The Icy Shores

I just listened through The Icy Shores‘ “The Opposite of Your Heart. It is dark, sinister, and absolutely enthralling. The guitar textures are marvelous, the vocals are haunting, and, in stark contrast to the overall tone of the record, there are moments of tenderness throughout.

The fact that the three gents who make up The Icy Shores are from Minneapolis brings me extra pleasure. I have lived in Chicago and L.A., and I have many times said that Minneapolis has better songwriters than both of those places. These guys couple some great songwriting with some great production to bring us a beautiful record from its nasty ashtray cover through to the end of the 40-minute listening experience. - Lunch Of Champions

The Icy Shores fall squarely within the Indie Power-Pop genre: rolling rhythms, distortion in moderation and strong emphasis on hooks. Their assessment of “leaning toward the loud sound of indie” is a very appropriate one, proffering a prominent yet well polished edge to their approach. Although they restrain their aggression to favor pacific melodies it is always apparent beneath a thin surface.

? The resulting dynamic reminded me most of Catherine Wheel (although it has been years since I’ve heard them, so don’t blame me if I’m off). I’d place them half way down a line between Gomez and Foo Fighters. Their strumming patterns are similar to Sunny Day Real Estate, but with more conventional formatting. Their style is more defined by their 4-chord arpeggio strumming in straight eight notes, usually in a distinct 3-3-2 pattern.

If it were up to me, I would pick Family Album as a first single. The guitars are turned up a bit and the vocals are pushed a few notches further which sets the track apart. I’m not usually a fan of syncopation, but used in moderation and paired with heavy legato it’s surprisingly effective (similar to Local H’s big hit, but much more subtle). This track is an excelent representation of their range and style.

But my favorite track is House at the End of the Street. It exhibits excellent use of e-bow (which I always like), quicker chord turnover, stronger vocals, and a longer more dynamic format. It’s very minor, almost haunting. It has the most elements, including organ. And it ends on a drone note. Bonus. When I get a chance to see them live, this is the song I’ll be most anxious to hear.

The Icy Shores will play at the Fine Line Music Café this Saturday, July 31st with The Jake Rowand Band, Usonia and The Alrights. Doors open at 8:00, 21+ $8 cover. - The Listeners Guild

Breakup albums are always, at the very least, a little unsettling. You are hearing about someone else’s life being scarred and irreversibly altered, while at the same time applying what you are hearing to your own life. It seems like stealing in a way, but then again these songs wouldn’t have been written if the writer wanted to keep these things from the public. The Opposite of Your Heart from Minneapolis’ The Icy Shores is such an album.



TOoYH falls in line with their first, altogether underrated effort, What You Get and How You Get It, with songs filled to the brim with shimmery, roiling guitars that explode into hook-filled, power chord choruses backed with lyrics that seem to be both documenting a break-up in near-real time and reflecting on said breakup at the same time. The immediacy of the lyrics and their power to at the same time cause the listener (or at least this listener) to feel the hurt of a years-ago rejection anew is quite a feat; but, make no mistake there is no mind-bending, “holy-shit-did-you hear-that?”-type alchemy going on here. This is simply sugar-free, indie power-pop done right (think Nada Surf and early Foo Fighters.) Songs that don’t exactly break new ground but are so extraordinarily well-crafted they don’t really have to be anything more than that. Lately in Minneapolis, it seems that everyone has some sort of a gimmick or a hook to get you to come to their shows, but hardly any of those gimmicks revolve around the songs themselves. In discussing an upcoming show the conversation always seems to turn to “Oh, they’re the band that…” and that sentence hardly ever ends with “has great, hook-filled, catchy songs.” In this era of one band after the next attempting to push the boundaries in one way or another, we forget that there’s a happy medium to be had and enjoyed immensely. The Opposite of Your Heart gives hope to the notion that bands in Minneapolis will get the songs right first and let the show come second. There’s definitely room for both, but if you build the songs around a stage show, sooner or later you’ll be playing to an empty room. So in breaking no boundaries, The Icy Shores have really essentially broken several and their injured souls deserve your attention.

