Hopewell 'Beautiful Targets' album

A brief scan of heraldic press clippings from CMJ, the Village Voice, NME, Time Out, Wire, and Magnet divulges a clear journalistic pattern of enthusiastically describing Hopewell in terms of opposition: delicate/visceral, sublime/stabbing, crushing/romantic, immense/fragile. Far more than evidence for a collection of tired journalistic tropes, those who follow the group recognize volatility as an immediate and clear touchstone of both its music and its history. With their new album Beautiful Targets coming out in the summer of 2007 on Tee Pee Records, Hopewell have come to fully recognize, embrace, and explore this tension to mature and stunning conclusion.

Their latest offering showcases a band at the height of their creativity. Somewhere in the anthemic soaring strings of "Tree," the pop prowess of "Bethlehem," and the shrieking maelstrom of "Windy Day," the band makes it clear that they are dead serious. Serious about outdoing themselves, seriously determined to make lasting, genre-defying music, and seriously out to break the listener's heart. The third full-length album finds Hopewell perfecting their inherent gift for drama. Characters in the loosely connected narrative are human to a fault, clashing and rejoicing as the music threatens to overwhelm them, often veering off into unexpected tenderness at the last minute. Where their previous efforts honored turmoil and chaos, this is the sound of a band who has survived and managed to make something beautiful out of their struggle.

Beautiful Targets was produced by Bill Racine (Rogue Wave, Mates Of State) and recorded in the band's beloved upstate New York wilderness of Poughkeepsie in 2006.

When Hopewell's leader Jason Russo was 19 years old he found himself traversing the world playing with the now legendary Mercury Rev. Following the tours for Revs breakthrough record Deserters Songs, he followed his heart to develop his own voice and formed Hopewell. They enjoyed rave reviews in national press and crisscrossed the country playing to increasingly larger amounts of fans.

Hopewell's devastating performances - unveiling a live act that supplements rock instrumentation with additional percussion, orchestral arrangements and shrieking horns - have left packed houses clamoring for more and drawn drop-jawed reviews from the most stoic of journalists. They have performed internationally with British Sea Power, Elefant, the Sleepy Jackson, the Comas, Mike Watt, the Brian Jonestown Massacre and The Black Angels.

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Hopewell - Beautiful Targets