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Listening to Umbrella Tree is a commitment with no easy outs. That's partially because singer/guitarist Zachary Gresham, singer/keyboardist Jillian Leigh and drummer Derek Pearson completely give themselves over to their live performances—Gresham acting the part of the wiry, animated ringmaster, Leigh the mysterious, girlish coquette and Pearson the focused brute with the precise touch. And the other reason? The three of them never, ever break character or signal that they're being ironic. That would let audience members off the hook, and give them the smug satisfaction of being in on the joke—if it were a joke. "We're not interested in being ironic," Gresham says. "If ironic things occur within a more sincere context, then that's fine. But irony just for its own sake...I mean, it's poison. If [the band] is successful in seeming consistent, it's because when we're performing and we're doing big things...we're trying to be caricatures of ourselves and not really trying to put on a different character.... The point is I don't feel like it's put-on." Various aspects of Umbrella Tree—from stage costumes to their detailed, meandering songs—suggest the way children, left to their own devices on a rainy day, engross themselves in fantastically imaginative worlds. Everyone else only discovers how fun the make-believe game—or the band's music—is by forgetting themselves and playing along. Not that Gresham, Leigh and Pearson write juvenile fare. For every halfway silly song ("Souls Are Warm Like Eskimos") there's an expletive ("fuck," for example, in "Spit Like a Soldier"), a nuanced character sketch ("Uncle William") or a song that brings fears to life ("Child Bride"). In the four years that the band has been playing shows around Nashville and releasing albums on local indie Cephalopod (What Kind of Books Do You Read? in 2006 and The Church and the Hospital in 2008), they've offered something different and engaging from every angle. "You're playing and you know that 50 percent of the people watching you are people you know personally—or more than 50 percent," Gresham says. "There's a tendency to go up in your blue jeans and your T-shirt and play a show for your friends, even if you're doing very good things. And this is not to knock that, because...many of my favorite bands in Nashville go up in their jeans and T-shirts and do it, and they kill me. But we didn't want to do that because we...all feel like a performance is a separate entity from a recording. And if you can make a really fun performance happen, then you're really embracing the fact that you are a visual artist when you're onstage." Umbrella Tree's new album, The Letter C, expands mightily on the visual aspect of what they do. It's a CD and DVD: 16 tracks of shape-shifting, literary-minded—and thoroughly arresting—indie prog-rock, and a video for each and every one, all directed by Pearson. The music videos don't feature anything as mainstream as the band members playing their instruments, which isn't surprising given how little they're invested in "making it" commercially. "You can't bank on that, you know," says Gresham. "And that's very liberating not to bank on it.... Then it becomes an art project, very explicitly an art project. And then you really can go as crazy as you want."
Jewly Hight, Nashville Scene
The Nashville trio Umbrella Tree might appear to be a band for children—its live performances have included puppet shows and onstage tea parties, its cover art looks like a page from a children’s storybook, and I have a hunch that its name might be taken from the kids’ TV show Under the Umbrella Tree. However, its latest album, The Letter C, casts a hazy, complicated mood within, with a theme of nautical uneasiness, words of wistful longing, songs in minor keys, and a few moments of R-rated anger. The amount of attention the band has put into this package is impressive; accompanying the 16-track CD is a DVD that contains videos (of the modestly homemade, no-budget, yet well-edited kind) for all songs, along with live footage and extra videos. On an album with pop instrumentation, including prominent keyboard lines and tasteful cello flourishes, unexpectedly, the most distinctive element of the band’s sound is the drumming; Derek Pearson avoids common beat patterns, and the album is mixed to allow his cymbal crashes to very slowly dissolve, leaving a mist of mystery. Singers Zachary Gresham and Jillian Leigh alternate duties or blend together, and the softie in me is drawn to the more straightforward ballad-type numbers, like the hard-to-resist “Starfish,” tenderly carried by Leigh, over the album’s mildly off-kilter numbers. The group’s approach is somewhere between rock and pop, and on The Letter C, it seems like the band doesn’t feel the need to take sides, which can be a little frustrating at times. To clarify, there are times when the ebb and flow of the album seem to need a liberating rock release, and at other times, one might want a pure, hook-laden pop song to carry the momentum. Overall with Umbrella Tree, there seems to also be a “cute” vs. “dark” battle, but on this effort, darkness definitely wins out.
