Current Live Band:
Clint Niosi - Vocals, Guitar, Lyrics/
Aaron Bartz - Guitar/
James Talambas - Keys, Horns/
Emma Hertz - Cello/
Nicole Amundson - Violin/
Marcosis - Bass/
Boyd Dixon - Drums/
Kristina Morland - Vocals
Influences
The Cure, Robin Hitchcock, Ministry, The Beta Band, Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, Herman Hesse, Janes Addiction, Lou Reed, Mazzy Star, Neil Young, Sabbath, Various Indian Classical Musicians, Shonin Knife, Donnovan, The Kinks, Bob Dylan, The Talking Heads, Concrete Blonde, Syd Barrett, Kurt Vonnegut, The Hollies, Ween, The Flaming Lips, Chuck Berry, Ella Fitzgerald, Robert Johnson, Howlin Wolf, Jimi Hendrix, The Animals, John Coltrane, NIN, Skinny Puppy, e.e. cummings, Roger Waters, Blondie, The Cranberries, Lorena Mcenitt, Aldus Huxley, Dead Can Dance, Missing Persons, Dr Demento, Kahlil Gibran, Radiohead, Portishead, Lovage, Serge Gainsburough, Toni Morison, Gary Numan, Dante, Heart, Fleetwood Mac, Book of Love, Elliott Smith, The Beach Boys, Lenard Cohen, Jethro Tull, David Bowie, ELO, Pulp, Brian Wilson, Brian Eno, Nirvana, Rachmoninov, The Shins, Three Dog Night, Vivaldi, Tommy James and the Shondells, The Unicorns, William Burroughs, Tori Amos, Erasure, Heart, abba, Nick Drake, Men Without Hats, Echo and the Bunnymen, The Magnetic Fields, Os Mutantes, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Twizted Sister, Thin Lizzy, Meat Loaf, New Order, The Pet Shop Boys, CASH, Cat Stevens, The Cars, Slayer
Your results: You are Spider-Man
Spider-Man
95%
Iron Man
75%
Batman
60%
Catwoman
55%
Superman
50%
Robin
50%
Hulk
40%
Green Lantern
40%
Supergirl
20%
Wonder Woman
20%
The Flash
20%
You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility.
Clint Niosi - Good Records 6/28/08 from You and Yours on Vimeo.
Hmmm. Hi.
I..ve just listened to your songs. It..s something about you, that makes you do just that, listen. ARE YOU OK?...............................................................
This might sound strange to you, I don..t even know you. But you have a sad sad thing about you, and my heart just filles up with these emotional feelings when I listen to your songs. I love the first one!! NO more no less, just loving it.............................................................................................................................................................................................................................
If you just do what you love, the rest WILL sove itself. If you think of the world as an illusion, things get easier.......................................................................................................................................................................................................................
With love and light, Emma from Sweden....................................................................................................
Coal mine Canary..is an amazingingly great song. I love your lyrics..theyre original, fresh and in no way cliché'd. Great guitar and voclas. keep up the great work. Mike in England.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Hi Clint, Listening to "City Girl." Likin the mellow sound you have and the lyrics are really good. So who is the city girl?
Euan........................................................................................................................................................................................................................
C-
The admissions desk is on the far left, on the first floor. It's 11:31 this lovely morning and in this otherwise silent sanctuary I hear sound. And it's loud, and I recognize it. I hear the admissions desk playing your music(!) at maximum volume from across the full length of the museum entry. I telephone down to Jamie at the downstairs desk; she says you had given her a cd last night. Well, that's what you get for giving music to people-- a play across the entire museum. ........j...............................................................................................................................................................................................................................Hi-
So I'm totally crazy about your song Living a Good-Bye. it remeinds so much of my own life. I know I said that before but, serioulsy keep up the good work.
-Ash Kansas City Missouri....................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Love, Loss, and Dead Horses
Sepia-toned singer-songwriter Clint Niosi makes his polycarbonate debut — finally.
