Ken Hanson
Panalure will be joined by an unusual opening act at their album release show at Anodyne Coffee’s Walker’s Point café on Saturday. Instead of opting for a traditional opener—perhaps one of the many local bands that the group has ties to, or maybe a songwriter with a shared lineage in folk or Americana music—the band has instead invited the local storytelling collective Ex Fabula.
On paper that may seem like an odd fit, but on a thematic level it makes sense since, like Ex Fabula, Panalure specialize in stories. The group fills their debut album The Bones with dark narratives of secrets and betrayals. Panalure wear their interest in fine art on their sleeve—the band is named for a high-end, discontinued Kodak film paper used for printing gallery-caliber photographs—so their brand of folk storytelling is more overtly literary than the American hobo songs and murder ballads that were popular a century ago, but make no mistake about it, the subject matter is much the same. These are songs about violence, regrets and sins of the flesh.
Though the songs on The Bones are richly colored with shades of blues and jazz, those arrangements are mostly subdued, holding themselves back so as not to drown out songwriter Fred Ziegler’s earthy prose. It took the band some time to learn that restraint, guitarist Michael De Boer explains. Some early versions of these songs, recorded when accordionist and keyboardist LaRita Craft was a full-time member of the band, were considerably busier.
“One of my favorite bands is Calexico, and I always thought we sounded a bit like them, especially when we had an accordion,” says De Boer. “It had that mix of rock, folk and worldbeat, with a little Mexican influence to it, too. My listening tastes are extremely eclectic, and I play with Painted Caves and some other bands, so I tend to play in that worldbeat style, and bring those influences in. Fred comes from much more of a folk and rock background, though, and his lyrics are so strong that that’s where we usually like to keep the focus.”
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The Bones’ macabre tone makes for a striking introduction to the band, but De Boer says the album’s darker themes don’t carry through all their material. Some of the newer songs they’ve been working on should lighten the mood at their album release show. “All the new songs are a lot lighter and more upbeat,” De Boer says. “They’re uplifting without being sappy.”
Panalure play their album release show with Ex Fabula at 8 p.m. on Saturday, Jan. 24 at Anodyne Coffee Roasting Co., 224 W. Bruce St. Cover is $10.
