Album Notes

New Harmony Indiana
This musical mish-mash that is NHI is the brainchild of Milwaukeean Matt Krajewski. Matt is a Hoosier state native, who relocated to Milwaukee a little while back. He cut his musical teeth with seminal Milwaukee punk/funk outfit, The Joker's Henchmen, then spent the 90's in the Midwest with a variety of outfits. With the likes of; the Yell Leaders (pop/rock), Ann McWilliams (folk), Amos Moses (grunge/pop), and Eric Blowtorch (soul/roots), and Tolstoi's Tricycle (prog/pop) he develop an unusually diverse musical palette. When Matt decided to record his own musical project, he gathered a few of his most accomplished cohorts and started recording.

The Music:
The product is Parlour Music. New Harmony Indiana plays an exhilarating mix of Latin dance, industrial jazz, moaning hillbilly ballads, and the occasional pop-rock tune, yet traditional country instrumentation provides their basic musical foundation, if not style. It's not unusual, for example, to hear a distorted guitar, a traditional fiddle, and an ancient reed organ on the same loungy pop song. Throw in some electronic drums and ghostly harmonies and you might start to get the picture. The music has some ties to Johnny Cash's baritone tales of despair, and the operatic harmonies of the Sons of the Pioneers. NHI resembles cowboy music in it's grab bag of instrumentation and style, and in Matt's vocal range from froggy baritone to crooning tenor. His vocals have been compared to everyone from Tom Waits to Paul Heaton (Beautiful South). And what ties this all together, is Matt's ability to transfer his soul to the recording. NHI creates interesting, intelligent, and aesthetically pleasing music. Mixing musical styles define NHI's sound, and it is the common thread which ties together all good music.