"Festooned with melodies and lyrical incisiveness."
- CMJ
"One of more impressive acts I've heard in years"
- Washington Post
"Rich lyrics and elusively poetic qualities will hold your undivided attention."
- Transaction Magazine
"Feel like songs you’ve known and loved for years."
- Ink 19
"Sounds somewhere between Talking Heads, Tom Waits and the Beatles."
- Mountain Express
"Vocalist Tom Shaner sounds simultaneously stuck in the clouds and the swamp mud."
- Flagpole
"Amazingly credible tunes."
- The Atlanta Press
"Some great goddamn pop music with just the slightest hint of country."
- Baby Sue Music Review
Tom Shaner Live at Lakeside, NYC 1/18/08
from lucidculture.com
January 19, 2008 ·
Tom Shaner has been playing weekends at Lakeside a lot lately, which is a great place for him. He writes subtle, catchy, generally upbeat and very smart Americana-inflected janglerock, sounding something like the Jayhawks without the melancholy or Steve Wynn in a breezy moment. With his old band Industrial Tepee he ventured into a lot of Southerwestern gothic, and there’s still plenty of that in his writing. His more upbeat song have focus He sings in a casual, conversational voice and gets great press: he needs this review like a hole in the head. But you should get to know him. Shaner was one of the many great mysteries in this city this evening, when hordes of people were willing to drop thirty bucks to see the latest poser du jour at the Gramercy or Webster Hall, while Shaner played to a midsize crowd, for free, in the back room at Lakeside. Some things just don’t make sense.
He and his backing trio opened with the bouncy Sister Satellite, lead guitarist Tom Clark taking a gorgeously clanging, tremolo-filled solo that was an omen of even better things to come. Shaner then did a couple of newer numbers s.
Gathered away from the stage were a gaggle of ex-sorority types, their lacrosse muscles gone to fat, eyeing Shaner like cats in a butcher shop. “You can’t be louder than the band, that’s rule number one,” Shaner gently admonished the crowd... as the band launched into the quietly swaying, countryish ...lament Rosalie. A lot of New York artists lately have been writing some pretty excoriating anti-trendoid songs, and the new one Shaner and band played tonight – perhaps titled She’s an Everyday Hipster – was subtler than most, quietly railing against the “parade of drama queens” surrounding some nameless indie rock diva.
On the fast, driving Waiting for You, Clark took the first of two blistering, spectacularly fast solos, the most potently adrenalizing display of musicianship we’ve seen all year. The band closed with ... big crowd-pleaser, Groove Queen, a ridiculously catchy, bluesy number.... That this guy isn’t a household name testifies to the sad state of the music business, not to mention what’s happened to the music scene here in recent years. At least the guys at Lakeside get it.
