The Austin-and-San Francisco-based band Monahans began in the spring of 2006 as a new project by Milton Mapes collaborators Greg Vanderpool, Roberto Sanchez, Jim Fredley, and Britton Beisenherz. The band's first release, Low Pining (Undertow 6/12/07), weaves anthemic melodies in-and-out of ambient tranquility and rhythmic intensity. The songs have a distinct nautical theme, decisively apolitical, with strands of detachment, nostalgia, and spiritual longing stretched across vast sonic landscapes.
What started mostly as a nameless collection of soundtracks (think Explosions In The Sky) emerged as something different for a group of artists whose common denominator has always been Neil Young. The sound incorporates inspiration from records like U2’s The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree, New Order’s Brotherhood, The Police's Synchronicity, and The Stone Roses.
The album also features multi-instrumentalist Chris Dye, Todd Pertll on pedal steel, and Margo Timmins of Cowboy Junkies (with whom Milton Mapes toured in 2006) as harmony vocalist on “When You’re Down”.
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Milton Mapes (from Austin, Texas) formed in 1999, naming the band after singer/guitarist Greg Vanderpool's grandfather. Vanderpool and bandmate Roberto Sánchez, both veterans of Dallas’ Deep Ellum music scene, subsequently spent a year in Nashville compiling songs that would make up Milton Mapes' debut release The State Line (2001). The 7-song CD was well-received by regional press and radio, drawing comparisons to Neil Young (Harvest) and Bruce Springsteen (Nebraska).
Milton Mapes has since evolved into a complete band (with the addition of Britton Beisenherz, Cliff Brown, and Jim Fredley), honing in closer on an atmospheric revival of Young's Crazy Horse or Bob Dylan's electric conversion. While maintaining its roots under layered guitars and textures, the band knows the power of understatement--oftentimes allowing the quiet moments of a song to shine as brightly as the loud ones.
The band released Westernaire (Aspyr Media) in 2003, reflecting this migration with a heavy dose of guitar-oriented songs. Sounding much less "country" than the title might suggest, Westernaire explores themes of "'the unknown", love, and alcohol--painting with rock-and-roll a hazy landscape that holds more questions than answers.
The band has toured through much of the United States since the recording of Westernaire. Appearing both as a duo and with a full band, Milton Mapes continues to introduce itself to new audiences with a personal and diverse set of live performances. The group has shared bills with an assortment of its respected Texas contemporaries and touring acts (such as Chris Whitley, Ron Sexsmith, Willie Nelson, Marah, and The Handsome Family).
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HARP MAGAZINE
by Steve Klinge
"Lately you've just been sinkin' / and that's better than nothing at all," Greg Vanderpool sings in the title track of The Blacklight Trap, the third album from Austin's Milton Mapes. It's a stately, 3/4-time meditation that, like much of Blacklight, recalls Tonight's the Night/On the Beach-era Neil Young. Vanderpool who named the band after his grandfather, is full of bittersweet empathy for characters on the verge of falling apart, whether it be the self-fulfilling prophet who's "Waiting for Love to Fail," the separated lovers in "Craters of the Moon" or the wounded victim in "Thunderbird." It's always dark and raining in these songs, and Blacklight itself, with its surfeit of slow electric ballads, is a bit monochromatic. But that only serves to throw into high relief the album's centerpiece, the slide-guitar-fueled swamp blues "Tornado Weather." "Is someone there to ease my worries?" Vanderpool moans, although deep down he must find the worried blues inspiring.
AUSTIN CHRONICLE (four stars)
(3.18.05)
by Christopher Gray
Milton Mapes' songs are a little like archaeological excavations: elemental enough to have existed for centuries until these five bearded local bards came along to uncover them. Third album The Blacklight Trap is heavy with portent, haunted by a mythic America of vast landscapes and endless promise that lingers like a shadow over the decidedly smaller-scale present, where "ghosts lay scarred and rugged as the land." Chief songwriter Greg Vanderpool's frequent references to windswept deserts, lonesome sunsets, and blood-stained river rocks only emphasize the cosmic insignificance of mankind's endeavors – except for the price they exact on the soul. His characters drift aimlessly through the songs, looking for a way out of their dead-end lives but finding only empty rooms and emptier bottles. Musically, the scenery gradually shifts between the Nebraska-like austerity of "Bowie AZ" to the early Crazy Horse stagger of "When the Earth's Last Picture Is Painted," as the subtle variations in mood and tone match the forlorn tenor of the lyrics. Buzzing, ominous "Tornado Weather" pleads for escape before it's too late, while gently hymnlike "Waiting for Love to Fail" reveals that even fatalism comes with its own peculiar peace of mind. Vanderpool's wounded heroes on "Thunderbird" and "Craters of the Moon" have no choice but to press on and face another day. Everybody knows this is nowhere, yes, but it's all we've got.
