COMIN’ atcha with a bagful of tunes that strike right at your heart in a simply lovely way – in that way the songs of Daniel Johnston or BMX Bandits do, naive, true, unaffected, from the heart – Drew Danburry, who also sometimes dons the Icarus Phoenix baseball cap for recording purposes – is the kind of American underground treasure we need more of.
He’s just released a painstakingly hand-drawn and -animated video for the lovely “Cassie Knows, Or How A Shy Person Says I Love You” , which you can delight in below. DIY to the max, the video took Drew an entire year to put together, using thousands of index cards (and, thinking about it, god knows how many pens).
It was a labour of love for sure, created during the shitstorm of the pandemic – tough enough on us all, but during which Drew lost his home and business in Montana, moved back to Utah and started over again. Sweet, surreal, and holding onto the good things when everything is flipping upside down.
The song comes from Icarus Phoenix’s self-titled, cassette-only album, a project of which Will says, “is an experiment in creating tangible items of worth in the constant ephemera of the internet and in the wake of the supposed death of the album.
It seeks to promote “the ritual of putting a cassette into a tape deck and hitting ‘play’… as an act of commitment”.
It’s “packed full of proper nouns and names of friends and family: the aural equivalent of carving someone’s name in a tree with a heart around it.
Tapes will be here long here long after we will and it’s nice to have your name on things,” he says.
The name Icarus Phoenix, of course, refers to the cyclical nature of life; the rise, the fall, the rise again – Drew rejects wholeheartedly the concept of linear time.
It contains 40 tracks: the result of a deep journey into self-awareness and the product of that journey. Perhaps he has a British mirror in the shape of Daniel Blumberg, out there fashioning acoustic song exactly as he wishes it to be.
Need more? We looked at the equally lovely “Zero One, For Will Sartain” last year.
That cassette sure holds a whole lotta beauty: you can place an order at Telos Tapes, here or at Drew’s Bandcamp page, here.
