Biography
With one ear to the ground, the other to the sky, always observing humanity with a sideways smile and a fist, J DiMenna delivers the most profound and prophetic album from an unknown artist in years. “Awkward Buildings” is an album that Dr. Dave Bowman's son would have been listening to on his headphones, waiting for an aeroplane.
J DiMenna discovered music at an early age, torturing his family by making them wait in the car before a trip to Grandma’s while he chose the soundtrack for the car ride. His tastes were wide in range, but always shared the common thread of being emotionally honest and musically adventurous. And if his parents would hate it, well, so much the better.
J showed an immediate talent for the arts when he was young – drawing cartoons, acting in the school play and singing in the choir. But classes remained a consistent struggle, until he enrolled at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, NC where he met now label-mate, Jar-e and played clarinet occasionally in ooloo orchestra. Their five piece genre bending band became a fixture on the college scene.
DiMenna immersed himself in styles of the acoustic guitar - from alternate tunings, bluegrass fingerstyle, the inventive guitar arrangements of Bert Jansch and John Renbourn, to the dark musings of Leonard Cohen and the fresh optimism of Cat Stevens. He moved on to discover legions of indie rock - Neutral Milk Hotel, Rachels, Wilco, Cat Power, and onto the likes of Elliot Smith and Radiohead. Building on years of careful listening, he began crafting his own songs.
Past influences in music tend to bind the foundation of a musician’s creative energy, but DiMenna’s musical personality is simply too overwhelming to succumb to simple mimicry. Awkward Buildings makes evident this songwriter’s real distinction - DiMenna manages to nod to the past, without ever steering hard into it. His respect for influence consistently defers to his uniquely evolved songwriting talent and sound.
J spent a year and a half recording in Asheville with producer Steven Heller, working with local musicians — Drew Heller (Toubab Krewe), Tyler Ramsey, Bill Reynolds (Drug Money), Bill Smith, and Mike Horgan, and a special performance by the late Bob Moog.
In spring 2005, J moved north and finished Awkward Buildings in Brooklyn at Bushwick Studios, working with Joshua Kessler and Keith Saunders. These sessions included performances from another group of great local musicians: Ethan Eubanks (Ivy), Mike Oliverio (Good Evening, Adam Richman) and Whynot (Gavin DeGraw).
Like Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light, the album explores human relationships – the failed attempts at connecting with others and the tenuous structures we build to establish identities for ourselves. The album is also a statement toward what J calls “literalist interpreters”; anyone who adheres so strictly to their own philosophy, be it religious or otherwise, that they are unable to fit the rest of the population into their narrow vision.
Even more directly, he aims his metaphors expressly at organized Christian religions in the song “Preacher”:
You might find out your Holy Ghost is just an old bed sheet.
Awkward Buildings is so genuine and sweetly convincing that one is continually surprised to discover a stiletto’s edge revealed a little more with each listening. DiMenna’s lyrical sense of metaphor and his sheer musicality weaves throughout the record’s string arrangements, riding the beat, abruptly stunning the listener with a well-placed turn of barely resolved cadence, or a sudden dissonance that appears and passes through each song like a dark cloud.
JONATHAN TAKIFF, Philadelphia Daily News
"J. DiMenna, a subtle North Carolina craftsman is making his national debut with "Awkward Buildings". DiMenna sings in a high, sweet voice evocative of Ray Davies and Elliot Smith in their respective primes. And his graceful, strings-endowed art pop is as richly endowed in atmospherics as it is in metaphoric meaning."
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