Posted on: December 6, 2010 Posted by: James McQuiston Comments: 0

Brooklyn darlings Elizabeth & the Catapult announce East Coast dates supporting
their sophomore effort The Other Side of Zero – out now via Verve Forecast.

Elizabeth & the Catapult sat down for a chat and played a very special,
intimate session at Rockwood Music Hall with Baeble Music.
Watch here for a preview of their new songs live.

More music and tour dates below!

Elizabeth & the Catapult East Coast Tour Dates
Dec 8 – Cafe Nine – New Haven, CT
Dec 10 – Maxwell’s – Hoboken, NJ
Jan 6 – Jammin’ Java – Vienna, VA
Jan 12 – BAR – New Haven, CT
Jan 15 – Music Hall of Williamsburg – Brooklyn, NY

w/ April Smith

Elizabeth & the Catapult premiered album tracks “You and Me” at the Huffington Post,
“Go Away My Lover” at My Old Kentucky Blog
and offered The Other Side of Zero for streaming on their Facebook page!
Elizabeth & the Catapult first debuted the new material for The Other Side of Zero
on a very special editon of WNYC’s New Sounds LIVE with John Schaefer.

Elizabeth & the Catapult and The Other Side of Zero
“If I had to compare our albums,” says Elizabeth Ziman, the singer/songwriter/keyboardist behind Elizabeth & the Catapult, “I’d say Taller Children has the sarcastic lightness of a Woody Allen film, and the new record’s more like Kubrick or Lynch—a little darker, a little more tongue-in-cheek.”

Not that any of these shifts are a surprise. After all, Elizabeth learned how to manipulate moods through music at an early age, whether that meant performing a wildly-expressive piano piece or belting out bizarre harmonies in New York’s world-renowned Young People’s Chorus.

And now this: The Other Side of Zero, an Elizabeth & the Catapult album that started with a Lincoln Center song cycle—performed last spring after a commission from NPR’s John Schaefer—and a cover-to-cover study of Leonard Cohen’s Book of Longing collection. As the latter’s pages sunk in, Elizabeth couldn’t help but draw parallels between Cohen’s failure to meet Buddhist goals in a monastery and her own coming-of-age struggles in the big city. (The New York native grew up in the heart of Greenwich Village.)

She also wrote Elizabeth & the Catapult’s rawest set of recordings yet, including the clanging chords and galloping groove of “The Horse and the Missing Cart,” the sputtering, string-grazed percussion of “You and Me,” “We All Fall Down, the Buddhist twist on a classic love song, “Julian Darling,” a wake up call to a friend and the hopeful but heartbroken contrasts of “Thank You For Nothing.” And then there’s the title track. Led by a lean, winding piano line, it builds to a spine-tingling crescendo alongside the honey-dipped harmonies of Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings—a collaboration that was completely unplanned. Not that you’d notice, considering how seamless it sounds.

Unlike their thoroughly-demoed debut—an album that took two years to complete—the Zero sessions boiled down to a month of recording with producer Tony Berg (Peter Gabriel, Phantom Planet, Jesca Hoop) and such respected sidemen as guitarist Blake Mills and Tom Waits’ longtime touring keyboardist, Patrick Warren. The result was rough but refined, bruised but beautiful, as if Berg had placed a mic in a room and walked away, letting Elizabeth and drummer/multi-instrumentalist Danny Molad do their thing.

As Molad puts it, “The record is more blatantly honest, even rude at times…” Elizabeth continues, “Even the happiest sounding pop songs on this record have a tinge of regret and darkness to them…And thank goodness for that. Ultimately that’s the only way I’d feel comfortable singing them. I’m drawn to the ambiguity like a menacing smile.”

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