By ANTHONY MARIANI
Clint Niosi’s debut album has been a couple of years in coming. The Sound of Dead Horses Beaten Against Cold Shoulders is a sly and evidently apt description of the Gen-X singer-songwriter’s music career. Lamentations of art not appreciated and voices not heard pop up throughout his delectable brassy-folk treat produced by The Theater Fire’s James Talambas. The dead horses, of course, are his songs, most of which have been worked and re-worked over the years. The cold shoulders belong to you.
Niosi has been writing, recording, and performing — quietly, apparently — for about 10 years. In addition to having a member of the vaunted Theater Fire in his corner as both producer and multi-instrumentalist, Niosi also has a backing band that includes several North Texas big-shots: Tame … Tame and Quiet’s Aaron Bartz on guitar and Boyd Dixon on drums, Top Secret … Shhh’s Marcus Lawyer on bass, fellow singer-songwriter Kristina Morland providing backing vocals, violinist Nicole Amundsen (former of Southern Methodist University’s Meadows Symphony Orchestra), and cellist Emma Hertz (formerly of Peter and The Wolf).
There’s a good reason Niosi is in such esteemed company. His tunes are epic — minimalist but totally sweeping. The arrangements are non-intrusive, just simple combinations of drums, acoustic guitar, strings, and brass that form skyscraping walls of sound while giving life to Niosi’s dynamic melodies. The overt influences, such as Robert Plant, Midlake, and the aforementioned Theater Fire, surface occasionally, and with his wavy, arrow-through-the-heart delivery — always nearing a falsetto but never quite committing to it and often jazzy — Niosi sounds like an older Jeff Buckley (R.I.P.).
The pitiable mood isn’t a gimmick but completely apropos, considering the ancient sins and sorrows at the heart of his songs. The two-part opener “My Mephistophilis” enters like The Theater Fire’s catchy “These Tears Could Rust a Train,” with a jaunty finger-plucked acoustic rhythm bouncing over a delicate, snappy beat. “I’d never call him my friend, though he’s there when I need him,” Niosi sings, jamming the entire second phrase into seemingly just a couple of syllables. “Mephistophilis and I / Got one hella unholy union.”
At first, the singer sounds like a soldier, perhaps one of the U.S. variety fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan, rationalizing his behavior. “When your colleagues are on the line / It’s easy enough to forget / Truth, beauty, and love / Are just your foolish alibis.” But as the song goes on, you might start thinking, heck, he sounds like all of us, compromising our morals for “gifts of wealth and earthly power … ’Cause, come on, now / Who needs eternal salvation / When you’ve got a friend today to get you by … by … by …”
In the second, shorter half of the piece, the singer comes to terms with his fate. The beat darkens to a stomp, and as mournful strings swell in the background, a violin slashes dissonantly across the tableau, Psycho-ishly but more slowly. “There. Will. Be. No redemption,” he sings. “There. Will. Be. No forgiveness / The god I have forsaken / To these events shall bear witness.”
Dr. Faustus isn’t the only reference to Lit 101 on the album, not that Niosi needs to drop names to let you know he’s a smart guy and smart tunesmith. “Villanelle No. 1” is exactly what it says it is, the lyrics written in the high-Renaissance poetic form, and “Van Gogh Complex” finds the singer lovesick and spiraling somewhat happily into madness. (“I poured a glass of absinthe, and I tried to force a sick smile / But in the morning I know what I must do / I’ll send a little piece of myself to you.”) And, going back to Dead Horses’ subtext, the afflicted party could be Niosi himself, in what’s arguably the album’s catchiest number, which is saying a lot because most of the tracks skew toward listener-friendliness. “I’ve never been good with people, I live inside a brain,” he sings. “I work hard all the time, but I never sell a goddamn thing.”
