his family’s gone, and it’s storming. It’s entirely different than when he left, when it was sunny and he was young and optimistic. When I read that story, I felt I’d had that feeling a lot. I’d walk home from work across the city as it got dark and colder.”

In this story, the city is Philadelphia, the town where Yutzy-Burkey landed after college with the dream of establishing an audience for his first legitimate band, One Star Hotel. Two albums and hundreds of Wilco comparisons later, the band had reached that goal, but by 2005 (after a tour opening for Wilco, incidentally) things were unraveling. Alternative country music was fading in popularity and Yutzy-Burkey had been writing a series of pianobased songs that simply couldn’t fi t into the twangy template that band had developed. He needed to start over, and the only way to do that was to break up the band with whom he had invested years of work.

“The end of One Star Hotel was a little awkward,” he admits. “The idea [for the Swimmers] was to bring together friends and have fun with it, and if we felt like we were having fun with it, we thought it would translate to other people, too,” he explains. “That was the intention from the beginning, to have a more indie pop-based project. That’s why my wife, Krista, got involved. Scott [French, drummer] has been a friend for a long time. I used to tune pipe organs with him, and we’d go on pipe organ-tuning trips and record songs in hotels and talk about starting a band. This seemed like a good opportunity for that. It came together organically. The idea was just to do what felt right and hope for the best.”

With former One Star Hotel bassist Rick Sieber recruited as the band’s fourth member, the newly christened Swimmers set their sights on making an album that would combine Yutzy-Burkey’s growing interest in the classic British Invasion rock and psych-pop of the 1960s. With three songs (“Heaven,” “Pocket Full of Gold,” and “All the New Sounds”) ready to go, the band headed to Brian McTear’s Miner Street Studios, recording most of the rhythm tracks live and saving the overdubs for Yutzy-Burkey’s home studio. But as soon as the album began taking shape, it started to unravel.

“Originally, I had a whole other album written around those three songs that was based much less loosely on ‘The Swimmer,’” he says. “As we were playing as a band, it became more evident that those weren’t going to be the songs that sounded best with this band. Some of the songs went through five or six demos that were totally different genres. As we’d talk about things, we’d say, ‘Ok, we’re going to do the Fleetwood Mac version’ or ‘the Kinks version’- just to give ourselves little directions. Some of those songs made it in very different incarnations.”

Six months passed before the band was able to finish the album, during which time the band argued over the merits of Arcade Fire’s Funeral and the perfect ways to capture a Beatles bass sound. By the time they reconvened to finish the album, Yutzy-Burkey had re-imagined the songs that didn’t seem to fit, and he had an entirely new album. Now, the album ranged from the clanging bells of “Pocket Full of Gold” to the marching power pop of “Your Escape,” making stops in prancing piano pop of “St. Cecilia” and the bittersweet balladry of “Heaven.” But despite thsweet pop melodies and breezy tempos, Fighting Trees is a deeply conflicted release, one informed by the trauma of growing up and leaving behind the certainty of youth, left only with the unsettling questions of meaning and value that accompany adulthood. No song is more emblematic of those sentiments than “Miles from Our Fears.”

“It was sort of that and imagining if you knew how you were going to die if you would be scared about things along the way,” Yutzy-Burkey explains. “It gives away the ending of this couple. ‘Someday they’ll fi nd us in the mud below the bay in a car,’” he says, quoting the song’s most ghastly line. “But then [it's] saying that that’s years from now that all these things are happening, and [asking] would you be afraid if that was the end of the story. So it’s comforting,” he laughs, “but in a scary kind of way.”

Even more heart wrenching is “Heaven,” a track whose melody comes across as a combination of the Beatles’ “Penny Lane” and Crosby, Still, Nash, & Young’s “Our House,” with Yutzy-Burkey recounting a return visit to his hometown of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where he discovered that the place he knew as a child no longer exists. There is no welcoming party; all his friends are gone; and his old haunts are closed. Really, it’s the thematic opposite of Paul McCartney’s idyllic “Penny Lane,” the place where everything stays locked in perfect whimsical harmony for perpetuity. In Yutzy-Burkey’s mind, “Heaven” is a place that only lives in memories- if it ever existed at all. Yet, if you just listen to the swooning harmonies and bouncy piano hooks, you’d think it was a tribute, a reassuring celebration of a man’s hometown.

