Palaxy Tracks

Palaxy Tracks

Wilderness

Peek-A-Boo

Brandon Durham is from Cedar Park, TX, a place of half-lit woods and lonely roads. When he was a child, he would fantasize about being a victim in a horror film. As a teenager, he played metal guitar. For an audition while under strict curfew, he slipped riffs out his bedroom window for a band assembled outside. (He was in!) The band was called Fury in Motion. As a young man, he moved to Austin, TX, and started his own group, Palaxy Tracks. They released three albums, including the shimmering and perfect Cedarland (Peek-A-Boo, 2003). They were a beloved part of the scene that fostered Spoon,  …And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead and The Octopus Project. Durham moved to Chicago for a while to work sound for the legendary shitty venue Beat Kitchen. He moved back to Austin in 2006 to play guitar for The Octopus Project, and there he met the man that he would later marry. Then, like many of his cohorts, his career took off and he put the down the guitar. Durham is now not quite 43, the year he thought a man “gets handsome.” He and his husband live in a New York City apartment with an 80-pound dog and two cats. He works for the typographers Hoefler & Co. Things are good. Then, after ten years, he picks up a guitar again, and songs come out... A song about memories of a home invasion (“Slow Dancing”). A song about...

Palaxy Tracks

Twelve Rooms

Peek-A-Boo

*** “Like a snapshot taken at twilight, their music is a photograph of a landscape caught at perpetual dusk”. This is an apt observation one reviewer made of Palaxy Tracks’ last record. A quick glance through the band’s press kit reveals similar praise from critics all over. Their distinctively subtle songwriting and expansive, somber guitar rock perfectly conveys a sense of loss and longing, evoking images of ghosts, memories, empty rooms and endless open roads. The group’s latest album, Twelve Rooms, shows a band that has aged gracefully over the course of three records, perfecting a sound more evocative and sweetly heartbreaking with each release. Palaxy Tracks formed several years ago in Austin, Texas, named after some distinctly human-esque footprints found alongside dinosaur tracks in the limestone beds of the nearby Paluxy River. Their wispy, angular, and effects-laden guitars earned the band an avid local fan base in no time. On Twelve Rooms the band strips away the electronics of previous efforts and relies upon vintage analog instruments, enhancing their superb songwriting with subtle horns, mellotron, hammond, pump organ and other finishing flourishes. These details combine perfectly to give the listener with a sweeping, expansively lovely listening experience - Twelve Rooms of swooning, bittersweet perfection.