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September 8th, 2008
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Out of the woods

Fresh sounds from an unlikely cross-country combo
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By Darrell Jónsson
For The Prague Post
January 9th, 2008 issue

Photo by BETH ORTEN
Havelka, foreground, has been following his own muse since his itinerant childhood.
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Please the Trees

When: Wednesday, Jan. 16, at 7:30
Where: Palác Akropolis
Tickets: 145 Kč, available through Ticketpro and at the venue

All the members of Please the Trees may have been born in the Czech Republic, but when they take the stage at Akropolis next week, some concertgoers may be surprised to find their melodic sound has little to do with Prague. “I have always taken inspiration from the outside,” says songwriter and Please the Trees co-founder Václav Havelka.
Although he’s referring mostly to his songwriting, every aspect of Havelka’s production, touring and artistic direction reflects a careful distance. Emerging on the Prague scene in 2004 as the founder of Selfbrush, he navigated an odd, compelling mix of alt-country and eclectic
lo-fi that continued through the band’s 2006 release Three Names (on Absent Hour Records).
Havelka’s identification with the geographic frontiers of rock is as much by circumstance as by choice. “I’m not from Prague — I was born in Pardubice,” he says. “My interest in music started with grunge and the Seattle scene … back then I was living in the woods.”
The woods he refers to are the north Bohemian mountain resorts, where his parents made a career as traveling hotel workers. Because of this semi-nomadic past, Havelka’s diverse musical taste owes more to the rural post offices near Harrachov than anything broadcast from the Prague-centered media. His formative years of trading homemade cassettes by mail left him with a colorful and complex musical background.
Explaining his continuing preference for roaming tastes, Havelka says, “In Prague, it’s hard to get fresh air. When Joanna Newsome or Coco Rosie plays in Prague, it’s presented like the newest thing. But the entire freak-folk scene is a 5-year-old movement. With the Internet today, though, it is all there for the digging — and I’m happy to dig for new music, even going to Germany to find new stuff. But what is the inspiration for young bands here? It’s London and MTV, as if England is the center of the musical universe. It is in many ways the center, but you also have scenes in Australia and New Zealand, and just beyond London there is Manchester, Bristol and Ireland.”
And a mere two hours beyond Prague there is Tábor, where Havelka’s current band mates formed a group called Some Other Place in 2003, and in 2004 released an internationally distributed CD, To be continued ... (on Free Dimension Records). Stripping down the grandeur of ’90s rock into minimalist dynamics and textures, Some Other Place remains one of the country’s more distinctive and enjoyable stage acts. In fact, it’s a mystery why they haven’t gained more local or even global attention.
Further adding to the puzzle, with Havelka being the sort of person more likely to have a Woody Guthrie biography tucked into his knapsack than a stack of Tortoise CDs, it was a bit of a shock to hear he had teamed up with an experimental spin-off from Tábor’s predominately heavy metal-influenced scene. The connection between Selfbrush and Some Other Place, Havelka says by way of explanation, is “more personal and spiritual than anything else.”
Whatever the chemistry between these two seemingly disparate spirits, both onstage and on their 2006 debut CD Lion Prayer (on Absent Hour Records), the results are timely enough. Within the post-’90s currents of their sound ripple echoes of everything from the expressionism of Germany’s Popol Vuh and Scotland’s Mogwai to the experimental ’60s folk epics that American artists like Ron Elliot, Neil Young and Jack Nitzsche dabbled in. That Please the Trees is benefiting creatively from what at first seems an odd coupling grows increasingly apparent on the group’s newest material, which leverages their airborne synthesis to ramble even further off the musical map. Although Please the Trees’ sound may have something of the drama former Bob Dylan producer Daniel Lanois mastered in his work with U2 and Belladonna, Havelka and his band mates are far from being Dylan folk-rock acolytes. Rather, their dedication to originality is reminiscent of what Dylan once said to The Los Angeles Times’ Robert Hilburn: “You can’t just copy somebody.”

Darrell Jónsson can be reached at features@praguepost.com


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