DAVE'S TRUE STORY BIOGRAPHY
by Jim Allen
Dave's True Story's smart, sexy sound blows a cool breeze through the world in which we live with its fourth release, NATURE.
Like all great art, Dave's True Story stands outside of its era, with a sensibility that encompasses the past, lives in the present, and hints at the future. The New York City group utilizes a stylish, elegant jazz/pop sound that contrasts the thorny thickets of songwriter/guitarist Dave Cantor's deliciously devilish lyrics. DTS's resident siren, Kelly Flint, coos former playwright Cantor's crafty, acerbic missives as if they were tender messages of love, but songs about psychic readings, beatnik posers, and prescription medication are seldom the stuff of late-night saloon songs.
Over the course of three albums, enough people have noticed Dave's True Story for the band to sell over 50,000 records without the benefit of a major label or big press machine. Instead they've been winning hearts and minds in a more subversive, covert manner, flying under the big boys' radar even as they've been lauded everywhere from the NY Times to CNN and had their songs included in the feature film KISSING JESSICA STEIN. With the help of DTS bassist and producer Jeff Eyrich, however, the group's hush-hush hipster renown seems likely to expand to a bigger slice of the pie, via the latest Dave's True Story disc, NATURE.
In a world primed for sophisticated, jazzy pop by the likes of Norah Jones and Diana Krall, Dave's True Story injects the crucial element of sharply observed irony with NATURE's batch of mordant, masterfully crafted tunes, from "World in Which We Live," where global ennui is wedded to a sinuous bossa nova beat, to "I Lost my Nature," in which the lovelorn protagonist searches for missing mojo against bongo-driven Beat-era jazz grooves. While previous albums featured more upbeat, swinging arrangements, NATURE finds Dave's True Story playing it cool, letting Cantor's songs, Flint's voice, and Eyrich's sterling sonic framework tell the story of a sensibility too sharp for mere "lounge" chic but too top-shelf to be crammed into a rock & roll pigeonhole.
So when the Wall Street Journal observes that "Harry Connick Jr. and John Pizzarelli should have new material that's as witty as what Mr. Cantor creates," they're not consigning Dave's True Story to an Adult Contemporary niche market, they're simply wracking their brains for artists with enough old-school spit and polish to do justice to the sparkle of a sound that's at once postmodern and timeless. With the release of NATURE, though, it's likely that admirers will stop vainly searching for comparisons and simply mark Dave's True Story as sui generis, a musical island unto themselves, offering a shrewd, sometimes salacious, but strangely luxurious escape from the banal world of mainstream pop music.