NO DEPRESSION MAGAZINE | May-June 2005
MILTON MAPES: A Little Bug Music
by Scott Brodeur
There is a shadowy cloak to the music of Milton Mapes. It’s the kind of dark, seductive veil that invites guesses about the people behind it, especially after you listen to The Blacklight Trap (undertow), the group’s cryptic and captivations third release, which happens to be named for a device that attracts and captures insects.
But be forewarned: trying to read into this band’s music can be as alluring and as precarious for the curious as, say, approaching that bug-zapper.
For instance, the band is named for singer Greg Vanderpool’s grandfather, who is exactly 51 years his senior. So you figure Milton Mapes was an inspuirational musician, someone who introduced Greg and his family to the joy and splendor of music.
Good guess. Wrong, thought, Zap.
“No, my grandfather’s not a musicians. He’s not musical at all,” say Vanderpool, the band’s songwriter and chief architect, chuckling at the mere thought. “During the period for a band where every word said is a potential band name, his name came up. We were all kind of laughing about it. Then it stuck. Nothing else ever topped it. He likes it. And I still get a kick out of seeing his name all over the place. Not too long ago, we were opening a show for Willie Nelson, and there were posters all over with Willie Nelson and my grandfather’s name side by side. The was just great.”
Describing the band musically can be like a game of pint-the-antecedent-on-the-artist. Most often, Neil Young & Crazy Horse, Pedro The Lion, Uncle Tupelo, and Sun Kil Moon come up. But there have also been comparisons to Bruce Springsteen, Counting Crows, Richard Buckner, and Damien Jurardo. “I’m pretty much fans of a lot of these people we’ve been compared to,” says Vanderpool. “And sometime, if a name comes up enough and I don’t know them, I can check out their stuff. This happened with Mark Kozelek [Red House Painters, Sun Kil Moon]. I check it out and really like it. I don’t hear us sounding too much alike, but maybe we have the same set of influences or something.”
Ah, influences. That means even though grandpappy Milton Mapes, the World War II Marines veteran, wasn’t’ musical, the Vanderpool home was still brimming with good tunes, exposing Greg to an eclectic but sturdy foundation of sounds to build on.
Hope. Zap.
“I didn’t grow up in a real musical household,” Vanderpool says, “Christmas music was big in my house. That was the time of year when we listened to a lot of music. Church music was big, too. So it was traditional hymns and Christmas songs.
“My dad used to listen to the Kingston Trio and the Everly Brothers and stuff like that, some country & western tunes. He also used to sing that song ‘Tom Dooley’ to me all the time. It’s kin of funny. Here I was, 3 years old, and my dad was singing to me about some guy getting hanged. I guess the darkness was already seeping in.”
OK, now we’re getting places. There is plenty of darkness on The Blacklight Trap. There’s the deadly tale of substance abuse on the title track, told in both the second and third person from a brother’s point of view. There’s the wounded lover refusing to let anyone get too close in “Waiting for Love to Fail.” There’s the bloody carnage of war on “”Underneath The River Runs.” Any there is the apocalyptic allusion to Rudyard Kipling’s poem “L’Envoi,” which Vanderpool expands and set to music under the title, “When The Earth’s Last Picture is Painted.”
This is a bleak but powerful landscape painted by Vanderpool and band, which includes Roberto Sanchez on drums, Britton Beisenherz on bass and piano, Cliff Brown Jr. on organ, keys, guitars and background vocals, and Jim Fredley on guitars, mandolin, and background vocals. Vanderpool’s vulnerable vocals are set amidst layers of acoustic guitar, raunchy electric guitar, swirling keys and thunderous drums.
Dark, dark stuff, it would seem. Well, not really, say Vanderpool. Zap.
“I don’t consider myself a morose person or anything,” he counters. “This album is a little darker than our others. But it’s not dark without a light at the end of the tunnel. The Blacklight Trap is a metaphor for society or for anything that is feeding us a lie. As a species, we’re inherently flawed. But we’re also capable of doing good. Right now, I’d say we’re set to self-destruct without some intervention from somewhere. But you look at the glass as half empty or half full. Sure, much of the album paints a dark picture. But the other message on here, the more spiritual message, is that not all hope is lost.
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