Photo by Blaine Schultz
Fallen Down Angels
Fallen Down Angels
While Over By There may be the debut CD by Milwaukee’s Fallen Down Angels, David Thomas and John Reilly’s history reaches back to legendary Milwaukee clubs The Starship and Zak’s.
Conversation of their musical adventures veers off into stories of mistaken arrests for driving stolen vehicles across state lines; police shutting down a concert looking for a murder suspect; working as roadies for local punk pioneers The Haskels and rubbing shoulders with the likes of jazz legend Sun Ra and British band Magazine. And that was just our first half hour of conversation.
The trio, Thomas on guitar, and vocals; Reilly on bass and vocals and drummer Anthony Vella are celebrating the release of the CD Over By There, at Kochanski's Concertina Beer Hall Saturday, Oct. 23 at 9 p.m. kochanskisconcertina.com/calendar-of-events
Pandemic Panic
As the pandemic came into view, they canceled shows on three different occasions in Milwaukee and Chicago. In the year when everything changed, things were put on hold and the band had to wait until now to release the CD.
Fallen Down Angels’ heavy sound, dominated by post-punk and American roots music, nods to the past with a cover of the Haskels’ “Deadmans Shoes” and “Bucket of Pabst,” a witty update of “Bucket of Love,” the song Thomas has been performing for decades with such bands as The Boogiemen, Screamin’ Lillies and Spade Cooley.
Reilly said he and Thomas began playing in drummer-less trio Narcotix in 1977. All these years later Reilly still gets a kick out of Thomas’ songs. Today the band’s practice space is equal parts soundproof bunker and gallery to gig posters their bands have played over the decades. Is it really that far removed from the Bay View bank vault they once rehearsed in?
In the early ‘80s, The Kingdom, The Power and The Glory found Reilly and Thomas collaborating to play experimental music that included drum machine, synthesizers, sequencers and percussion. “I found that the lids for Dixie Revere pots and pans were perfect bells. You’d get them at thrift stores for a dime or a quarter. I’d bring a tuner with me to tell what note it was,” Thomas said. The band also hauled an anvil onstage and used the morse code signal from a walkie talkie. The Kingdom, The Power and The Glory was even written up in the Wall Street Journal of all places.
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Time Stands Still
Photo By Blaine Schultz
Fallen Down Angels - Over By There
A few years ago, Thomas heard about a band playing across the street from his house. It included Vella playing drums and Thomas jammed with them. At the time Thomas had also reconnected in a digital recording project with Reilly; eventually things shook out with the trio becoming a band. They even dusted off the rust to play a socially distanced afternoon set in Thomas’ front yard during the pandemic.
The songs on Over By There are lean, muscular slices of energetic timeless rock. “Thin Ice” offers an existential viewpoint, “Anything/Everything” delvers a nagging pop hook “Tear Down the Dam” is a chapter of neighborhood folklore set to music. Is rock and roll the fountain of youth? Fallen Down Angels might argue that it is the elixir. After 41 years, they might be onto something.
