Artist description MYSSOURI is epic, dark, cinematic rock music with a distinctively intense Western American edge. The Atlanta four-piece is celebrated by fans and in the media for their unique sound, style, vision, approach to performance and avid attention to songcraft. MYSSOURI takes pride in the frequent comparisons to such influential and legendary acts as The Gun Club, The Doors, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Pink Floyd, 16 Horsepower and other noted artists who push the envelope of artistic expression.

Music Style Dark American Rock Songs

Musical Influences Extensive! From Nick Cave, 16 Horsepower, Swans and Joy Division to Leonard Cohen, Pink Floyd and The Doors.

Similar Artists Most often compared to Nick Cave, Gun Club, 16 HP, Ennio Morricone.

Artist History Formed in 1998 in Atlanta, Georgia, MYSSOURI (pronounced Missouri) rose rapidly from humble art gallery shows to mammoth, blasting walls of sound at the city's premier venues--The Cotton Club, The Tabernacle, The Variety Playhouse, The Echolounge, The Masquerade, The Star Bar, The EARL, and EYEDRUM. When not headlining their own shows, MYSSOURI have opened for such internationally renowned artists as 16 Horsepower, The Damned and The Angels of Light(ex-Swans). The 1999 debut album, MALAMERICA (a limited pressing of 500 copies), was the only self-released CD to break the top 5 on WRAS 88.5 FM (the largest student-run radio station in the USA) in heavy rotation, and it hit #1 on their weekly all-request program. Following a brief hiatus in late 1999, during which bandleader Michael Bradley toured as guitarist/vocalist for The Living Jarboe (acclaimed chanteuse for Swans), MYSSOURI hit the new year with a vengeance--shooting videos for their songs "Open Contempt" and "Blindly," compiling new material for the second album, a webcast performance and interview on Media1st.com, a feature article in Southeastern Performer magazine, and of course numerous shows, including appearances in Atlanta's annual Music Midtown Festival, Atlantis Music Conference, and the first ever CMJ Changemusic Festival. 2001 has seen MYSSOURI return to a ferocious 4-piece, with intense and multi-talented players Rogers, Heckel and Reeves joining. And the songs are pouring out like lava! Brace yourselves...

Group Members Michael Bradley, vocals and guitar. Mark Rogers: Lead Guitars, lap steel. Cade Lewis: Bass Guitars. Chris Reeves: Drums and Percussion.

Instruments Acoustic and Electric Guitars, Bass, Keyboards, Lap Steel and Drums

Albums FurnaceSongs EP; Malamerica (debut, out of print)

