The Physics of Meaning

"As members of three of my favorite local outfits come together to form The Physics of Meaning, I'll go ahead and preemptively call this newfangled excursion a Triangle supergroup. [They] have something special on their hands with this mercurial, under-construction pop pursuit." -- Grayson Currin - The Independent

The Physics of Meaning is well on its way to great. While Hart plays a violin (yes, like Final Fantasy, Patrick Wolf and Andrew Bird), his band sounds more like Grandaddy, Broken Social Scene, John Vanderslice - crunchy drums, backward-spinning electric guitars, tumbles into cut glass. Though the lyrics sometimes carry the insipid philosophising bemoaned above, often they fall closer to the giddy side of emo: everyday phrases repeated until they begin to glow. The strings are arranged marvelously, with unexpected harmonies and then sudden dashes of feeling. At their best - stripped to modest pretensions, pop music instead of treatise, - they're electrifying.

The Physics of Meaning - "Down at Columbia and Cameron". See this is what I'm talking about. Roll-over-and-over drums, blended vocals that would make Fountains of Wayne blush, and it's a song about girls (or maybe boys - he doesn't specify). There's a breeziness here, the way the synths bump into the strings like they've been distracted by some cherry-blossoms. More exciting still is the way the band finds another vibe in the second half - a woozy regalness, the prince having a lazy spring fever spazz-out. The sort of song you want to parcel into a parcel, tape up, and send over the water to make someone smile.

The Physics of Meaning - "Manhattan Is An Island". Drum machine, boy and girl, Notwists of synth: a slippery song, slick and supple, strings sneering. And then the slap of sound, the surge of static, the ceiling slipping. I love the aqueous feel of the whole thing, with the vocals set slightly apart. (On an island, natch.) But when the voices stop and the skyscrapers begin to fall; well, they fall. - Said the Gramaphone

Particularly impressive was the set put on by The Physics of Meaning. It is kind of a ridiculous name, but this foursome fronted by an intense violinist is destined for big things. They have got the same sort of integrity and gorgeousness that makes other North Carolina-bred bands (like Annuals) so loveable. - Free Williamsburg

Back in the old days, when an album cover and a name were enough for a chance purchase, this is the album you'd bring home to hear from a band called something like The Physics of Meaning. With silhouettes of a winged creature and a snake on the front and back covers, respectively, it portends a fantastic tale whose drama rolls in like summer stormclouds, dark, sudden and fierce. You wanted to explore.

Snake Charmer and Destiny at the Stroke of Midnight is the second album by Daniel Hart's loose musical collective, Chapel Hill's The Physics of Meaning. Sometime violinist to St. Vincent, John Vanderslice and—more to the point—The Polyphonic Spree, Hart delivers a moody, dynamic epic here, its swooning, fevered, 12-song course often seeming better-suited for the theater than the club. Like the Spree, Hart likes big tapestries and stages and screens. But if the Spree once made Jesus Christ Superstar, Hart's latest is Tristan und Isolde.

Indeed, this richly orchestrated rock-opera focuses on a pair of seemingly star-crossed lovers, who, in a familiar glyph, discover each other only to be pulled apart. Hart employs 20 additional instrumentalists and almost as many vocalists on an album whose scope and dynamics suggest a major motion picture. Its ambition recalls the progressive rockers of the '70s, and Hart is, not coincidentally, also a student of classical music, fashioning several moments of elegant delicacy showcasing such influence.

Though the album definitely rocks at points—like the trilling-cello that's the racing heartbeat beneath "No More Sleeping in the Shadows"—those moments have quieter counterparts, even within the same song. On tracks such as the harp- and harmony-driven lullaby "Around the Bend," the cinematic swell feels almost Hollywood.

This isn't a strict criticism, though, as Snake Charmer is wonderfully crafted and gracefully executed. But its pacing and texture are considered enough to risk becoming lost as background music. This is music that you listen to, which might sound strange, except music's more an accessory or soundtrack these days than the central locus. People don't want to explore as much. Like his rich lyrical metaphors ("Where's the snake charmer who can cure the venomous heart?") and multi-movement passages, Hart's latest requires time and attention to fully digest. Effort, though, is a chief constituent in most things of value. - The Independent

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYs8KAnyJkw - KEXP/Youtube

This is the solo project of Daniel Hart, who share his time and incredible multi-instrumental talent with the bands of St. Vincent and John Vanderslice. Hart's music, self-described as chamber rock, is complex in part from his classical training, but remains relative to indie rock with strong melodies, gorgeous layering and simple honesty. - Time Out New York

North Carolina band The Physics of Meaning is led by Daniel Hart, who brings the attic feeling into his virtuous songs of inescapable pain and dramatic texture. They recall bygone times and the way that people looked from far away in memories, with a shine and a more porcelain gloss. The stories are high with tension and threaded together with a passionate discourse of unbridled steam and storm. You see it setting up at the edge of town, tumbling in from the west, turning on all of the street lamps as it methodically makes a night out of a day, delivering a reminder that there’s more to this living thing than we could ever control. Hart and his violin are one and the same apparatus, working in unison to bend the frames of typical pop, into pieces that open up old souls from the grounds. They make for contemporary hauntings – recalling those tiny nettlesome skeletons in the closet or attic, slumped into a hot or frigid crawlspace, where just two triangular windows on the ends of the structure provide looking space – a connection to the outside. He and his revolving band of players – depending on availability and the time of year – create so much urgency in these songs that are more graphic folktales of a new kind, ones that befriend the line of thinking that Colin Meloy, Zach Condon and Hart’s frequent boss John Vanderslice take when writing. They are stories about hardships and discomforts, realizations of just how everything fits together in its jarring and contradictory way sometimes. The muffled groans that are coming from the top of the stairs that you hear – the hollow bangs of the floorboards above the head – is the band channeling these ghosts, locked in their periods and steps, that reach out to them for their vocalness.
- www.daytrotter.com

The Physics of Meaning played our Gothamist House show on Wednesday, and have been one of our favorite bands this CMJ by far. - www.gothamist.com