Corey Dargel - Less Famous Than You
CD Album Available here in iTunes and here at Darla (for individual consumers and retailers in the US) and here at Rough Trade (for individual consumers in the UK).

New York based composer/performer Corey Dargel releases Less Famous Than You, a collection of songs about falling in love with famous (or semi-famous) people.

Trained at the renowned Oberlin Conservatory, Dargel creates deceptively simple and achingly vulnerable art-pop. Even though it's not new for a classical musician to embrace the use of a laptop, drum machines, and synthesizers, it is rare for one to embrace the pop song with such unabashed intensity.

Dargel's gentle assault on the pop idiom creates a tension which pervades the music: Deadpan and detached vocals reveal heartbreaking intimacies, awkward and obtrusive drum patterns struggle against fragile harmonies, vocals and music uneasily opposing each other as songs stumble to their ends.

Emotional and intelligent, Less Famous Than You evokes the fragility of Antony & The Johnsons and The Hidden Cameras, the electronic works of the late Macon Sumerlin, and the avant-pop approaches of Mark Amerika and Arthur Russell.

Voted one of Time Out New York's 'Top 25 People To Watch In 2006,' Dargel's live performances have received glowing reviews in the New York Times and the Village Voice.

TRACKLISTING

01. glasses
02. i’ll drown
03. gay cowboys
04. i don’t remember
05. withdrawal
06. the news
07. how much you’re worth
08. boy detective
09. global world view
10. change the world
11. like a ghost
12. every word means so much to me

QUOTES

"Perfectly pitched between sentimentality and detachment, Dargel's songs can touch the most hardened heart." -Time Out New York

"...Dargel's songs smartly and impishly blur the boundaries between contemporary classical idioms and pop... [He] has an acute ear for harmony and texture. His electronic accompaniments are richly layered creations with undulant rhythm tracks, chorale-like chord progressions, skittish flute lines and fractured phrases. That the layered elements usually sound slightly out of sync just lends the music more charm." -New York Times (full article)

“...dangerously close to commercial viability... [Dargel] could be mistaken for an ironic pop icon.” -Village Voice (full article)

"...svelte and fastidiously crafted art-pop songs..." -The New Yorker

"...if you've ever felt unattractive, you'll know exactly what he's talking about" -Marc Geelhoed, Time Out Chicago

"...a prodigiously talented, entertaining, and original singer-songwriter" -Darcy James Argue's Secret Society

"Dargel's songs are carefully wrought, but it's not the craftsmanship that wins you over so much as it is the droll observations, clever wordplay and genuine heart in his lyrics... [Less Famous Than You is] surely the contemporary-classical smart-pop breakthrough hit of 2006." -Night After Night

“[Dargel's] songs exhibit... a studied balance between the heart's instincts and the head's ironic assault on pop conventions....The juxtaposition of laconic humour and effusive sentiment is the most characteristic aspect of the album, and it works because like all the best jokes and ballads the delivery is never less than sincere.” -The Rambler

“The perfect reconciliation between pop and the avant-garde, minimalism and modernism, Dargel’s songs are misleading in their apparent simplicity. Purposefully warped by sub-par intonation and jarring rhythmic divergences, moments of delicate harmonies bubble out…” -New York Press