One year after the release of their critically heralded A Promise, Philly art-rockers The Chairman Dances are back with Michael and the Prophetess, a song cycle steeped in biblical language and set in a fictionalized 1950s era Brooklyn. Upping the ante from previous efforts, the album includes an arsenal of strings and brass that spin out recurring melodies, mirroring the narrative and giving a sense of wholeness and depth to the work. The crystalline production, too, is an advancement and a step toward the pop idiom, which is fitting as Michael and the Prophetess finds the quartet moving ever-closer toward the pop aesthetic. College-radio singles abound and include the guitar driven “Prophetess” and “Wreck,” the tongue-in-cheek “My Life and the Postseason Collapse of the 1956 Brooklyn Dodgers,” and the Wilco-esque, alt-country crooner “Well-wisher.” If, as WXPN’s John Vettese avers, A Promise marks the band’s “graduation from indie songwriters to dramatic storytellers,” Michael and the Prophetess marks yet another progression, one that is both toward the abandoned album-as-story and, paradoxically, the very pop music audience that abandoned it.

The Chairman Dances are:

Andrew Ciampa
Mike Giuliana
Ben Rosen
Eric Krewson
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