Press Reviews Songs for night drives, alcohol, and nowhere to go. Reviewer: Thomas Burke (goldfish@magicnet.net) Myssouri mastermind Michael Bradley is a talented writer who finds his muse in dark places. Consider Artaud, Baudelaire and Poe as literary reference points and you'll be close to the territory he's exploring. Bradley's lyrics are complex, intensely visual, sometimes brutal and always interesting. Looking now at the dense mass of text that serves as the Furnace Songs lyric sheet, I find myself Amazed that they could be molded into such graceful, memorable songs. Musically the set is characterized by a sense of relentless forward motion punctuated by dreamy interludes and furious accelerations....black thunderheads forming over a vast, desolate plain...a stampede of spectral horses across a full moon sky. Lyrically Furnace Songs seems to form a five part song cycle. The centerpiece is "Muscle Car on a Dead End Road", an epic evocation of the album's central theme (as I see it anyway): the inevitable corruption and death of the idealized dream.... " Sit down and soak in the rain and the woe. Stoke your fire in the mire of the dead end road. Take a drink, steal a light in the stultifying night. Think of anything that could disguise your life. But don't dream of the girl with the golden hair, cause that dream is old, and there's nothing there for you." Once a dream is made tangible it loses something-the trick is to find the beauty in what it gains, in what it becomes. Whatever dream materialized as Furnace Songs is now a record of great depth and beauty filled with songs for night drives, alcohol, and nowhere to go. "Another interesting thing about Myssouri is that they are TRUE indie rock. They don't even try and find some obscure label to release their music -- they do it all themselves. Furnace Songs is their second self-released disc. It is an EP and a follow up to 1999's Malamerica. What is interesting to me about this whole phenomenon is that Myssouri's releases have all been exceedingly well produced. That is, i would expect a band who does all of it's own releases to sound a little "raw" on disc. Not Myssouri -- their sound is clear and precise. They obviously spend a lot of time working to get things perfect, and it shows. Furnace Songs is 5 tracks worth of well produced gothic western goodness. Let me examine each song in turn. The EP starts off with "Ride You Down", a song which sets the disc moving with a strong rhythm, like a train, or driving on the highway. Appropriate, considering the song title. Ride You Down features competent guitars and vocals with insistent drumming to good effect. I have listened to this disc many times, and enjoyed this track much. Yesterday i took it to work to listen to as i wrote code and prepared for this review, and I discovered something subtle: if you listen to this on headphones there are really eerie whispered backing vocals at certain points. I didn't hear them until I had headphones on. Anyway, these make the song much creepier with headphones than without. Track 2 is called "Malimony", which is a nice song with slow mournful slide guitar. The drumming is less insistent here, in fact, it kind of meanders throught the song, until the end when drums, vocals, and guitars build to a really powerful crescendo. That crescendo fades, and the next track "Muscle Car On A Dead End Road" starts slowly. This track kind of plods along until the chorus, where the song swells, the guitars thunder, and vocalist Michael Bradley bellows. Suddenly, you are in the muscle car with him, unwilling passenger as some possessed soul tears dawn a dark road (presumably in West Texas somewhere), fearing for your life and yet exhilarating at the speed and terror of the ride.... This track is epic and good. Next comes Devil On My Shoulder, which directly inspired one of our Myssouri-isms. The guitars change on this song, becoming punk-y and distorted. The insistent drum beat is back, carried over from the end of Muscle Car On A Dead End Road, and Bradley sings deep and dark. This track continues the paranoia/exhilaration combo of the previous song. It ends with a flurry of EVIL: the whole band joins Michael in yelling, as if Myssouri were the "chorus of demons" in the song. To wrap the EP up Myssouri give us a relief from the paranoia of the last few tracks. One Holy Thing seems to offer salvation where the previous songs offered only damnation. I think this is because Bradley sings "Hosannah" repeatedly in the chorus, and I am taken back to my childhood singing that in Catholic churches. This is a sad slow song, with beautiful keyboards. It invokes the solemness of a Catholic Mass. The song, and the EP, end with a long mournful guitar arpeggios. Quite beautiful. Furnace Songs is a strong EP. It is very good for it's genre -- goth or western rock. Myssouri do what they do very well. I must say one thing though: there is some ineffable quality to their live performance that is not captured here. It could be that Bradley sings with greater passion when there is a crowd looking at him. It could be that the dynamic interplay between the various musicians is greater when they play live as opposed to in the studio. It could be that I am not as beer-buzzed listening to this EP as I am at their concerts. Or it could be that a mere piece of plastic can never quite express the sheer power of a group of people gathered in front of you bellowing out these songs as if the devil were, in fact, rustling their cattle! This is an enjoyable listen, but if you have the chance, go see them live. Reviewed by: PostLibyan PRAISE FOR MYSSOURI's DEBUT CD, MALAMERICA: "Music that must be lived in to be understood, not merely listened to and forgotten. Musically influenced by the Western soundtracks of Ennio Morricone and lyrically influenced by the frontier-gothic of Cormac McCarthy, Myssouri create vast and desolate soundscapes pocked with the sprawling ghost towns of the heart." --Chad Driscoll, Listen.com "Less 'darkwave,' as they've been tagged, than a continuation of the grisly depths of the psyche that shadow figures like Nick Cave and Michael Gira have explored, Myssouri offer a compelling argument for never smiling on their debut CD, Malamerica. Conversely stark and grand in all the necessary places, the group pulls it off admirably."--Jeff Clark, Stomp and Stammer "Wow. To give you a slight indication of what this is like - think of the musical genius of the Swans, the poetic lyrics of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, the stylish and twangy groove of Johnny Cash and perhaps the artistic madness of the Doors. This is pure soul - a soundtrack to the dark journey of humanity set amidst tumbleweeds and blowing desert wind. Myssouri presents its view of the world with profound lyrics and vocals that squeeze every emotion out of them. The musicianship is superb - bass, guitar and rhythm guitar layered and singing their individual parts perfectly against the steady and driving drumbeat. The buzz is strong on this band; their musical talent is getting rave reviews from listeners as well as fellow musicians. Jarboe (ex Swans) has recently recruited vocalist/guitarist Michael Bradley to work on her newest project. Not band for a band just formed in 1998. This is stuff legends are made of."--Blu, EDITOR, STARVOX.net "Have you ever come over a rise in the road and seen something from a dream long ago? Something so beautiful and frightening and glorious that you can't breathe? This is what I felt from the very first notes of this CD. I felt, "I have heard this before. I have dreamt this before." This is directly from the Collective Unconscious-- straight up, no chaser. With all the grace and sad delight of And Also The Trees, Myssouri build a world so dark and so lovely that there is no way to escape it; better yet, there is no DESIRE to escape it. Imagine a hot summer night full of Spanish Moss and Kudzu, drunk on sweet cheap wine; desperate sex in the cemetery, all stumbling limbs and bleeding mouths, and it's the last time because it simply cannot ever happen again, by virtue of wars external or internal or fully hallucinatory, and it's all for nothing and there is no hope and the ravens circle overhead and the road never ends and now you're getting the idea of where this CD will leave you when its finished with you."--Kirin,STARVOX.net "It's rare when a band comes along with a new sound that truly stands out, but the bizarrely named Atlanta group MYSSOURI manages to do precisely that. After opening with the brief, compelling instrumental title track--a soundscape that's part U2, part Ennio Morricone--their debut disc Malamerica becomes a dark platform for the tortured yet ascendant vocals of bandleader Michael Bradley, whose voice sways dramatically on a cold wind like a corpse at the end of (a) hangman's rope."--Gregory Nicoll, Creative Loafing, April 1999

Location Atlanta, Georgia - USA

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