Middle Class

Rattlin' Bones Records, in association with Street Press, proudly announces the release of Multiverses, Middle Class's debut CD featuring the lyrics of Graham Everett, and the music of Demoy Shilling (guitar), Janene Gentile (bass), and Raymond Kruse (drums).

Middle Class, Long Island's premier poetry band, has been performing at area bookstores, galleries, music spots, and college campuses since 1996. Recently grown from a trio to a quartet, Middle Class is noted for its "ability to innovate on the frontier between poetry and song. Its members know what they're doing and they're having fun doing it" (Susan Csankany, The Village Herald). About their performance at C.W. Post Poetry Center, Norbert Krapf, the Director of the Center, noted "Middle Class did a stirring job of showing that music and poetry should never have been separated and gave stirring testimony that an audience is awakened to its roots when words and music are reunited and walk hand in hand." Multiverses, a professionally packaged compact disc, presents ten studio cuts and three live cuts.

Middle Class has produced a haunting record. The first few cuts of Multiverses enter the brain like ghostly chants. Everett intones his lyrics/poems, some times as if they were warnings, some times melancholy refrains, and some times biting bitter rants. [T]he slow-burning music draws you into a "smoky room inside our minds," as on "Alias Fallibility Medley." Shilling's guitar and Gentile's bass take you out of the bar and draw you out onto a noir road movie that feels vicious - but fun! Throughout, Kruse's drum-work is particularly chilling, as on the lost-woman song "Magdalena," the cymbals performing cold-scalpel surgery up your spine. My personal favorites are "The Poets Around Here," a referential if not reverential Everett chestnut; the oddly tender "Benny Profane Yoyo Blues" ("sometimes the only blue sky is in my head"); the timely and insistent "Watching TV" ("may our dreams see that this broken world turns out all right"); and the rocking "Revenge." (Richie Narvaez, Mongrel).

Middle Class' Multiverses is currently available by subscription from Rattlin' Bones Records, P.O. Box 772, Sound Beach, NY 11789-0772 for $12 (postpaid). Please make checks or money orders payable to Graham Everett, Publisher.