"Deerpath" by Class M Planets to be Released with Stunning New Art
Class M Planets is an acoustic tweak folk ensemble and part of songwriter Adam Goldman's super group, thebrotheregg, whose expansive psychotropic pop stylings have been haunting the Pacific Northwest and the Earth since 1992. The songs are smart and off-kilter, rekindling brit-pop stylings, like Syd Barrett and Marc Bolan with a smattering of Leonard Cohen. The sonic quality of their latest record, Deerpath is at once lo-fi, crisp, and clear. Adam's lyrics are both psychedelic and lucid. There is a sense of contradiction running consistently through it, thus canceling out and unifying the experience.
Deerpath flows with poetic verse and colorful songs, much like the world of forest animals and ancient mysticism being depicted within the cover art. Finding correlation between the cover and lyrical content is subjective, for the listener. Adam commissioned Cary to paint something that would return storytelling and imagination to album art. They agreed on the title "Deerpath" before starting, evoking a fantasy image, this theme of wandering and seeking knowledge. They also agreed that the work should look like a Bosch tryptic and illustrations from The Wind in the Willows. All in all, it is an ode to the spirituality of Oregon's forest and its mystical nature.
Deerpath marks a new standard for Adam in the recording process, each song tailor-made with different musicians. 16 different musicians appear on 16 tracks. The album has a cohesive, united feel, even with so many flavors brought out by collaborators. Production quality is crisp and strong without losing that sense of organic indie production and values. Adam worked with four different engineers from tracking to mastering, including Mike Hagler at Kingsize Studios in Chicago, and Adam Gonsalves at Telegraph Studios, for vinyl mastering. The final product is a beautiful, 180 gram vinyl album.
Deerpath is to be catalogued under Alternative Rock, Psych-Folk music.
Exclusive to Press mp3 Download: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bxv4uup6-WNpWkcyRVZVdVlQQmc/edit?usp=sharing
Record Link: http://classmplanets.bandcamp.com/album/deerpath
Class M Planets Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Class-M-Planets/328703836164
animated video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhoTKl0oy0Q
bandcamp:
https://classmplanets.bandcamp.com/
label:
http://www.totallypunk.com
REVIEWS
Portland Mercury 7/26/2014 :
Deerpath, the new vinyl album from Class M Planets, comes in a formidable package: a full-color gatefold with sumptuous storybook artwork by Cary Porter, evoking the work of British artist Peter Cross (who illustrated Trouble for Trumpets and did the wonderful cover art for all those Anthony Phillips solo albums). The actual music contained within is substantially more modest. Class M Planets—the "tweak folk" project of songwriter Adam Goldman, who's also launching his (hopefully ironically named) Totallypunk label with the release—sounds like murmuring, introspective, acoustic sketches whose charms are located in their low-key, homespun qualities. It's a welcome counterpart to Goldman's other band, Thebrotheregg, whose prog/psych/pop hybrid has long been a Portland mainstay. NED LANNAMANN
Spacerock reviews 1/6/2015
Class M Planets is the project of Adam Goldman from Portland, OR (I’ll have to check with my friend Roger Neville-Neil if he’s aware of this musician) and while it’s clearly not space-rock – you guessed that from the cover image, right? – it’s going to interest blog readers who enjoy that sort of bucolic, pastoral, alt-folk psych singer-songwriter music that Cary Porter’s acrylic cover painting exactly suggests.
The accompanying press release for this LP, released in July 2014, invokes Syd Barrett and Marc Bolan, and a smattering of Leonard Cohen and I’d add that perhaps it just about swaps an orbit with Twink or much more particularly Ian A. Anderson but then again it’s quite charming enough to standalone. Regular readers of the blog will likely remember Adam for his split 7” single with Bevis Frond that I’d reviewed back in 2013, playing as thebrotheregg and releasing just as enchanting a record then.
Sixteen tracks, with Goldman working alongside different musicians on each, all reflect the vividness of that striking cover painting – again to quote the PR on this “the final product is a beautiful, 180 gram, vinyl album with full-colour gatefold and insert” – brief but gently crafted songs that have a contradiction to them simply because they are spaciously lo-fi but still lushly realised. A neat trick, I’d say.
So what these songs are, they’re wrapped up in an ethereal mysticism and still they’re about the here and now of real life. They’re elegant and approachable, heartfelt intimacies. As sparse as, say, a Pulco record, as neatly simple as a BMX Bandits song and as satisfyingly complex as you’d want.