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On this page: Clouds Forming Crowns discography, sample audio, Biography,
Tobias Brothers Early History, and a pre-Clouds discography
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| Clouds Forming Crowns: Tim Tobias, Brian Noga, Nick Cross, Scott Pickering |
DISCOGRAPHY
RACE TO THE BLACKOUT(2006) Produced by Todd Tobias. Written and performed by Tim Tobias and
Todd Tobias. Track listing: 1) Phantom Dog Black Water 2) Animal
Drunk 3) Ghost Looms 4) Waiting for a Drain 5) Floating 6) Matter of Choice 7) Have a
Dream 8) Satellite Ingestions 9) Electric Fools 10) Seat of New Elation 11) Race to the Blackout 12)
Sea Witch #19 (North Station) Click here to order this CD.
Click on the player below to hear Animal
Drunk from the album Race to the Blackout.
REVIEW: Race to the
Blackout has nary an ounce of fat on it, as the brothers Tobias choose instead to cut the crap and stuff the record full
with some of the dirtiest, meatiest blues riffs this side of the Mason-Dixon Line. Within the first five seconds of album-opener
"Phantom Dog Black Water," you’re hit with ball-breaking distortion and grimey cymbal decay. The song segues into the
second track, "Animal Drunk," without skipping a beat, shifting into an ingenious variation on the main riff of "Phantom Dog."
On one of my favorite songs, "Matter
of Choice," grungy guitars and psychedelic moans stutter and collide with breakneck intensity. The following tracks, "Have
a Dream" and "Satellite Ingestion," are vastly subdued, airy pieces, like Bob Dylan’s songs after he went electric.
And "Floating" features an utterly brilliant, floating chorus that just elegantly drops the bottom out when the up-tempo,
bobbing verse and bridge screeches to a halt.
One after another,
Race to the Blackout fires off incredibly breathtaking songs, each one memorable and unique in its own right. On each
listen, I marvel at the Tobias brothers’ knack for writing swampy melodies and hooks that rival quicksand in their ability
to grab hold on someone. Savor this album, as it’s one of the best of the year so far. -Matt Cohen (excerpt from his
review at delusions of adequacy)
CLOUDS FORMING CROWNS (2005)
The self-titled debut on Morphius Records. Produced by Todd Tobias. Written and performed by Tim Tobias and Todd Tobias. Track
listing: 1) Accidents of Air 2) Nowhere is Everywhere 3) Free from Blades and Teeth 4) Are you
Sleeping Well? 5) Let's Bleed 6) Animal Heads on Human Form 7) Forest of Twins 8) Minus Drivers
9) Dreaming of Flying 10) Poppies to the Wake 11) Wish Hound 12) The True Heart of Medicine 13) It's
Easy, Knife 14) Night When People Go Fast 15) Collapsing the First String 16) Night Playing Tricks.
Click Here to order this CD.
click player below to hear Accidents of Air
from the album Clouds Forming Crowns
REVIEW: Former Guided
By Voices members Tim and Todd Tobias unite for a unique and genius-drenched stroll through the cornflake meadows and cigarette
smoke clouds of life. Exactly the kind of album to put on during an autumnal afternoon spent in bed with all the lights in
the house low and nothing but you and a little navel gazing going on (but not in the sad, depressed way). Clouds Forming Crowns
is the kind of band - and the kind of record - you can’t let go of once it has you in its grips. Thank you, brothers
Tobias for giving this to us. May you make many more. – Jedd Beaudoin (Copper Press)
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ROUGH GIANTS and CARDIAC DIPPERS (2006) A collection of 16 unreleased songs recorded in 2005/ 2006. To order this CD, go to the order music page. Track listing: 1) ESP collector 2) no pain today 3) from zero to two 4) close the window 5) morphine
girls 6) made to make you dream 7) sad spine 8) all the grinning women 9) noise and forgetting 10) burn everything 11) mary
skingle 12) desert weathervane (inst.) 13) people who wish you'd go away 14) for the reset 15) river into
ocean 16) almost bleeding
Click on the player below to hear Morphine
Girls from the album Rough Giants and Cardiac Dippers
ALL THE PHARMACIES (2004)
Clouds Forming Crowns' first homemade "studio" recording. Produced by Todd Tobias. Lyrics by
Tim Tobias. Music by Tim and Todd Tobias. Self-released by the Viva Recording Company in a limited edition. For ordering info, go to the order music page.
