Press
Hey Marseilles plays orchestral folk songs, interweaving eclectic instrumentation with melodic musings on time and place. Having landed on Sound NW’s “Top 10 Bands to Watch for 2008,” HM released their first full-length album, To Travels & Trunks, late that year and have been garnering favorable reviews from Seattle critics in the months since. The record landed airplay on independent radio taste-maker KEXP and secured a top ten listing in Seattle’s Three Imaginary Girls’ “Top Northwest Releases of 2008 Readers Poll.” HM played SXSW 2009, are booked for the main stage at Seattle’s Capitol Hill Block Party, and have been selected for both Bumbershoot and CMJ 2009. Recent months have seen them share bills with The Constantines, Cotton Jones, and fellow Seattleites The Long Winters and David Bazan. A re-mix & re-release of To Travels & Trunks is planned for early 2010.
To Travels and Trunks LP
Selected tracks:
Rio
From A Terrace
To Travels & Trunks
Cannonballs
Goodbye Versailles
Selected Press:
“For all the room-filling beauty of the symphonic climaxes on their first full-length album, there’s just as much power– and passion– in the record’s simplest, sparsest moments. What makes To Travels & Trunks so incredibly intoxicating, however, is something less definitive than notes and measures: A youthful earnestness, a genuine, unsullied passion for song, shines through every last second of Hey Marseilles’ music.”
–Seattle Weekly
“The instrumentation is beautiful and dynamic, ranging from lamenting cello to joyful trumpets and everything in between…”
–KEXP Review
“Despite their name, Seattle’s Hey Marseilles perform in la langue de Shakespeare, preferring instead to invoke the spirit of old-world Marseilles as an influence to their poetic, folkish, and stunningly orchestral music. The collection of pianos, cello, violins, and accordion might force some people to label it as ‘eclectic.’ I call it ‘magnifique.’”
–A Limerick Ox
“Melancholy cello and viola harmonies underscoring poetic meanderings about love and loneliness,
God and Dostoyevsky make these guys worth keeping an eye on.”
–Wilson Diehl, Seattle Metropolitan
“[Hey Marseilles's] instrumentation is a smooth complement to the soothing, heartfelt songs that suggest this unsigned Seattle group may be the city’s answer…”
–Rob Miller, Sound NW Magazine
“…it’ll sweep you off your feet.”
–Megan Seling, The Stranger
“Built on the solid foundation of Matt Bishop’s songsmithery– [...] the band creates lush propulsion that is far less assuming and rowdy than the sheer mass of musicians on stage would have you believe.”
–Tyson Lynn, Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Selected Videos