- Ernie Paik, Chattanooga Pulse
last year, thanks to our friends at noisetrade, i discovered this strange little band out of nashville called umbrella tree and their album the church and the hospital. that strange little band with that strange little album ended up landing on my best of 2008 list (and their song, tooth on the floor made my rest of the best songs list). a year later, that album still finds itself in frequent rotation—that is, until i received their latest album, the letter c. before i get into the details of the new album, let me try to broadly describe umbrella tree and their music. with anything good in life, you should be able to tell someone you meet about it in a concise sentence-length description. so, i thought i'd give it a whirl with umbrella tree. here's my tries: it's like if three art students had a really good acid trip and recorded an album. it's like if three art students had a really bad acid trip and recorded an album. it's like if the mad hatter, march hare and the cheshire cat decided to join the opera. it's like if two mad scientists coaxed a beautiful young girl into helping them create an operatic frankenstein. it's like if the two guys in weird science created their perfect woman and then decided to record an album together. it's like if the everybodyfields grew up listening to iggy pop instead of gillian welch. it's like if that flaming, running stuntman guy from movies decided to make a record while still on fire. ok, so those descriptions—as vivid as they may be—don't exactly give a very tangible analogy. quite frankly, it's difficult to describe what umbrella tree does. some have described it as bohemian bookworm prog rock or experimental chamber pop or just frenetic dissonance, but whichever way you choose to describe them, it's just good. weird isn't really weird if it's good weird. it really transcends categories and that's one of the things that makes the journey with their music so great. while the church and the hospital was very experimental and raw, the letter c is much more aceessible. admittedly, while this is generally regarded as a positive, it's one of my very few critiques. it felt a little like the band and/or the label was pushing to make it a little more public-friendly, at the risk of over-polishing. of course, with that said, you need to understand that umbrella tree is doing anything but making records for the top 40 wasteland. so, over-polishing is strictly relative in this case. my one other minor criticism is that the dynamic arc begins to fade a little towards the end of the album. wheras the first half of the album has quite a bit of sonic and dynamic unpredictability, you finish the album waiting to recapture the momentum of said first half. with that said, the letter c spends most of its time giving listeners a growing number of reasons to clear a spot on their impending best of '09 list. there's a lot to love. in just the first 10 seconds, the creeping build gives the listener a chance to wade into the water before being immersed by the spectacle that is umbrella tree. again, in that first track, his majesty grows suspicious, you see the most defining and compelling aspect of the band. zachary gresham and jillian leigh make the perfect opposites attract relationship. on one hand, gresham is a wiry, frenetic figure whose voice provides much more drama than it does depth. his vocal counterpart, jillian, is the beautiful songbird who provides the perfect sweet to gresham's sour. what pulls it all together is derek pearson's steadfast unpredictability as the percussive, proverbial man-behind-the-curtain. another interesting dynamic on this album—as opposed to past records—is the balance between the frenetic musical/vocal uncertainty and the delicate story-telling in songs such as show & tell and starfish. again, i tend to lean towards the songs with a lot of dynamism, but the slower tracks provide a little breathing room and a chance to enjoy the underrated songwriting. lyrically, there's a lot more under the surface than just songs about the sea—like hope and loneliness and insecurity and faith and doubt—and it's easy to lose sight of the lyrical depth in the midst of the frenzied pace. i could list 15 more elements of the band and the album that are great, but i think i've summarize enough of the highlights. it's definitely a band worth checking. even if you don't fall in love like i did, you'll at least appreciate the break from the routine of what you were previously listening to. - Ryan Byrd