“I think that when the songs are too light and the treatment is too light, it comes off as fluff,” Yutzy-Burkey says. “I do like that contrast between the tone and the lyrics. I really enjoy the fact that people could listen to the songs for awhile and not know how dark they are or how if they really start thinking about the song, it might shift the idea behind the song for them. I think that songs that do that, that reveal more, with each listen, are the best songs. There are very few songs that I write that aren’t fairly directly related to my experience or the people around me. It’s the way that I think through some things. In reshaping them and rephrasing them for the people around me, it makes me process them differently.”

To that extent, Yutzy-Burkey has created a concept album of sorts, one not based on Cheever’s short story, but one that encompasses many of those same uneasy examinations of meaning and purpose. Like all good song cycles, it’s a snapshot of a specific moment in time, one that captures a man waking up in his 30s and looking back on his youth with nostalgia and toward his future with doubt. But despite his admitted fascination with narrative structures, Yutzy-Burkey admits to not really knowing if he has a concept album in him.

“I’m definitely drawn to those grand ideas and narratives that do really say a lot of things on a lot of levels,” he says. “[This album] is about the journey of the band and how we got to where we are and where we’ll be going in the future. It’s just the idea of a journey,” he says, repeating the word for emphasis. “I guess I haven’t really made that concept album yet, but I wouldn’t rule it out.”-Matt Fink Alarm June/July 08

Whether you are a Philly resident, a frequent visitor from the burbs, or an out-of-towner passing through, there are some local staples you won’t want to miss out on. If you are looking for good tunes, or bargain buys, this month’s Philly Spotlight will prove that the city has much more to offer than cheese steaks and good sneakers.

For two years, The Swimmers have been making waves (get it?) all over the city. Now that I got that cheap joke out of the way, I can seriously say that The Swimmers are a very promising indie four-piece from Philadelphia. I would not be surprised if their name becomes common place in the mainstream music world. The Swimmers have made quite an impact, being well received by such papers as The Philadelphia Inquirer and The New York Times. Their music is highly influenced by bands such as The Arcade Fire, Wilco, and The Shins. When you take those influences, turn them into ideas and then have those ideas produced by Philadelphia producer Brian McTears, you get The Swimmers debut album, Fighting Trees. The album is a brilliant mix of indie and pop music with a little touch of classic rock.

Although Fighting Trees was recorded in 2007, it was not released until March of 2008. It turns put the highly anticipated album was well worth the wait. Since then the band has even recorded song for The Day Trotter Sessions. With their full length already out The Day Trotter Sessions will give you something to keep you occupied until the band records again.

Unless you live under a rock, or just flat out don’t like indie music, I am willing to bet you will hear about The Swimmers, if you have not already. Definitely keep an eye out for this band in ‘09 before they blow up big and the only way to see them is looking through a crowd of 500 people.Dave Quaile/Wonkavisionmagazine.com 9/8

Three notes into the opening song, “It’s Time They Knew,” off their debut release, Fighting Trees, The Swimmers have already sucked you into their irresistible brand of smart indie-pop. What follows is 41 minutes and 40 seconds of gorgeously crafted, rocking pop-tunes that bounce along with abandon, but still maintain a restrained dignity that serves to construct the sonic landscape of 12 instantly catchy songs that just won’t let go.

Fighting Trees is powered by lead singer/guitarist Steve Yutzy-Burkey’s elusive, accessible lyrics. From returning to a childhood home only to find it (or you) have changed on “Heaven,” to the idea of loneliness on “All the New Sounds,” to “Miles From our Fears,” which explores our fear of the unknown, each song deals with a universal emotion that everyone can find in themselves. Despite such deep, introspective lyrics that may cause us all to pause for minute, they are delivered with such upbeat, brilliant music, you can’t help but stick around and listen. Instead of leaving you with a feeling of dread, they impart with a sense of satisfaction.

The Swimmers have long been part of Philadelphia’s burgeoning indie-rock scene (Dr. Dog, Man-Man, The Extraordinaires, Matt Pond PA), and last year, when a finished copy of Fighting Trees was leaked to the locally based influential radio station WXPN, it was declared “the best record not released in 2007.” Thankfully it is released now, and it can just be simply described as one of the best records released in 2008.