Three tracks (Screaming Dinosaurs, Goodnight Old Man and Pop Song) from  "Vanity," the second offering from Folsom indie rockers Brown Shoe, were featured on MTV's Real World: Brooklyn this month.  To get your copy of Vanity, visit www.brownshoemusic.comor visit iTunes.

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Please do check out our newest review by Brian over at Bootleg Avenue Magazine out of Wilmington, NC. Here's a link www.myspace.com/avenuemagazinepresents


Folsom, California's Brown Shoe offer up Jackalope, their third album in as many years. Previous albums, The Wheat Patch and Vanity, are familiar in sound but share a different focus thematically. If suffering could share a place with melodic and melancholic music it exists here in the extreme. The album is comprised of beautiful pop music yet it stews and boils, centering on the pain of a relationship gone awry, the reflection and after effects. It's juxtaposition for any ear, for any listener – sweet music layered with lyrics brought on by painful experience.
Lyrics are strewn across an album's worth of material that all point to something deeply heartfelt – I don't want to be touched by anyone anymore ('Uh Oh'), I need new nude company ('Take This Paper and Burn It'), It's the whites of your eyes that tell your lies ('Sixes'), So follow me into the hollows ('Aquarium'), We fought like soldiers without pay ('Lightfoot'). Songs infrequently, yet forcefully, paint severe images - of spending time with women to pass the time, to mask pain, the burning of memories, or introspective self abuse when Ryan Baggaley sings Never took you dancing/I never really showed you my love. Jackalope serves as allegory, of the back and forth one encounter at the end of a relationship – denial, argument, acceptance. Two songs display the yin and yang - 'Pulp' is caustic, its guitar blistering at the songs dénouement while 'Cellar' is the opposite, soothing wounds while displaying them.
Jackalope is politely powerful, burning and mournful. It's comfort music that mirrors a gray day outside. In tone and feel, Brown Shoe captures spacey sounds combined with soaring harmony and airy vocals. Songs are built around persistent drumming and jangly (and restrained) guitar playing. Their songs are entrenched in emotion, devoid of catchy nuances. But in the midst of this storm there's something uplifting, something common between listener and musician, that there's more to enduring hardship than purely the sum of experiences that make us who we are.

Brian Tucker
Bootleg Magazine

Kevin over at Music Emissions reviewed our new record, "Jackalope" last week take gander and let us know what you think.

The brothers of Brown Shoe have returned for their 3rd offering in as many years. There's something to be said for being consistent, and consistently good. After The Wheat Patch and then Vanity opened doors for major media attention and shows across the country, Cali's best-kept alt-rock secret fell back into the studio with Joe Johnston (Deftones, Cake) to assemlbe Jackalope.
Their sound hasn't changed much at all, a natural continuation of what they were doing on Vanity. That would be, artsy pop-rock that relies on big, sweeping melodies, tight basslines and a heavenly atmosphere. An intriguing mix of sounds you'd hear from bands like Coldplay, Sigur Ros, Animal Collective and so on. "Cheery" is a word you'd use, but plenty of the lyrics work as a counterpoint to the sunshiney tunes. The album's first half is it's strongest, with two songs that should garner Brown Shoe with even more recognition; opener "Take This Paper And Burn It" and my favorite,the anthemic "Aquarium". If Vanity held an aquatic theme beneath it's surface as I had thought, then Jackalope has more to do with the dirt, the ground, roots and rocks and foundations. Other noteworthy tracks: "Uh Oh", "Pulp" (the album's best instrumental passages, really beautiful work) and "The War", another song that has single potential written all over it.
Brown Shoe are definitely getting better with each release, and while this album is not the 2nd coming, it is certainly going down as one any fan of melodic, soulful and uplifting rock music. They're still able to do it honest, which is the absolute hardest thing for a band with pop tendencies to pull off. If this band isn't being talked about all over the internet by the end of the year, I'll be shocked. This one will most likely end up on more than a few best-of-the-year lists.
- Kevin Sellers

Here's the first review for our new record "Jackalope".

