Glorytellers

The creative force behind Glorytellers is guitarist/singer/songwriter Geoff Farina, who spent the better part of 14 years fronting Boston’s genre-bending Karate, and as one-half of the formative lo-fi duo Secret Stars. Farina’s latest effort reveals a set of delicate ballads that draw from the quirky psych of the Raincoats and Spacemen 3, the rustic narratives of The Band and Mose Allison, and even the dense harmonies of pianists like Jelly Roll Morton, Herbie Nichols and Andrew Hill.

Farina delivers Glorytellers lyrics with the same staccato, stream-of-consciousness style that helped define Karate’s sound, but these image-laden lyrics are decidedly more narrative. They include stories of a teenage mother determined to raise her child against her family’s wishes, of a friend habitually in trouble with the law, of suburban parents who inadvertently vote for the policies that send their sons to war, and of Karate's experience witnessing a drug-related murder on tour. The characters in these dark stories share a positive outlook, and Glorytellers songs are ultimately about survivors searching normalcy in the face of tribulation.

During the summer of 2005, Farina wrote the bulk of these songs on a “Flamenca Blanca” (a cheap, cyprus-backed flamenco guitar) in a small cabin in Chievolis, a secluded Friulian village in the Dolomites of northeastern Italy. The songs’ delicate acoustic arrangements preserve the idyllic charm of the setting that inspired them, and have an immediacy that puts the listener on the front porch with the band as they casually rehearse. But the mood is anything but bucolic, as acoustic and electric guitars flesh out dense and abstract harmonies. Farina found inspiration in odd corners of his musical world for these 2-guitar arrangements, including the strolling syncopations of Jelly Roll Morton, the recursive counterpoint of Philip Glass, and even in Bach’s two- and three- part inventions that Farina studied in college. Consequently, the guitars in “Camouflage,” “Trovato Suono,” “Awake at the Wheel,” and other songs on the band’s eponymous release are woven together to function more like the two hands of a piano player than any conventional rock rhythm section.

Farina recorded these songs in 2006 with the help of drummer Luther Gray III (Ida, Joe Morris Trio) and engineer Andy Hong, who recorded most of Karate’s catalog. Farina and Hong then spent countless hours in Andy’s Boston studio experimenting, re-tracking, and re-mixing these 10 songs until the often-peculiar arrangements congealed. In 2007 Farina formed a touring version of the band with guitarist Josh Larue (Mice Parade, Him), and drummer Gavin McCarthy (Karate, Cul de Sac). Larue will take a break to become father in early 2008, when Ty Citerman (Gutbucket) will take over guitar duties.

Although the band sounds most like Karate, Secret Stars, and other Farina-related projects, Glorytellers are undoubtedly a product of the 80’s underground music of their adolescence, and their first loves were bands like the Minutemen, Gray Matter, Beefeater, Dream Syndicate, Spacemen 3, the Raincoats, the Fall, Wire, the Smiths, the Effigies, Squirrel Bait, Crass, Pere Ubu, The Gun Club, and Killing Joke. Glorytellers songs also manifest Farina’s love for earlier American music, including the dense ragtime guitar of Blind Blake and Gary Davis, the earnest blues of Robert Pete Williams, Geeshie Wiley, Willie Johnson, and Skip James, the cathartic acoustic music of Roscoe Holcom, Robbie Basho, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee, the narrative songwriting of the Band, Leonard Cohen, Mose Allison, Merle Haggard, Gram Parsons, and Bob Dylan, the impressionistic harmonies of pianists Herbie Nichols, Andrew Hill, Jelly Roll Morton, Bill Evans, and Abdullah Ibrahim, and the electric guitar styles of Jim Hall, Lonnie Johnson, Johnny Smith, Otis Rush, Grant Green, Link Wray, and Jimmy Bryant.

The name “Glorytellers” can have positive or negative denotations. A gloryteller can be one who recounts resplendence or grandeur, such as someone who sings about the possibility of a more egalitarian society, or it can be someone who proclaims veneration for expired majesty, such as those who stir up nationalism by trumpeting a vague and narrow set of values. “Glory” is also a verb meaning, “to take great pride or pleasure in,” so a gloryteller can designate someone who takes pride in narrating.