Artist ID: 808
For most bands, 12 years of touring and six albums with over a quarter million combined units sold is more a fantasy than it is ever a fact. But for Fighting Gravity, one of the country's most potent and enduring rock-ska combos, the only way to celebrate entering the 13th year of a great career is to release the double-disc live album that fans and band members alike have dreamed about since this six-piece Richmond, VA act began.
Hello Cleveland manages to be simultaneously contemporary and historical, tracing the musical roots of the band and chronicling its ever-maturing sound even while it grasps hold of the definitive Fighting Gravity. As vocalist/frontman Schiavone McGee puts it, "[Hello Cleveland] gives the listener an exact idea of what we are and how we evolved."
Fighting Gravity has always struggled to capture the illusive energy and feel of its live performance on an album, and Hello Cleveland solved that riddle with the help of producer David Lowery (Cracker). Mixed at Richmond's Sound of Music studios, the 28 songs on two discs transport the listener through the deep catalog of Fighting Gravity's musical past and present. The album moves from a bouncing, sweat-drenched first disc with a track ordering similar to some of the band's more structured first sets, into a second disc ripe with improvisational jams and tight, poppy gems (the band has been known to go onstage after intermission without a set list planned).
After recording its entire three-month 1999 summer tour, Fighting Gravity eventually selected the tracks on the disc largely from three shows that tapped into the essence of the band's reality. Performances at Washington, DC's 9:30 Club, Virginia Beach, VA's Peabody's Nightclub and Richmond, VA's Mayo Island, represent the hyped-up club gig, the drunken bar night, and the organic outdoor performances, respectively, that Fighting Gravity moves between. Hello Cleveland also includes the nostalgic track "Holiday," recorded at a 1996 show at Richmond's now-defunct Floodzone, the hometown stomping ground where Fighting Gravity came of age.
In many cases, the songs on Hello Cleveland are more accurate manifestations of how the band intended them to sound than the various studio versions that have been laid down over the years. Arranged for the current lineup, the older tracks take on a new life that springs from the band's own changing sensibilities.
"As we evolve as musicians, our influences expand," says bassist/vocalist Dave Peterson. "We strive to grow and find things in music that we didn't know we could appreciate. Our perspectives shift, and as our sense of music grows, we become able to use it in a more proficient way."
Or, as McGee puts it, "Our energy has become a better complement to ourselves. We know when to kick ass and we know when to ease off."
While Fighting Gravity is deeply indebted to the influences of reggae, ska and the 2-Tone movement, those musical elements are only a piece of Fighting Gravity's complex puzzle. With a breadth of stylistic approach that includes rock, pop, soul and funk, the fresh, edgy feel of Hello Cleveland looks to the future and the past simultaneously. Which is exactly the strength that has allowed Fighting Gravity to build a career in an era of prefab musicians.
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