Lowercase Roses ~ Edye Renee ~ Dan The Movie

Mover, the fourth full-length album of introspective and artful pop rock from Philadelphia’s Lowercase Roses, explores many angles of its titular noun: emotional changes, shifts through time and space, and the labor connected to moving—which happens to be a job worked by Matt Scheuermann, the project’s songmaker, producer, and primary instrumentalist. Motion paces through the liminal scenes the record’s subjects haunt, and it flows between the doubt and desirousness of Mover’s lyrics. “I cannot overlook the relentless beauty of life,” admits Scheuermann, in spite of the destructive forces humanity wields against itself: capitalism, ecological destruction, genocide, incarceration. “We’re destroying our home and our family. But we were given a home and a family in the first place, and that is incredible.” He sees movement as a way through existence and understanding, a path to learn and grow with the earth. And so Mover is about acknowledging bad things, but also believing in better things. It coalesces into a warm and well-built home—sunny in its quirky decor, soft in its honesty, strongly structured by the supportive bones of Scheuermann’s masterful songcraft. Layers bustle and build, nudge aside or disappear, come back in a differently-tinted form, like musical furniture staged into a lived-in place of refuge. This restless arrangement and rearrangement reveals deft architecture: a beautifully uncanny, suspenseful-yet-steady collection about love, community, and the precarious act of making something meaningful amid end times.

 

Keyboardist Edye Renee has been performing as a solo singer-songwriter for many years. And now, along with Edye on keys, her band members include Philly favorites Claire Quaranta (drummer) and Eliza Becker (vocalist). Influences range from Feist to Radiohead and beyond, and each of them has a deep love and appreciation for the Beatles, which, if you listen closely, can be heard throughout their set.

 

Dan The Movie is the guitar grand baby of Philly faces: Dan, Jonas, Josh, Eliza and Will, members of TJ Kong & the Atomic Bomb, The Teeth, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, BC Camplight, Squawk Brothers, Lowercase Roses and a Tom Waits cover band.