Wedding Dress

Made up of various members of Maps & Atlases, Suns, Joan of Arc and Gypsy Blood, Wedding Dress are about as Chicago as it gets. Dreamt up as side-project / outlet for Maps & Atlases guitar player Erin Elders, songs were written between tours and slowly released during his "math-pop" band's fleeting downtime. Wedding Dress is a distinctly different type of band. It is more layered, plaintive and measured than anything in Elders' previous catalog. The songs involve patient, textured narratives. The instrumentation is restrained, a well-tuned hybrid of real and virtual instruments. "Even though we knew we were making a 'bedroom' record, we didn't want to think about it within the frame of acoustic guitars to a 4-track," offers Elders. "When arranging 'Holy water,' I tried thinking about it in the way that an electronic artist might: how to use or reject repetition. We experimented with some midi string sounds and that led to one of the big cornerstones of the album — the relationship between acoustic sounds and electronic sounds." The songs themselves are beautiful in their sparseness, the palate is selectively lush, and the rotating set of players — both recorded and live — patiently flesh out Elders' haunting vocals and evocative lyrics.