Dry The River

It has been an odd sort of musical upbringing for the five sons of Dry the River. Whilst today their rattly alt-folk is a rag-tag mixture of Americana, gospel and indie rock, their early collaborations were born of a shared infatuation with late 90s post-punk and progressive rock. Singer/guitarist Peter Liddle believes this unlikely marriage has been a formative influence: “I think what we always admired about bands like At the Drive-In, Glassjaw, Refused, is the consumptive energy that they had – post-punk is a really expressive, heart-on-sleeve kind of musical heritage and I think we still write and play that way. On the other hand, we were blind to a lot of other wonderful music – I was probably eighteen or nineteen before I started to go back and really listen carefully to the records my parents played when I was growing up: Paul Simon, Leonard Cohen, Suzanne Vega... and allow that to feed into the way we write music.” Following a musical hiatus spent in Central and South America, Liddle began to write again at university, often drawing narrative inspiration from the ethnographic and religious texts he was studying in the course of his Anthropology degree. What began as a solo acoustic project quickly grew into a haphazard array of musical endeavours, expanding and contracting “like a folky amoeba” over several years until guitarist and co-songwriter Matthew Taylor completed the formal 5-piece line-up early in 2009. In June of that year, Dry the River worked with producer Peter Miles (The King Blues, Sweet Billy Pilgrim, Young Soul Rebels), live-tracking their debut E P “The Chambers & The Valves” in just two days. This was followed by a thirty date acoustic tour with singer songwriter Matthew Reynolds, and a heavy schedule of band dates with acts including Hjaltalin, Broadcast2000, Plants & Animals, Port O’Brien, Deer Tick and Bowerbirds. www.drytheriver.com www.myspace.com/drytherivermusic