Album Notes

Lead by multi-instrumentalist Paul Fonfara, a virtuoso clarinet player with a handle on just about any music-making device you can throw at him, Painted Saints are perhaps the most accomplished local band you've never heard of. A transplant from an incestuous Denver music scene, Fonfara possesses a technical prowess that has been on display for years; he's a former member of Devotchka and touring sideman to Jim White, but it's his songwriting and orchestral creativity that get the limelight with Painted Saints. Live, Fonfara layers guitar, clarinet, strings, an archaic Colombian squeezebox, and whistles that would make Andrew Bird blush, resulting in a self-described "spaghetti western-heroin-klezmer-chamber country-sad-bastard thing." Also a talented painter, Fonfara pens lyrics that detail the kind of dark and vivid imagery one could imagine Hieronymus Bosch creating, were he raised in modern-day rural America. . —Christopher Matthew Jensen, City Pages

painted saints and paul fonfara fall into the realm of spaghetti western/heroin klezmer/sad bastard chamber folk music and write tin can and twine romances in a color of rust with backdrops of long wind swept open roads framed by tangled barbed wire and naked telephone poles. Their songs are of ashtray broken hearts and lansdscapes of beauty and sorrow borrowing harmonies from old eastern europe, the desert southwest and the sentiments of working class rust belt americana. they also really like long winded and pompous descriptions. the bricks might breathe again has songs about taxidermy, factory assembly lines swimming in red brick dust clouds, fat children on epic bike rides in snow storms and naked cottonwoods. painted saints is made up of denver and minneapolis' finest including kelly o'dea, joshua granowski, chris hepola, jonathan kaiser and jackie beckey playing a thick mix of cellos, violins, violas, bandoneons, clarinets, guitars, drums, upright bass and saw.