Music
Press
Tourist on the Run is a sly, powerful, kick-ass album of alternative rock. The music is complex and balanced and surprising. It has intelligence and humor. The lyrics are intriguing and many of them are brilliant. The push-and-pull in all of these songs between radiance and decay, between love and anger, is striking. "This Isn't It" is a stunning piece; the lyrics are oddly perfect. This is a funny and haunting creation, and the ending is really pleasing. Pulsing, propulsive rhythm. The vocals in the background sound like nervous angels. The woman's voice is theatrical and mannered; the man's is straightforward, simple, true, so there's a fascinating sexual tension here. "You" has an odd, jazzy beat, neat keyboards, and deep, rich, layered vocals. The line "I want to be here with you when I walk this planet" stays permanently in the listener's head. The closest thing on the album to a love song, but a wonderfully unconventional one. "Riding the Rails" is full of yearning for evanescent gladness, for what has slipped through our fingers. Clear, pretty female voice, and then a graceful male one. Great harmonica. It's sweet and plaintive at the same time. "Drifting" is a hypnotic track with amazing sax. The lyrics are just breathed, and the listener can float with the song. Subtle and odd elements, including a purring sound and nice scat singing, are full of surprises. Imagine closing your eyes in an old jazz club and letting the song completely take your soul over. "Tourist on the Run" evokes perfectly the feeling you get when you're on the move and disoriented; it's a distorting mirror. The music is beautiful, hypnotic, and unsettling. The singer is lost and looking for his place in the universe, alienated and apprehensive. Especially powerful are the looping voices, the little harmonies, the layers of sound, the tiny hidden quieter percussion behind the louder pounding beat. This song played at a high volume hums right through your bones. And there are unexpected lyrical delights. A dark and powerful song. "The Primordial Scream" has a Dylanesque quality; it's a story-song of world-weariness and quiet menace from a man who has hit the end of one road, and of his rope. A litany of visual observations that leads to inner insight. It's the most patiently impatient scream imaginable. "In the Night Hotel." The looping, loopy harmonies are loose and cool on this one. The instrumental in the middle draws us in powerfully. We're suddenly stuck in a seedy place--seductiveness and disgust and hanging out and just hanging on. Right after the line "my cigarette is ashes and I want to scream," the "ooow" sound made me laugh out loud. "Anytime Anywhere." So simple, so complex. It sucks us in with soft percussion at the start; then there's quiet, slow, growing, measured violence. Menace and beauty (the chorus of "anytime, anywhere" is lovely) seem inextricable here. The ending is haunting, the way it goes on and on and then abruptly stops, unresolved. "Make your enemy your friend"--it's dark touches like this that make Bohagey Bowes stand really far out from the crowd. It's inspired. "Summer Solstice" is on one level a scathing and subtle look at the mindlessness of cult-like belief, and on another a deeper philosophical reckoning on the part of the singer. Plus it's just gorgeous to listen to. All in all, Tourist on the Run is quirky and brilliant and deeply felt. P.S. Make sure you don't miss the descriptions of the instruments on the cover. - CD Baby
different
it's kind of like type o negative meets pink floyd. i like it. you're not expecting those vocals when the song starts, but they definitely work. powerfull lyrics. killer outro. i just like the overall sound. it's a good sound...... keep it up.
- derhoade from Zanesville, Ohio on 17Jun2006
Something good at last.
Iggy Pop eat your heart out. Really liked this one, and i'm a hard f***er to please. Production is great but the whole feel of this one grabed me. Good lyrics, sounds like there's a lot of meaning there which is one of the keys to a great song. Just a bit too long but no big deal for an album song. Good stuff lads, keep it up.
- dinsil from Ireland on 17Jun2006 - garageband.com
soothing
a nice track, very mellow, very cafe del mare... very well produced and mixed, clearly the artist had paid attention to detail and it shows. The music has a dreamy, mellow atmosphere, and that sax! This is truly professional work. The range of instruments holds the listeners interest all the way through, with some brilliant interplay of sounds, yet the sax holds it all together. Very well done.
- nickstour from United Kingdom on 2Jul2006
Wow
I love the long held out vocals on this tune. Very trippy and laid back.
The production quality is pretty good and utilizes that panning very nicely.
Very laid back and groovy drum beat and all the different instrumentation works very well with this song, especially the saxaphone!
- ltjams from Boise, Idaho on 27Jun2006 - garageband.com
yup...right out of the park!
This is a fantastic track. I like everything about it. The opening is like a master storyteller setting the scene for an epic saga. The vocals create a great atmosphere. The performances are spot on. The sound is a lot like BT and the others like him. wow!
- blanziflorart from Taipei, Taiwan on 29Jun2006
ORIGINAL AND PRO
Good sounds great mood, this works well with the vocals, I would have let the beat ride a lil more but thats just me. I like the message behind everything and its the kind of song that will stand out to those smart enough to get it. very well done, over all sounds pro!
