Post Description

- Release Info -------------------------------------------------------------- -

  Artist:      The Rocket Summer
  Album:       Of Men And Angels
  Label:       Island
  Playtime:    55:16 min
  Genre:       Rock
  URL:        therocketsummer.com
  Rip date:    2010-02-18
  Street date: 2010-02-23
  Size:        85.62 MB
  Type:        Normal
  Quality:     205 kbps / 4410kHz / Joint Stereo

- Release Notes ------------------------------------------------------------- -

   *pop kiddies and farmers and christians cream themselves*

   "Texas native Bryce Avary, the singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist
   mastermind behind The Rocket Summer, has accomplished enough for someone a
   lot older, as he prepares to release his second Island Records release (and
   fourth overall), Of Men and Angels, the follow-up his major label debut,
   2007's Do You Feel.

   Since launching his career as a 16-year-old with the independently released
   The Rocket Summer EP, a name he took from a Ray Bradbury short story, Bryce
   has toured around the world, selling out venues not just in the U.S., but
   Canada, the U.K. and Japan, while playing such noted events as U.K.'s
   Glastonbury Festival, Scotland's T in the Park, Japan's Summer Sonic
   Festival, Austin City Limits, SXSW, Bamboozle, Cornerstone and the 2007 Vans
   Warped Tour.

   "With this album, I wanted to strip away some of the expectations and goals
   even more so that have perhaps held me back in the past," he explains. "I
   still tried to write songs the whole world would want to sing along to, a
   beautiful and huge record. But I went into it with the attitude, I want to
   make an album of genuine and honest songs written from my heart and personal
   experiences that musically and lyrically would be better than anything I had
   done yet and above all would be an album that would hopefully, truly move and
   affect people. The whole pop success is like playing the lottery anyway. Of
   course it would be amazing, but for me it's all about focusing everything you
   have on making the greatest music you can without banking on any thing else.
   I'm grateful to be doing this and I want to do this for the right reasons."

   For someone as spiritually motivated as Avary, that means he focuses on the
   struggles and victories of life's often-challenging journey in Of Men and
   Angels. There's the fervent post-emo power-pop punk riffs propelling "You
   Gotta Believe," the autobiographical tale of romance and surviving the bad
   times in the hint of a hip-hop groove in "Hills and Valleys" and the
   quiet-to-loud, mud-below-to-ground-above contrast of "Light," while "Nothing
   Matters" is a paean to altruism and selflessness, "Pull Myself Together"
   about accepting grace and allowing yourself to move on while learning from
   your mistakes and the moving, hymnal "Walls," an epic ballad on battling
   depression. And if his songs often tackle serious topics, Avary isn't above
   concocting something more tongue-in-cheek, like "Japanese Exchange Student,"
   which compares his social life as an up-and-coming artist to that of a
   student's experience in a foreign land, and "I Need a Break (But I'd Rather
   Have a Breakthrough)," his own sly acknowledgement of the role of luck in pop
   success.

   Avary produced the album with CJ Eriksson, who engineered Do You Feel,
   recording "21 or 22 finished tracks...almost two albums' worth" at Ocean in
   Los Angeles and in Austin, playing, as he did on his previous albums, all the
   instruments himself--tackling guitar, keys, bass and drums, which were the
   first thing he learned as a kid.

   "I wanted this to be the best record I've ever made to date, so when people
   look back on it, they say, `That's an album which really affected my soul.'"

   In fact, The Rocket Summer has a way of getting Bryce Avary's fans to feel
   just that