-Pat O’Brien - Cake In 15

Right away, the Icy Shores’ Catlick Records debut What You Get and How You Get It aligns itself with the kind of soft-loud aesthetic that has stood the Foo Fighters in such good stead for years on album opener “Backseat.” It’s spot-on power-punk-pop, and the album follows suit, hitting all the right notes from the design (pastoral, hand-drawn animal imagery + handwritten band name + swirly linework = indie rock) to the profound-sentence-fragment album title to the shimmery guitars that break into curtains of distortion.
- Pulse Magazine

What you get: an easy but artful exploration of that common ground between the Foo Fighters and Sunny Day Real Estate, a well-meaning place where catchy hooks and hollered lyrics are never far away, and if by chance you trip on a broken beat on the bridge, there's always a big, fuzzy chorus waiting just below to catch you.

How you get it: through 13 tracks that zigzag between poppy toe-tappers that will bob far more noggins than they'll scratch, and down-tempo, heartfelt numbers readymade for lakeside teenage romance (contrary to what the Icy Shores' name implies, the overall tone of What You Get and How You Get It is really very warm). - City Pages

If The Replacements had formed 20 years later than they did, they may have sounded a little (or a lot) like The Icy Shores. They sound like The Promise Ring without the self-indulgence and The ‘Mats without the sloppy drunkenness, all of which is to say they were very tight and not too showy--a definite asset. They were comfortable and loose on stage, trading in-jokes and goofy one-liners between songs. The music is pure, unadulterated, hooky power pop with the amps turned all the way up. A couple of times, when they got the bass guitar and the bass drums going my vision blurred a little--these guys seemed like they were exorcising some serious demons on stage. And after listening to the lyrics, which were mostly about broken relationships but wrapped in a thick blanket of sarcasm and bitterness, that might be true. When they hit the stage that had a look of quiet confidence, like they knew they were going to be on and could hardly wait to get going. Sometimes bands that have that look don’t follow through, which is always a disappointment, but The Icy Shores did it. They cooked on stage for 45 minutes and then wordlessly packed up and left. They arrived to do a job, did it well, and then went on their way.
-Pat O'Brien - howwastheshow.com

The Icy Shores, a two-headed monster of simultaneously slick and crunchy pop, are not your typical local rock band. Comprised of ex-pats from lands far (vocalist/guitarist Hunter Jonakin and bassist Shane Stubblefield originally hail from Alabama) and farther (vocalist/guitarist Nick Hegarty was born in the UK), only drummer Nick Larsen is a Twin Cities native. Already veterans of various outfits by the time of the Icy Shores’ formation—Jonakin and Stubblefield criss-crossed the country touring with Godplow during the mid ‘90s. The band chose to take its time and slowly sculpt what would become their debut project, What You Get and How You Get It.

"We’ve actually been playing for quite awhile just not really in front of anyone," claims Hegarty, the gruffer and lower-pitched voice singing lead on half of What You Get’s tracks. "This record has taken forever to come along. We started playing about three years ago. The difference for me between this project and my previous bands is really just a matter of growing up. I was playing in [my previous band Hollypond] when I was 18, 19 -- obviously things change pretty drastically from that period in your life. The openness of our collaboration has also made the songs different. With this first record most of the songs were written by Hunter or me and individually and then arranged by the group. We’ve already started moving towards more co-writing; the newer stuff we’ve started working on is already totally different because of that."

