You’d imagine Dignan’s music is conceived somewhere cold and snowy grey and stunning in its starkness, a place for thinking meaningful thoughts and contemplating life’s everlasting mysteries.
Not a Texas town located a mere five miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border and boasting a significant Hispanic community. (Dignan photo by Taylor Pool)
“There’s not much of that in the music,” bassist and Dignan co-founder Devin Garcia tells me via phone a few weeks ago while the band was enjoying some down time in Cincinnati before a show later that night. “A lot of times, people are almost surprised about that.”
The atmospheric chamber pop has a distinctive psyche-folk feel in the same vein as Grizzly Bear. The multi-layered vocals are delivered in gentle and mellifluous intones or passionate cries, and are backed by wordless chorales and tasteful washes of sound with small textural details added for affect — glock chimes, guitar reverb, tambourine jingles, hand-claps, accordion notes, whistling.
Dignan is named after the charming ne’er-do-well in Wes Anderson’s first film, Bottle Rocket, and had its start when high school-aged Andy Pena met Garcia in church and became fast friends while tooling around in the church’s music room, where they spent many a late night experimenting with various instruments and taking full advantage of the empty performance space. Soon enough, Pena was playing guitar, Garcia electric bass and the duo were recruiting other young musicians to join them. Eventually, they settled into the current lineup with keyboardist and harmonizing vocalist Heidi Plueger, drummer Trey Perez, and David Palomo, who sings and plays accordion, glock and keys.
This article appears in Jul 8-14, 2009.