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Soul rocker Bryan Thomas will release his third album BABYLON on Leap Day – February 29, 2004 – making it available online via indie Internet retailer CDBaby.com. Recorded live to tape in a single day, the album features a backing band of Bob Buckley and Matthew Loiacono, on loan from Albany punk bluegrass quartet Kamikaze Hearts. More info about the album is online at bryanthomas.com/babylon, including audio clips, photos from the recording session, and Thomas' lyrics and journal entries for each song.

ABOUT THE ALBUM

"Sure, I'd call it a love song to America," says Thomas of BABYLON. "But not the blind love that's been going around of late. This is something deeper. This is seven songs of tough love."

Tough love, indeed. Most of the songs on the album were written in early 2003, in the weeks before and after the launch of the Iraq War. Thomas and his wife were awaiting the birth of their first child at the time, which intensified and complicated the songwriter's emotional response to front page headlines and images on the TV news. "It was a scary time," he says. "In lots of ways."

BABYLON is more organic and stripped-down than its predecessor, the dense soul rock epic Ones and Zeros. That record - Metroland Magazine's "Album of the Year" in 2002 - was recorded over the course of a year in Thomas' bedroom studio with big beats, overdriven guitars and layered vocals. BABYLON, in contrast, is nearly all-acoustic, recorded live to tape (analog!) in a single day in August 2003 at Silvertone Studios in Saratoga Springs, New York.

Thomas recruited Bob Buckley to play the bass and Matthew Loiacono to play a brushed snare and kick drum on the record. Buckley and Loiacono are members of Albany punk bluegrass quartet Kamikaze Hearts, well known in the Northeast and beyond for their own brand of organic, deftly crafted, heartfelt porch songs. It was a good fit.

"I did wind up adding guitar solos to a couple songs after the initial session," says Thomas. "But most of what you're hearing - vocals, drums, bass, and 90 percent of the guitar - all happened live in that room. Often on the first take. So it's got some rough edges here and there, but that's part of the charm. It's just three guys sitting in a room, playing some songs. In the raw, out in the open - that's the feel of the record, and I think it serves those songs well."

And that it does, from the bluesy album opener "Around1" - where Thomas calls out America as a cheating lover who "swings her behind like she knows it's too big for the Planet Earth" - to its reprise on the album closer "Around2," a spoken word descent into Hell that finds Thomas channeling Saul Williams, Richard Pryor, T.S. Eliot and Thomas' own father, the late Rev. Willis Thomas III. "Yes, I'm the son of a preacher man," he says. "Which probably explains a lot of where I'm coming from with these songs." He laughs. "And all of the songs that came before them."

Perhaps the spiritual nature of the album is most apparent on the title track "Babylon." Here Thomas testifies with lyrics stolen from the Book of Revelation, his fire-and-brimstone melody grafted over a driving acoustic-rock, country-gospel groove. "And the woman thou sawest is that great city, which reigneth over the kings of the earth," he chants. So it's a spiritual record, certainly. But knowing the climate in which most of these songs were written - and reading between the lines to see both Baghdad and Washington in his vision of Babylon - would he also call it a political record?

"Not in the traditional sense," he says, "These aren't protest songs. Hell, I have more questions than answers these days. One moment in history inspired it, but it's more about how that moment fits the pattern established throughout our history, as a nation, as a planet. How we've come to make the same mistakes, again and again and again. And how our children will pay for it. Same old story."

He smiles that smile, and you know he's about to turn it all around.

"Of course, you could just as easily argue the opposite: that it's smaller than politics, that it's just one guy's attempt to work the knots out of his stomach in strange, strange times."

The smile fades. "Although believe me, most of those knots are still there."

ABOUT BRYAN THOMAS

Soul rocker Bryan Thomas is a punk clown fool hailing from New York's capital city of Albany. BABYLON is his new, live, acoustic album. The Albany Times Union named him "Best Male Singer-Songwriter" shortly after he released his acoustic hip-hop debut Radio Plastic Jennifer in 1999. The follow-up soul rock epic Ones and Zeros was Metroland Magazine's "Album of the Year" in 2002. In addition to these records, Thomas' music can be heard on the opening track of the Black Rock Coalition's Bronze Buckaroo Rides Again (which also includes a track by BRC founder/ Living Colour guitar wizard Vernon Reid). Thomas also has three tracks on the double-live Pazfest: A New Orleans Tribute to Joni Mitchell, recorded on a steamy Louisiana night at the Howlin' Wolf in the summer of 2000. He was recently in the studio with punk legend Tommy Ramone, making a special guest appearance on a track produced by Ramone for New York City's genre-smashing neo-punksters Collider. Samples of Thomas' music, video and poetry can be found online at his award-winning web site bryanthomas.com, and at TheHiddenCity.com, a webzine for underground arts in Albany, New York. Thomas is a founding member of the Hidden City collective.

A web developer by day, he lives in Albany with his wife Cindy and daughter Zoe. He is the son of Deloris Griffin Thomas and the late Rev. Willis Thomas III, who moved from Louisiana to New York in the late sixties to pursue careers in education. Thomas' younger brothers Jason and Justyn are also artists, expressing themselves in film and poetry. He is a graduate of Niskayuna High School in Schenectady, New York, and Middlebury College, Middlebury, Vermont.

More information about BABYLON is online at bryanthomas.com/babylon.

BABYLON will be available for purchase online at CDBaby.com beginning February 29, 2004.

CONTACT

D.C. Damseph
Publicity/Management, WT3 Records
bryanthomas.com/contact