Will Knauer, Jonathan James, John Robert Cardwell, Philip Dickey. Photograph by Wesley Hamilton
Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin is the type of band you could bring home to your family. Over heaping plates of chicken salad they'd tell your younger sister they like her braids, your mom that she doesn't look a day over thirty, and take your dad's hints that he has a shotgun in stride—all while coming off totally unpretentious. That's just the type of guys they are.
The band—hailing from Springfield, Missouri—has been making catchy, pop tunes since 1999. Their big break came when a track from their debut album, Broom, was featured in a 2006 episode of The OC—the same year, the band notes sardonically on their website, The OC went off the air. Another of the album's tracks ended up in a 2008 Mastercard commercial.
Broom and 2008's Pershing, were both self-produced in the homes of the bands' families—occasionally resulting in their neighbors calling the police.
Soon after, Chris Walla of Death Cab for Cutie fame became interested in the band, offering to produce their next album. The result, 2010's Let It Sway, is the band's glossiest, most cohesive sounding album.
The band then backpedaled with their fourth venture—the album, entitled Tape Club, is comprised of 26 pre-recorded, unreleased tracks spanning the band's entire history.
"The first song's recorded at my mom's house for...like an extra credit school assignment and then the last song is in a real studio," Phil Dickey—drums, guitar, and vocals—explains. "It's kind of like the story of us trying to be a real band."
The songs were, for the most part, left in their original form with scratches and imperfections peppering the tracks.
"We tried to keep it as raw and embarrassing as possible," Dickey says of the early tracks. "If one of those songs were to ever come on in public I would just run out of the room. It would be really horrible."
While the tracks may cause Dickey to cringe, the most surprising aspect to listeners is that the music, even with it's imperfections, is consistently enjoyable. The first track, "The Clod and the Pebble," is a perfectly lovely combination of cello and quietly melodic vocals. These are guys who, while not always a formal band, have always been gifted musicians.
Their musical talents have garnered SSLYBY a following with boundaries far outside their Missouri roots.
In 2007, the year Boris Yeltsin passed away, the band was invited to play Russia's Afisha Picnic Festival, one of the largest yearly music festivals in Eastern Europe.
This July the band set out on their first foray into Asia with a tour of Japan.
"We're hoping that it's just like Spinal Tap," Dickey says, with surprisingly little irony. "Their tour is a disaster and all these horrible things happen and then they go to Japan and they're big in Japan. Because...they have "Sex Farm" or something. So hopefully we're big in Japan and don't know it yet."
Maybe that one is a story they shouldn't share over family dinner. You can just let them know beforehand.