Track Listing: 1) All the Pharmacies 2) Enter Like Clouds 3) American Head 4)
Crept 5) Wolfbane Membrane 6) Left of the Tunnel 7) Tomorrow Might Change 8) 1000 Years of Snow
9) Cruel is the Time 10) Sick and Free 11) Breaking Treaties and Burning Flags. 12) Crashed into
the World 13) Sharply Learning
Click on the player below to hear Wolfbane Membrane from the
album All the Pharmacies.
REVIEW of All the Pharmacies by Jenn
Young, A&E Editor, Morgantown, West Virginia
Clouds Forming Crowns' debut is both refreshing
and beautiful in its scope. Through trance-like guitar riffs and production that exhibits both intelligence and depth, this
proves to be a record of delicate brilliance. It's one of those albums that sound as though it were composed with a nobler
intention. Lyrically, CFC faces a number of demons and, musically, scare them back into their place. This is music that doesn't
strive to be anything it's not. It's what makes it so damn good. Although much of the album has a somber Wilco -meets- late
Mercury Rev quality to it, it remains nicely balanced by songs like the forth and ninth track that take on lives of their
own with a bigger, louder demonstration of what the band is capable of.
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CLOUDS FORMING CROWNS BIO
Following his engagement as bass player with Guided by Voices, Tim Tobias formed Clouds Forming
Crowns with brother Todd, who had been playing in bands with Tim since their school days. Tim is the principal songwriter
and lyricist, and does the singing and most of the guitar work, while Todd (who also produces records, including the final
three releases from Guided by Voices and solo work from Robert Pollard) provides the musical backup.
Most of the recording is done at home on 4-track cassette and 8-track reel tape and ADAT.
Tim:
"During breaks in my tour schedule, I would write sketches and skeletal parts for songs-most
of the time just guitars and vocals on my 4 track here at home. Then I'd pass these skeletons on to Todd, who would put flesh
to everything and made them what they are today. We've been writing together going on 20 years now. Sometimes we don't see
eye to eye in the long standing Brothers-Who-Make-Music-Together 'tradition', but thus far we've avoided any physical confrontations....
Aside from the recording core of the Tobias Brothers, there is another Clouds Forming
Crowns: the LIVE BAND. Playing alongside Tim are Brian Noga (bass) , Nick Cross (guitar, from Cleveland's Coffinberry)and ex-Gem pal Scott
Pickering on drums.
EARLY HISTORY
Tim and Todd grew up near Akron, Ohio (Little West Virginia) on the outskirts of a suburb, in a sort of
no-man’s land between two different worlds. On one side lived the friendly churchgoing folk who kept
their lawns tidy and smiled at you when you rode by on your bike. On the other side, along the rough, pot-holed roads
and high weeds lived the surly, secretive folk. The brothers were among the churchgoers, but the evil vibrations
coming from the woods at the edge of the back yard, including the lonely sound of a howling electric guitar that seemed to
call to them and scare them all at once, produced a strange attraction. The guitar came from the loft of a cabin in the woods
– one of a clustered group of several houses and cabins belonging to a secretive clan, who according to whispered rumor,
worshiped the devil, practiced incest and made their living from growing and manufacturing illegal drugs.
One day a bloody, skinned animal was found hanging upside- down from a tree in the woods directly behind
the Tobias property. This was taken to be a marker of some kind, or a warning. After that the weird vibes
coming from the woods intensified. While the brothers never ventured into the part of the woods inhabited by the secretive clan,
the sense of the world being populated with shadowy elements took hold. To the searching minds of young boys raised
in a Christian home, the elements of rock and roll, the woods, drugs, the devil, lycanthropy, dirty magazines, the general
weirdness of rural clans, and anything having to do with older boys who smoked marijuana and played electric guitar, all meshed
into a picture of life in serious tension with the picture of life painted by the church and by the wholesome suburban community
at large, which by the way still has more churches per capita than any city in the state of Ohio.