- SEROTONES from Vancouver, Canada on 15Jun2006 - garageband.com
Discography
Tourist on the Run, premier LP, released 15 July 2006!!! Available on CD Baby and Amazon.com.
Photos
Bio
“Together with the 'lonely planet', this CD completes the illusion of roaming in the 'free world'.”
Robin Scott, aka “M” (“Pop Muzik”)
Born from the ashes of the seminal New England 60s band The Tikis, from the cinder pit of the late 80s reggae band Man on the Street, from the crash and burn of Success E£press, the comet-like existence of Earth From Above, and the constant hunger of The MAOInhibitors, BOHAGEY BOWES bursts into life with Tourist on the Run, a nine-song saga about one man's stumble along the roadways and into the airports, cheap hotels, and tourist traps that litter the galaxies of a private imagination.
Driven by keyboards, guitars, loops and voices, and layered with the occasional saxophone or harmonica, BOHAGEY BOWES blends both the old and the new to create a sound that's at once familiar yet lucky strike fresh at the same time. Tourist on the Run was created between June 2005 and February 2006. It was produced by David Sardinha and Brian Hallas and mastered at Sterling Sound in NYC by Ryan Smith.
BOHAGEY BOWES is a disparate group of musicians influenced by everything from the blues and The Beatles to Bowie and Byrne and Eno to the beatbox. Tourist on the Run is the brainchild of Brian Hallas, the Brooklyn-based composer, musician and videographer. It features appearances by a dozen fellow artists and musicians from all over the country. Caroline Altman lives in San Francisco. She met Hallas as a fellow teacher at Stagedoor Manor, a theater camp in the Catskills, where Hallas was teaching movie making. Her hypnotic voice haunts both the the album opener, This Isn’t It, and Drifting, a song built around loops of her vocalizing. Muna Tseng is a well-known dancer and performance artist in New York City and throughout the world, and she, too, appears on the opening song. Jon Lavieri and his wife Martha Lenihan-Lavieri have known Hallas for decades. They had returned to Rhode Island just days before recording, from six years of playing jazz in Portugal. Jon’s saxophone provides an ethereal element that was missing before he added tracks to Drifting and The Primordial Scream, and Martha’s harmonies on Anytime Anywhere help give the song its truth. David Sardinha is a media specialist in Middletown, RI. He and Hallas first wrote songs as partners in 1972, and most recently produced Tourist on the Run together at the beginning of this year.
Paul Carrellas is a painter who teaches college-level art courses in NYC while Tom Perrotti plays in an Irish music duo and Ken Foster makes jewelry, both in RI. John Sunderland works on computers at RISD, Mike Napolitano does the same at NYU. Both live happily with their families. Bethany Smith Staelens, who scats through Drifting and sings lead vocal on Riding the Rails, works at a detective agency in Manhattan and sings big band music, while LindaLee Wayne raises two girls, cleans apartments and sings opera. They all make music. And many have never met.
One favored featured performer is Oscar Hallas, the 13-year-old son of the bandleader. The younger Hallas plays bass guitar on one song, Drifting, and bass keyboard on the title track. It’s the first time both Hallas’ have appeared together musically. “It was a thrill to have Oscar play—the best thing about the entire album. I suggested he needed to take it as seriously as everyone else on the songs, most of whom are 30 years his senior. No pressure there, eh? He played like he’d been recording for decades.” Oscar just smiles. Briefly.
It's Retro-Futuristic Rock 'n' Roll at its best! BOHAGEY BOWES. Tourist on the Run. IT'S WHAT YOU'VE BEEN LISTENING FOR!
REVIEW ON CD BABY:
Tourist on the Run is a sly, powerful, kick-ass album of alternative rock. The music is complex and balanced and surprising. It has intelligence and humor. The lyrics are intriguing and many of them are brilliant. The push-and-pull in all of these songs between radiance and decay, between love and anger, is striking.
"This Isn't It" is a stunning piece; the lyrics are oddly perfect. This is a funny and haunting creation, and the ending is really pleasing. Pulsing, propulsive rhythm. The vocals in the background sound like nervous angels. The woman's voice is theatrical and mannered; the man's is straightforward, simple, true, so there's a fascinating sexual tension here.
"You" has an odd, jazzy beat, neat keyboards, and deep, rich, layered vocals. The line "I want to be here with you when I walk this planet" stays permanently in the listener's head.
The closest thing on the album to a love song, but a wonderfully unconventional one. "Riding the Rails" is full of yearning for evanescent gladness, for what has slipped through our fingers. Clear, pretty female voice, and then a graceful male one. Great harmonica. It's sweet and plaintive at the same time.
"Drifting" is a hypnotic track with amazing sax. The lyrics are just breathed, and the listener can float with the song. Subtle a
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