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A Cuban-American whose parents fled Castros Havana with him still in the womb, Walter Salas-Humara was raised bilingual just across the Florida Straits in Fort Lauderdale. College at University of Florida in Gainesville and a residency with the Vulgar Boatmen left him with a lifelong habit of Mudcrutch/Tom Petty-style crunchy guitar riffs. Chasing the punk prairie fire to New York just in time to sift through the ashes, he formed The Silos in 1985 with guitarist Bob Rupe and violinist Mary Rowell, plugging the main cable of American rock idiom into the jerry-rigged soundboard of Velvets-era feral experimentalism. The unlikely result, as evidenced by About Her Steps (1986), the seminal Cuba (1987) and their RCA debut The Silos (i.e., The One with the Bird on the Cover, 1990) was a loose-limbed conceptual country-rock that in turn influenced (if not outright inspired) the alt-country No Depression movement just around the corner.
2014 brought the release of a new Walter Salas-Humara solo album, Curve and Shake. Rolling Stone editor Anthony DeCurtis describes the album - That sense of being untethered from certainties, of floating, permeates Curve and Shake. The feeling is gentle, not quite scary, but with an element of unease. Letting go of expectations combines aspects of sadness, freedom and even wonder. Like so many great singers, Walter communicates as much by what he doesnt say as by what he does. His raspy tone provides a rich counterpoint to the genial surrealism, the offhand magical realism, of so many of his lyrics. His words are presented as if theyre describing straightforward events, but they speak a rich, associative poetry that evokes emotions more so than facts. His guitar playing is similarly adaptable raw and stinging one moment, dreamy and droning the next.
While the winter snow buried his hometown of Milwaukee, Brett Newski hibernated to South Africa, touring, couch surfing and writing songs for the Hi-Fi D.I.Y. EP. His car broke down on day one of the tour, food poisoning set in on day five and his train car fell under attack by robbers on a trip from Johannesburg to Durban, inspiring the song No Anchor, a song about diving face-first into the world alone with no safety net.
In preparation for the Hi-Fi D.I.Y. World Tour, Brett returned home to record new material. Fellow Milwaukean and Violent Femmes cofounder, Victor DeLorenzo, produced Hi-Fi D.I.Y. at Howl Street Recordings in Milwaukee. The two geared up for the Hi-Fi sessions by holding coffee drinking contests on Victors front porch, demoing tunes on an old snare drum and ragtime guitar. The five songs are a blend of Newskis anxiety-rich indie rock, along with tongue-in-cheek power acoustic tunes like DIY, about playing the worst show of your life to four people on a shitty Monday night in St. Louis. The final leg of the Hi-Fi D.I.Y. world tour begins in the US on Feb 19th, taking Brett from the Midwest to SXSW and up the east coast.
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