Frustration, natch, is around every corner. Niosi leavens it, expertly (and thankfully), with wit and good ol’ fashioned kick-ass music. His snarkiest outing — “City Girl,” a paean to a hipster-princess — is also a scathing indictment, namely of the inner-city-hipster lifestyle (for whose charms the endearingly scruffy Niosi has most likely fallen). Over an acoustic progression that conjures up Cat Stevens’ “Wild World” (“Oooh, baby, baby, it’s a wild world”) and bubbly, gently clacking rimshots, he loads on the sarcasm: “Goodbye, color green / So much more to be seen / Goodbye, sky of blue / Yeah, who needs you.”
All of the tracks are straightforward, and most of them have judiciously placed nuances that give everything some depth and never seem gratuitous. The acoustic-guitar riff that drives “Van Gogh Complex” alternates between joyous, carefree flamenco and heavy-metal, “Wave of Mutilation”-ish despair. In another nice touch, Niosi dusts off 12-bar country-blues for “Weary Willow,” whose vocal melody tumbles forward predictably before it’s steered into Rufus Wainwright’s and Fiona Apple’s lovely, purple terrains. There’s even a little circus music. Though “The Sum of Parts” comes on all skipping beats and jangly acoustic, it quickly slouches into a lazy, delirious march that’s almost funereal. Laying to rest Niosi’s career, are we? As he says in “Weary Willow,” “At the top is success and the bottom failure / But I know in the middle is worse / Now I am the voice, and you are the ear / It’s a matter of choice what you’re going to hear.”
Clint Niosi’s The Sound of Dead Horses Beaten Against Cold Shoulders
www.myspace.com/clintniosi
By Ken Shimamoto
First impression: Waitaminute, what’s this? Can it be…a concept album about rejection (a topic with which most musicians should be familiar)? Nah, that’d be too perfect.
Clint Niosi’s a singer-songwriter who grew up in Minnesota and moved, kicking and screaming, with his family to Mansfield when he was 14. An agile fingerstyle guitarist whose vocalismo resides somewhere in the vicinity of Jeff Buckley, Rufus Wainwright, and the rustic side of Robert Plant, he hit the boards in 1999, playing any and everywhere from the Ridglea Theater lounge to the Black Dog to the Metrognome Collective, not to mention Denton, Dallas, Austin, etc.
Niosi rolled out this arty, ambitious debut disc in a late-June extravaganza at the Rose Marine Theater, backed by a string section and musos from Tame…Tame and Quiet as well as album producer-arranger/Theater Fire multi-instrumental whiz James Talambas, fellow singer-songwriter Kristina Morland, and Top Secret…Shhh mastermind Marcus Lawyer (on bass). On the disc, Talambas decorates the songs with lush beds of keyboards, string and horn arrangements, vocal choruses and loads of interesting effects (like the hand percussion on the opening “My Mephistophilis”). Morland joins Niosi on “The Sum of Parts” for a vocal duet that hits like a depresso June ‘n’ Johnny.
Lyrically, Niosi takes on The Big Topics (God, death, the emptiness of city life) in a way that’s often oblique and opaque (I’m not sure exactly what he’s on about in “Coal Mine Canary,” from whence the album’s title is drawn), but when he drops the thesaurus and speaks plainly, he can be effective. The aforementioned “My Mephistophilis” starts out as a Bert Jansch-via-Led Zep III folkie blues before the string section enters two thirds of the way in and transforms the song into a Danny Elfman-esque cartoon nightmare. “City Girl” works either as a meditation on urbanity or a love song, punctuated by Burt Bacharach-meets-The Theater Fire brass interjections. “Van Gogh Complex” rocks out in the manner of Death Cab For Cutie or one of those, reframing the classic tortured-artist story in a way that’s miles away from the way, um, Don McLean did.
With the record done, Niosi’s taking it to stages all over North Central Texas, including the Fairmount (for their July 23rd Songwriter’s Showcase). You can cop the CD at Borders at I-30 and Hulen, as well as online at lala.com and emusic.com.
