Few Dallas Bands Can Claim A Pedigree As Strong As MOTORCADE’s, So It’s Not A Surprise They Just Released One Of The Best North Texas Songs Of The Year.

Welcome to Song of the Day, where we hip you to all the new local releases you should be caring about. By highlighting one new North Texas-sprung tune every week day, our hope is that you’ll find something new to love about the rich and abundant DFW music scene five days a week.

MOTORCADE — “Slip”
RIYL: time-traveling with Donnie Darko
What else you should know: The Dallas indie rockers in MOTORCADE received plenty of praise — both around here and nationally — following the release of their debut album a few years ago.

Now, the band has a new single that hopefully brings its music even more attention.

Recalling the layered bliss of Echo & the Bunnymen’s Ocean Rain (and especially its opening “Silver” cut), “Slip” is three minutes of dense joy. With an up-tempo feel driven by a prominent piano and cello, it’s one of the finest singles released by a North Texas-based act this year.

The Echo & the Bunnymen comparison, by the way, isn’t just music critic talk:

“The song is about how everything falls apart eventually, no matter how stable things can seem,” says guitarist/keyboardist James Henderson. “[I] was trying to make this one stand out a bit from the rest of our songs, so [I] started playing with different sounds as the focus. [I] started working on the cello thing a la ‘Never Stop’ by Echo & the Bunnymen, and felt that was the answer. Still do.”

This is a melodically rich tune with lyrics about uncertainty — a topic that hits hard these days during a pandemic that won’t go away. Still, this is a tune that will still resonate at any time.

With vocalist Andrew Huffstetler (the powerful voice of the legendary Dallas band Baboon), bassist John Dufilho (hey, it’s that guy again!) and drummer Jeff Ryan (ditto!), this band has a momentum that not a lot of other acts can claim. Theirs is a modern-retro sound that’s just not altogether common these days —  or even back in the day, for that matter.’

Like most MOTORCADE material, “Slip” feels timeless.

Recorded in both home set-ups at Oak Cliff’s Consolvo Studios, it’s the first taste of a very promising LP that the band has in the pipeline called See You In the Nothing. We’re guessing the band will tease more of what’s to come there when it plays the Texas Theatre on Friday, October 22, with fellow stellar locals Cryptolog and Abbreviations.

In the meantime, we’ll be listening to this one on repeat.

No more articles