Brian De marco creates uncommon music that fills your heart and soul with melody and joy, pleases the ear and feeds the soul. His heartfelt lyrics help you to realize the truth and reality of our everyday lives.
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Brian is an excellent artist, not one of paint or color, but one of sound and feeling. You can hear his feeling in his every single song. Quality music like this is hard to find these days. Brian delivers in his new album, Bend Don't Break, family heratage and class. Brian is a true professianal, and for that he gets the full 5 stars from me.
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For the last few years DeMarco’s music has taken on three distinct personalities: his flagship band Second Harvest, the electric blues outfit the Joe Banks Band and DeMarco solo.  For the most part the three incarnations of his music have stayed separate in sound and purpose, but with 'Bend Don’t Break' DeMarco has expertly woven together his varying musical styles and his many talented bandmates into one cohesive tapestry that comes off neither pretentious nor disjointed.  It seems that to truly unify all the ways in which DeMarco plays music, all he needed to do was diversify his sound.  Recorded over the last several months at Steve Botterweg’s Multi-Purpose Studios in Jerome, DeMarco brought in all of his ringers from his bands to create a sound that displays his songwriting abilities in their most natural environment.  Bend Don’t Break has achieved a state of being multi-faceted but not scattered.  Some tracks on the album have Second Harvest members Wild Billy Kneebone on bass, mandolinist Aaron Tyler and banjo picker Frank Dedera, while others have Joe Banks sound with bassist Dave Logan, drummer Ron James, sax player Greg Aitken, and six string supplied by Kneebone.
    With his three previous solo efforts, Big Heart Small Worries, everythingnothing and Never Come Down, DeMarco’s style was honed and specific, bringing forth his trademark obsessive and prolific nature of a continuously working perfectionist.  For each previous album the instrumentation was uniform and the stylistic sensibilities were consistent giving a real highlight to DeMarco’s bluegrass side, his electric blues side and his solo singer-songwriter side, respectively.  Bend Don’t Break is a notable departure from this philosophy.
    Bend Don’t Break’s first track, “Let’s Go Walkin’,” has an undeniable Neil Young Harvest Moon influence with the gentle, floating tempo and general complacently happy mood.  Track two, the instrumental “Pass the Mezzrole,” takes an abrupt turn to the Joe Banks Band electric side with stinging lead guitar work by DeMarco himself.  “Uncle Ray” exhibits a Bruce Springsteen Nebraska-era hollowness with strummed acoustic guitar underlying a somber tale of street reality and gritty misery.  “No More Worries” signals a first for DeMarco with a sweet, syncopated reggae groove and smooth island backing vocals that comes off as an addictive blues/reggae/Americana fusion.  The tune “Loves Broken Bow” is a somber, emotional and sparse piece with local picker Nolan McKelvey playing bowed standup bass along with DeMarco on piano.
    Bend Don’t Break signals DeMarco’s fourth solo album and is the best example of his work to date with the most evolved incarnation of his sound.
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