I'm a huge fan of Brown Shoe's live show. These four guys bring such intensity to the stage, even going so far as to play musical chairs with their instruments. While debut disc The Wheat Patch captured some of that passion, their second release, Vanity, lacked the energy of said live show, and was a bit of a disappointment as such.
For their third release, Jackalope, this Folsom, Calif., quartet has gone back into the home studio. No hotshot producer to dumb things down; this was recording on their terms, and the heart shows through the final product. In addition to disc highlight "Aquarium" (from whence the disc's title comes)a raucous number (and live show favorite) that proclaims in near-shout, "If it's all over, then let it be over, 'cause I can't say it again"Jackalope does much to restore Brown Shoe to their focused finest.
Brown Shoe is composed of three brothers—frontman/guitarist Ryan Baggaley, guitarist/keyboardist/multi-instrumentalist Aaron Baggaley, bass/multi-instrumentalist Bryson Baggaley, and drummer Jim Mikesell; it should go without saying that each of the four are multi-instrumentalists, with a plethora of soundmakers listed in the credits. Their sound is an amalgam of shoegaze and introspective indie rock, with touches of lyrical genius and revelation.
"Take This Paper and Burn It" kicks off the album with a swirling wall of keyboards fronted by Ryan's smooth vocals. "Atop the Ferris wheel of Paris/ I sit with the gangly girls/ named for cities and pretty things," he sings, his words painting a clear and colorful portrait. Next up, "Sixes" is darkly insinuating, driven by a quietly smoldering guitar line and Ryan's flexible resonance.
Where "Lightfoot" has a driving, more straightforward indie-rock groove, "Uh Oh" is gentler; Ryan sounds almost apologetic as he offers, "You're a let down, baby." The slower "Tappy" finds Ryan revelating, "This life will surprise you/ every chance it gets." Next up, "Pulp" is almost bouncy in its delivery, made expansive by a chorus of voices. "Bathe me in your lover's clothes/ I'll fake it and maybe you won't know," croons Ryan on "The War"; next up, the stripped-down, almost protest-sounding "Late."
The rest of the disc alternately weaves tales mellow ("Grifter"), piano-heavy ("Rivals") and cathedral-like ("Hey"). Played in its entirety, the nasalness of Ryan's voice gets every the least bit tiring, yet overall, the album is one that grows on you with each listen.

We sat down with Jonathan Keifer from Sacramento News and Review a little while back to talk about music and ourselves (our two favorite topics) and it looks like it's in this weeks edition. You can check it out at:

http://www.newsreview.com/sacramento/Content?oid=602601

or here...

SN&R by Jonathan Keifer

File under, um ...
Keeping it simple gets complicated for Folsom foursome Brown Shoe

Just when Brown Shoe had seemed to take full ownership of the moody indie-pop atmospherics and the comparisons to My Morning Jacket and Red House Painters, somebody went and said the local quartet sounded a little bit prog.

Hang on. Really? Prog? Meaning what, exactly? Music for the verse-chorus-verse averse, rendered not in songs so much as tonal experiments and weirdo time signatures? Music made not for thrashing around in piss-stinking dive bars after midnight but rather for afternoon examination via turntables mounted on plywood and cinder blocks in the wood-paneled basements of yesteryear? Hey, they're not Emerson, Lake & Palmer, for Chrissakes.

And no, the three Baggaley brothers—lyricist and front-man Ryan, 28; Aaron, 27, on guitar and keyboards; and bassist Bryson, 20—plus drummer Jim Mikesell, 27, aren't exactly eggheads, either. They have day jobs as landscapers. ("We dig ditches," Ryan says flatly but with a grin.) They write songs about, among other things, sex and death. None of them looks like he has any trouble getting dates.

On the other hand, orchestrations in Brown Shoe's studio recordings have broadened steadily since the band's 2006 debut CD, The Wheat Patch, going so far as to include smashing file cabinets with hunks of PVC pipe. "We just keep acquiring more and more gear," says Aaron, to which Mikesell adds, "It gets interesting fitting us on the stage." The intent has more to do with textures than theatrics: The new-ish disc, Vanity, enlarges the band's confidence and further indulges its musical curiosities, with songs that can seem at once utterly stoned and hyper-alert. Rhythms shift around as if to make themselves more comfortable. Melodies soar like signal flares fired off to suggest ways through all the shimmering, unhurried, open-voiced changes. The music draws life from its own sincerity. "No one's passive," Ryan says of the foursome's collaborative creative process. "If someone has an idea, we try it. If you don't like it, fine, just don't do it half-assed. You try to blow your own mind. Your ear is training itself."