The tension manifest in this 1970's semi-suburban, semi-rural landscape, carries over to Tim and Todd’s
music, including Clouds Forming Crowns, and the musical elements of Circus Devils as well as Todd’s instrumental
music. The music is built on internal tension -- tension between elements in a song, and tension between
different songs on a given album. The tension gives the music a sense of movement within a landscape.
Todd: "I like to listen to some albums because they take me on a trip. The trip
is not just an escape. It's an affirmation of a way of seeing the world that starts when you're a child, when things
aren't sorted out yet. When you're a kid, you feel things more than you think about them. When everything is new and strange,
the whole experience of life is different. Some people feel a nostalgia for that experience, but they don't know it,
or at least they don't think of it in those terms. Creating landscapes in music to move through is a way of staying
enchanted in an adult world where nothing seems new and surprising."
With the late 70’s and early 80's came an avalanche
of new bands to discover. Out went the Rush and Foghat records and in came Roxy Music, the Clash,
Gang of Four, Joy Division, the Sex Pistols, and local boys Devo along with older records like Revolver, the
White album, , Let it Bleed, Ziggy Stardust, and Pink Floyd's Meddle, all of which were new discoveries thanks to
a vacuum in local rock radio.
In 1980 thereabouts, Tim saved his allowance and bought a cheap Les Paul copy. The brothers’
mom bought Todd a drum set from a neighbor, and they started to play spaz-style three-chord punk. After Tim found a schoolmate
to join on bass and keyboard, the trio became "Map of Africa," doing originals along with Sex Pistols, the Clash and
Devo covers. In the mid 80's, punk gave way to gloomy dramatic dirges, and the brothers combined this with their punk
attack to form "the Ghost Sonata", including younger sister Jenny on bass. By the late 80's, Tim and Todd just
wanted to play hard rock again, and The Four Coyotes were born, with Mark Kunz on bass and Chris Candio on guitar.
When the Coyotes broke in 1992, Tim joined guitarist Doug Gillard and current Clouds Forming Crowns drummer
Scott Pickering in the pop rock band Gem. Following Gem’s first release "Hexed," Todd joined the
band on bass. In 1999, Gem released their second and final CD "Sunglare Serenades." (Those interested in pre-Clouds
Tobias recordings see the discography below). During the Gem years, Robert Pollard asked Doug Gillard to join Guided
by Voices, and soon after Tim was invited to join as well, putting aside the guitar to take up bass in that band.
It was a dream realized for Tim to travel the world playing music in a great band...
You can see the rest of the story above in the "CLOUDS FORMING CROWNS BIO."
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Tobias Brothers Pre-Clouds Forming Crowns Discography:
Ghost Sonata (1983-1987)
(Tim: gtr, vocals / Todd: drums)
We Walked on /One Way 7" (Scat)
Hotel Cleveland compilation 1 (3 songs)
4 Coyotes (1988-1992)
(Tim: guitar, vocals / Todd: drums)
Float in the Eye 7" ep(Scat)
Wishbone Fight 7" ep (Scat)
Dreamt Up an Ocean 7" ep (September Gurls)
Prisonshake
(Tim:gtr)
Roaring Third LP(Scat)
3,128 Seconds over Cleveland (Scat)
GEM (1993-2000)
(Tim: gtr, vocals / Todd: bass)
Sunglare Serenades LP (pitch-a-tent)
Hexed LP (Restless) Suburban Girl/Drool 7" single (Carcrash)
Sheep/Smiling All the While 7" single (Carcrash)
split 7" with JennieMae (can't remember the label)
3,128 Seconds Over Cleveland comp (WUJC) I Am A Tree 12" ep (Scat)
Guided By Voices
(Tim: bass / Todd: production, keyboards)
Earthquake Glue (Matador)
Universal Truths and Cycles (Matador)
Isolation Drills (TVT)
many 7"s, CD ep's, 'official' bootlegs
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