Hopefully the even newer "new stuff" won’t stray too far from the effective formula present on the still hot-off-the-presses What You Get and How You Get It, which was finally unveiled back in November on Catlick Records (home to the similarly clean-pop inclined Landing Gear). The album’s pristine pop production -- slick guitar lines and stealthy keyboard lines abound -- envelops the tracks of two very different singer/songwriters and manages to make the entire affair cohesive even though Jonakin’s pleasingly light tenor (a near dead ringer for local music heavyweight James Diers of Love-cars/Halloween, Alaska) tends to be married to bouncier mid-tempo numbers, and Hegarty’s lower Pete-Yorn-reminiscent warble is usually responsible for the more overtly aggressive rock material. Recorded with the aid of Dave West (Landing Gear) and Bryan Hannah (who’s mixed albums for artists ranging from the Orange Peels and Hang Ups to Sean Na Na), the album sounds like a million bucks -- a pleasant deception as I found out.

"We actually started the record at Terrarium studios back in January [of 2005] and just tracked drums. That was with Bryan Hannah. I think most of us would agree that was the most important part. Then we basically took it from there and just used [digital home recording program] ProTools all over the place -- all of the other recording was in basements. That’s why it took forever. ProTools is great because you can mess with it as long as you want, and it’s also horrible because you can mess with it as long as you want. I’m anal, my feeling was always I’m going to have to live with this record for the rest of my life and I don’t want to take it down off the shelf and be embarrassed about some really sucky performance that we kept on there in the interest of time. So that meant that a lot of deadlines came and went. My vision as we were recording was just to make sure it was all absolutely correct. In hindsight that might detract from spontaneity and rawness; listening to it now there are points where I wish it was more explosive."

You’ve got to hand it to a musician when they beat you to your own critical punch through self-assessment. The polished sound feels perfectly suited for Jonakin’s more placid explorations, including stand-out cuts like "Shudder Shocked Awake" and the coolly grooving "Warning Set," although some local hipsters may find the sound a little too suited to the like of Cities 97. Hegarty’s similarly shiny aggro-rock finds its zenith in the opening "Backseat" and its nadir in the theatrical crunchiness of "Dialing for Dollars," could slip into 93X’s rotation during that station’s more thoughtful moments. Although they’re solidly constructed songs with intriguing lyrics, one can’t help but get the feeling that perhaps a little more fire and a little less ice would have elevated this album to another level -- Hegarty’s own self-awareness of this fact certainly bodes well for the future.

Hegarty is well aware that the relatively straightforward sound of his band is actually one of the factors making it hard for the group to make headway locally in the notoriously adventurous music scene, despite the fact that it would undoubtedly find rapid success precisely because of its accessibility in a different kind of town.

"It’s been kind of weird," admits Hegarty of his band’s first extended forays into local gigging -- after playing roughly two shows a year before the album’s release, the Icy Shores now have three local shows slated in less than two weeks. "We’re still trying to figure out how we fit in with what’s going on in the Minneapolis music scene. Because comparatively we have a really straight ahead sound, I think that can kind of work against us. That being said, the shows recently have gone pretty well."

The Icy Shores perform on Thu., Jan. 12 at the Triple Rock Social Club with Building Better Bombs and The ‘Fraid. 9 p.m. $6. 21+. 629 Cedar Ave. S., Mpls. 612-333-7399. They play again on Saturday, Jan. 14 at the 400 Bar with Moonmaan and The Spectaculars. 9 p.m. $5 adv / $7 door. 21+. 400 Cedar Ave. S., Mpls. 612-332-2903.
For more information on The Icy Shores visit their website at TheIcyShores.com.

Or head on over to www.pulsetc.com to download an mp3 of the Icy Shores’ song "Shudder Shocked Awake."
- Pulse Magazine

Somebody forgot to tell The Icy Shores, pictured above in my crappy camera phone, they were the opener Saturday night, as the group brought their unique brand of agro-pop to a sizable crowd and quickly "cooled" the room with catchy hooks, spot-on solos and Foo-esque rock. Switching back and forth between songs penned by guitarists/vocalists Hunter Jonakin and Nick Hegarty,the group walked the fine line between aggressive and emo pop, and it worked.

Overall, it's the marriage of genre that makes this group shine, even as the opener for the opener on Saturday.
- perfectporridge.com