Of Lake Victoria, Sweet Clementines guitarist and songwriter John Burdick says, “for me, the new record is a story of its two epics. There’s the mock-epic, mildly Bowie-esque fantasy ‘Gone to the Golden Love,’ and the tidal, tragic epic, ‘A Waltz for Matt Coleman,’ which is a poetic telling of the story of my friend who died in a hail of gunfire. All the other songs fall somewhere along the tragicomic spectrum defined by those two.” “‘Diluvia’ is an auto-obituary; ‘Voice Lessons’ is a high and solemn jam meditation on overcoming the fear of your own voice before you die. ‘Heart Like a Muscle,’ ‘You Don’t Have to Go Brooklyn,’ ‘Happiness Now,’ and ‘I Give Up” all deal in various ways with the paradoxes of surrender, the psychic necessity of giving stuff up all time. I didn’t really intend that theme, or all the images of guns, war, code-breaking and old, secret orders of men. It is funny how your songs tell you who you are in ways you might never have known if you hadn’t written them. Not always pleasant, either.” As has always been this band’s way, the music is eventful and overstuffed with vocal and instrumental melody, rhapsodic and stumbling, sweet and sour. In eight years of eccentric and quaint rocking (with vibraphones, violins, and baroque vocal harmony), the Sweet Clementines have cultured their own way of playing together, their own pin on the style/influence map: start with a sense of Beatles (or Zombies, or XTC), dress it in some colors of cabaret and circus, like Tom Waits (or Andrew Bird) and—now more than before—venture boldly into long forms, unafraid of either “J” word –Jazz or Jam. Add some wicked guitar solos and elements of folk, prog, and earthy rock of the kind that older dudes tend to make. But not too much. On the real map, The Sweet Clementines come from New Paltz, New York, a college town legendary for its party culture in the ‘60s, vitalized now as a part of the bustling Mid-Hudson Valley music scene (Kingston, Hudson, Woodstock), where the high-art and indie bands share bills with the friends of Levon Helm and where urban refugees make their little Brooklyns out of old river villages. The highly active members of the Sweet Clementines are implicated in all parts of it, but this band is a just a little different. The Sweet Clementines are: John Burdick: guitar, vocals, keyboards Jason Sarubbi: bass, vocals, percussion Matt Senzatimore: drums, vocals Marianne Tasick: vocals, violin, percussion, keyboards Paul Carroll: keyboards, vibraphone, percussion, vocals