Slow Parade

Slow Parade

Slow Parade is the musical messenger of songwriter Matthew Pendrick. Based in the fertile landscape of Atlanta, Georgia, Slow Parade distills a familiar recipe of Roots, Blues and Country into a potent elixir once known as Rock & Roll. Slow Parade's 3rd LP Maybe You'll Come Around Again follows closely on the heels of 2020's psychedelia soaked Hi-Fi LowLife, but pares the song craft down to its barest essentials: a band, a room, and Pendrick’s keen eye for a song.Maybe You'll Come Around Again finds Slow Parade digging new holes in old dirt, following in the footsteps of their folksy forefathers down the path that lies in service of the song. With echoes of Harvest-era Neil Young or the Band's more clear eyed moments at Big Pink, Slow Parade’s latest LP strips back the shiny veneer of digital technology in search of something less. These songs exist in the here and the now: a reality as hazy as a Sunday morning hangover. Pendrick’s characters are low on gas, incurious of redemption, and probably high on something. They slouch towards the lucidity lurking under every pounding headache from a good time Saturday night. "Not much left sacred nor profane," Pendrick yawps out in the frenzied final stanza of “Junker In the Fast Lane” a rowdy anthem to a headstrong jalopy. The song's swampy New Orleans groove lurches like a raucous junkyard jam session between Allen Toussaint and ZZ Top.The bulk of the Maybe You'll Come Around Again was recorded over the course of just 3 days at Standard Electric Recording Co. in Atlanta, GA with a simple goal: to play songs together in a room. “Quick Buck” unfurls at a lazier pace on par with the ambitions of its scrappy narrator. Chiming flange soaked guitars punctuate a relaxed groove chill enough to cool JJ Cale's Lone Star. The tune was written with Pendrick's oldest musical partner in crime, David Kirslis (Cicada Rhythm), after a trip down the road to a scrapyard to do some recycling. "It takes me back some pretty good times we had in our young life, bumming around, catching trains to who knows where, and not having much to worry about other than eventually finding a way home or scrounging some beer money."Elsewhere on “Maybe You'll Come Around,” Slow Parade strikes a defiant chord in the face of steep odds and a half empty tank. On “Last Call For the Band,” a gut punching power ballad of the hardscrabble touring musician that echoes the rowdier moments of Jason Isbell, harmonized guitars weave across a beer soaked dance floor and erupt into flames in the harsh fluorescent light of closing time. “This Old Van” is a heartfelt ode to the horse the band rode in on. As the song builds from a somber breakdown, steel guitars ring out like the long drip of Jesus' happy tears while a honky tonk piano saunters along in a locked two step dance. Their wheels may be feeble, the miles may be long, the band may have even broken up, but they're bound for somewhere, "not in style, but with ragged grace."“Napping on the Job” and the lush album closer “Lovely Moon” smooth out the rougher edges of the new LP, trading twang for a touch of blissful atmospherics. "I've been taking my time with a dream I can't mend," Pendrick muses wistfully as the specters of waking life hover above like rain-soaked clouds. As the melody swirls and shimmers around the ears in a hallucinatory trance of lush pedal steel and electric piano, Slow Parade beckons us to surrender to the dream. If only for a few stolen winks, if only for one last drink, if only for a few more miles. Maybe it doesn't have to be so complicated. Maybe You'll Come Around Again.

Cicada Rhythm

The Titos