Bound Stems tour dates for 2009

Appreciation Night was two years in the making; the songs themselves cover a dozen decades.

Chicago is the album's host city, where the Civil War blends with the roar of the elevated train and the songs' edges are embroidered with the found sounds of airport patter and clattering turnstiles, parties, private conversations, snow crunch and drifting histories.

Produced by Tim Sandusky and Evan at Chicago's Studio Ballistico, Appreciation Night is a large and complex album in which each song could as easily be a story as a chapter. Mathy, too: opener "Andover" hides tricky time signatures under a warm patchwork blanket of vocal melody, and "This Is Grand" rolls sevens hard against sixes. There's history rock ("Walter Waters Addresses the Bonus Army"), lit. rock ("Rented a Tent"), and social studies pop ("Wake Up, Ma & Pa Are Gone"), and each song contains moments of fierce, earnest success, where all of Bound Stems' sonic experiments converge and fall into crashing, exultant hooks. Appreciation Night is a record of a band's optimismism: fascination with life, a diet of interesting objects, the narrative thread.