Album Notes

-- Timelines & Tragedies was nominated "Album of the Year" for 2008 at the Omaha Entertainment Awards (OEA)!

-- Timelines & Tragedies charted CMJ Top 200

-- Timelines & Tragedies was selected to be featured on Roadtrip Nation on PBS


MIDWEST DILEMMA – A guitar, cowboy cut shirt, red trucker hat, and an old passenger van on open road. Justin Lamoureux has been performing under the name Midwest Dilemma for nearly a decade. Many know Midwest Dilemma as Omaha based folk-rock band who's debut release Timelines & Tragedies won the title Album Of The Year at the Omaha Entertainment Awards show this year. The album also charted CMJ Top 200 based on college radio play shortly after the release.

Lamoureux enlisted friends, family members, and musical acquaintances to help create the music on Midwest Dilemma's Timelines & Tragedies album. Twenty-three members to be exact. Such instruments as Flute, Clarinet, Tuba, Trombone, Saxophone, Accordion, Cello, Viola, Trumpet, Singing Saw, Upright Bass, Vibraphone, Pedal Steel, Mandolin, Piano, Percussion, and Electric Guitar give the record an orchestral folk and chamber pop sound, similar to Arcade Fire, The Decemberists, Sufjan Stevens, and Bright Eyes.

Timelines & Tragedies is a time line of family history. Tracing Lamoureux's ancestors to their days of French Canadian fur trading, the Great Depression, the struggles of his parents' generation with Vietnam, and eventually concluding with his life in Sioux City and Omaha. Timelines & Tragedies is the perfect outcome of Midwest Dilemma's vision.


"Timelines & Tragedies does an extraordinary job of telling the immigrant’s story, one that distills the shared experience of severed roots and the dismembering and intimidating shift out of the safe boundaries of home into an uncertain future." - Frederick Foxtrott

"Midwest Dilemma has created a brave, introspective and genre-bending first offering with Timelines and Tragedies." - Tracer Magazine

"Acoustic Americana, with a subtle instrumental backing that dips from old folk to stylized cinescape." - Song, By Toad

"Midwest Dilemma has constructed a journey for the spirit." - Canadian Audiophile

"Lamoureux is a stream, it doesn’t matter if for a time he is only trickling through rocks and soil, his conviction is the rainfall, pouring much needed force sustenance to the stream – it can’t be stopped. He will find his ocean; it’s inevitable." - CityWeekly

"Using strings, woodwinds, guitars, accordion and a musical saw this album catapults itself to the upper echelons of folk music." - Here Comes The Flood

"Midwest Dilemma feels like a band that must not only be heard, but witnessed." - Enough Cowbell

"Above all, there is an inexplicable power to Timelines & Tragedies that gives it such an epic quality." - Radio Indy

"If you would have told me earlier in the day that I’d kick off the start of my weekend sitting around listening to 400 years of family history, I probably would have told you to piss off. After learning that factoid from the press sheet for the release of Midwest Dilemma’s Timelines & Tragedies, I’m pleased to report that I’m doing exactly that." - Rock Sellout

"This is an album for our times." - Metric Reflection