Yeah, OK, so maybe they are a little prog. And maybe that's fine. But it's not what got them so much college-radio play and sub-mainstream press in the first place. So, what did?

You know that sometimes annoying yet perennially endearing buddy who got dumped and spent that one whole summer in the corner slouched over his guitar, locked in rhetorical arguments with his own inspirations and looking straight through you whenever you tried to get his attention? Well, imagine that he actually got his act together, and got a band together, and played out enough to learn how to work a crowd, and put out a couple of CDs, and actually got really tight. Yeah, Brown Shoe is kinda like that, too. Not literally, though. Or maybe literally.

At their best, and most urgent, they seem like fugitives from the categories to which their describers would so hastily assign them. "Ethereal rock" is what they call their own music, and that seems right—but only really means something after you've heard the music.

So: Hear it. A California winter could be the perfect setting for expansive, gauzy, downcast, shoulder-hunched, hands-in-pockets indie tunage. Of course, who knows if that's what the quartet actually will bring to its Marilyn's outing next week, let alone the later shows in Hollywood, Long Beach, Fresno and finally Folsom, the Brown Shoe home base.

In some ways, the band's chameleonic versatility has been compulsory. Each performance venue—be it concert hall or coffee shop—makes its own demands. There are those in which, as Bryson puts it, "everyone wants to grab your ass," and those in which, as Aaron puts it, "half the people there just want to study." Accordingly, it's become a point of pride for Brown Shoe to thwart (and presumably exceed) audience expectations. For instance, a crowd might get treated to an evening of furious rock and, as Ryan puts it, "they're like, 'What the fuck? I thought these guys were shoegazers!'"

Hang on. Really? Shoegaze? Meaning what, exactly?

We just got back from St Louis and the Play STL Fest. We had ourselves a great time maybe too much of a good time. We met some great people who I might add like to purchase booze for bands. Being in a band we like that. Being people with livers we could have drank a little less. We also sat down with Matt Fernandes of St Louis Post Dispatch for a interview of the band (us), it went something like this...

Brown Shoe releases itself from Folsom (on its own recognizance)
By Matt Fernandes
Saturday, Sep. 22 2007


Folsom, Calif. band Brown Shoe hopped into their van a few days ago to make the long journey to St. Louis to play Playfest, stopping in Denver to play a show on the way. Folsom is just northeast of Sacramento in the golden foothills of the Sierra Nevada. And yes, it's still home to the prison made famous by Johnny Cash.
More on that later.
Lead singer Ryan Baggaley's voice has an earnest, Robert Pollard quality to it on their psychedelic, chilled out numbers. But this band does not get lost in space by any means. On upbeat songs, they assert themselves quite boldly, with lively drums and vocals.
Brown Shoe is made up of three brothers and a friend and started out playing in a Folsom garage. According to guitarist Aaron Baggaley, the days of sibling fighting are over… well mostly anyway.
"We don't fight any more," said Aaron. "Me and Ryan used to fight a lot. We were best friends and worst enemies when we were kids. It's an interesting dynamic in the band. We might get pissed at each other and be on level ten, screaming at each other and it's no big deal."
As kids, the brothers Baggaley used to run up the hill to Folsom Prison to badger the guards.
"We used to live close to the prison and we would get so close to this guard that he'd shoot off his gun to make us leave," said Aaron. "So of course we'd go back and get close to him pretty much every day."
The band's sound has evolved a bit in their three years together.
"In the beginning we were a bit stripped down and linear," said Ryan Baggaley. "On the first record, we said, 'let's play honest, straight forward songs that we can play live exactly right. Now our sound is a lot fuller. We have a lot of energy in our music, but we also don't want it to be happenstance, so we keep changing and adding parts to songs throughout the process."
When asked how they came up with 'Brown Shoe,' Aaron said it wasn't complicated.
"We wanted something simplistic," he said. "We wanted the name to have nothing to do with the music, where no one knows what they're going to hear when they put the CD in."
'Three Brothers and a Friend' probably would have worked also.
This should be a highlight at the festival Sunday.