Alcotone, an outfit headed up by eccentric frontman David Michael Dill, delivers their latest recording effort, Buttermilk. The band will hit the clubs this summer with David Dill and Josh Copp on guitar and vocals, Matt Fowler on bass, and Zack Watson and Chad Wanat on keyboards and drums, respectively.   

David, a self-proclaimed conspiracy nut weaves tales of secret government plots and alien interventions while balancing prose against bold and stunningly original musical compositions. Moving down the playlist of the thirteen tracks you get a taste of many different and recognizable styles woven wonderfully together. There’s certainly a seventies throw-back sound, and with his pervasive accent, a bit of a southern rock bent. With tracks like What Do I Do adding a lush Motown style, Bullfighter's dreamy psychedelic lament and the odd “crisis-inducing feel” of the duet Time, the facets of the material confound.

Alcotone’s number two, Josh Copp, rounds out the overall tone and gives David a break, performing amazing tracks like Easy Seven and Peace Baby, which add to the playlist’s effortless flow.

Where did this glorious gift to music come from? The story actually begins some years back.

David’s had a twenty-five year career that took him through some of the most prestigious recording facilities in New York City.  At Sigma Sound Studios, he got his start making coffee and tea for The Talking Heads, Robert Palmer, and Ziggy Marley before finding his first opportunity to move up the ladder as an assistant engineer on James Brown’s album, Static. In 1989 he landed a job as a staff engineer at Atlantic Records and followed that a year later with a stint at The Hit Factory, during its heyday. After a seven-year run working with Steely Dan frontman Donald Fagen and his producer Gary Katz at River Sound, David joined the staff of Jive Records as an engineer at the label’s Battery Studios complex. It’s there that Alcotone came to be.

Rekindling his love for song writing in 2003, David started recording material at Battery Studios in his off-hours under the name Hazard Christ. As the sessions progressed it became obvious that the rotating door of eager employees could be an extremely potent aspect of the project. Talented, albeit inexperienced, young kids were more than willing to survive sleepless night to be a musician or an engineer on a real session. In 2004 a then twenty-one year old Josh Copp rose to the top of the order with his ability to be charming and invent smart little hooks with intricate backing vocals. They united, and they called themselves Alcotone. By 2005 they had recorded and self-released their first album, Alcotone X, with the duo easily working in tandem and adding additional guest musicians to flesh out the tunes.

One Friday night in 2006 a Battery Studios mastering engineer-in-training, Matt Fowler, stayed late to record a track of his own and asked David to help. The song that came from that session, The Duke, became the title track of Alcotone’s second record. And then they were three.

From that point on the project seemed to just move under its own power. “Work every Saturday,” David explained. “Smartest thing we ever did was, with very few exceptions over the next two years, we recorded every Saturday. That period was a real education for everyone. We must have recorded forty or fifty songs in 2007 and 2008, but for the little EP we made called No EQ we just picked six.”  

After years of woodshedding they realized, in early 2009, that they were going to have to put the show on stage. “We were going to need a band.”

Zack Watson who, as an assistant at Battery, had actually played piano on many of the band’s early tracks was an obvious choice. It didn’t hurt that he lived in the same building that housed Josh’s loft recording studio. Chad was already playing drums in an insane (and awesome) band called Apeman with Matt and another Battery alumni, Jake Gianinni. When Jake decided to move to the wilderness of northern California Chad “slid on over Alcotone way.”

After a burst of shows in the summer of 2009, the new-and-improved Alcotone went back into the studio to make the definitive Alcotone record. So now after much consideration they give you Buttermilk.