Where Our Failures Are, the first full-length from Brooklyn’s The New Dress and out now on Red Leader Records, is just great. It’s hard to really find any other way to describe it except “great”. They’re one of my favorite bands and the CD, which includes the five songs from the original demo, gets your toes tapping and your fists up in the air.

With a slightly beefier production than the demo, Where Our Failures Are doesn’t do anything to take away from the rawness of the single guitar, and the twin vocals of Bill and Laura, which is where their real strength comes from. The New Dress mix punk, folk, and just a dash of working-class heroism from the opening notes of “Setting Off Alarms” (one of my absolute favorites of theirs) to their Billy Bragg cover of “I Don’t Need…” to the closing notes of “Two Sweatshirts.” This is just the thing you need playing on the stereo when you’ve got a bottle of whiskey to kill and a couple of friends to help you do it.

It’s from the heart, and what’s not to love about that?

Initially, when you see a band, you probably wouldn’t think it was possible for just two people to conjure up such a passionate, gut-punching amount of raw power and intensity. But that’s what you get with The New Dress when they play their good-for-the-soul-type-folk-punk, filled out with their unique take on political sincerity and pain-ridden love sick laments. Or maybe you would. Maybe you’d be able to tell that these two have got something special going on here. I recently got a chance to see them play for the fourth time, and later on, in the hot New York City night and in the shadow of the Knitting Factory, got to discuss Billy Bragg, being a bonehead, among other things.

State your name and what you do in the band.
Laura: I’m Laura, vocals.
Bill: Bill. I play guitar and sing.

So how’d The New Dress start?
Laura: Bill used to be in a really, really sweet band called The Banned, back in the day and we met in college and had similar musical interests. I sang on a track on a Banned recording and when they broke up, Bill harassed me on a daily basis to do something else.
Bill: I kept telling her that I wanted to be in a band with her that was kinda like Billy Bragg, to sum it up.

Laura: And he would call me up every single day and act like it was a new idea, and I was like “I don’t think so.”
Bill: I’d say “hey, I got this really great idea” which I’d done like 17 times before, to the point where she stopped answering her phone. I was like “you should be in a band with me!” Finally, I played her a song that I wrote and I had the lyrics done and everything, and it ended up being a song that we still play. That kind of convinced Laura, and it kind of took off from there. It started out playing songs on an acoustic guitar in my apartment and that’s how we still practice, except now in Laura’s apartment.

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And to think, the cold almost kept me in doors tonight instead of going out to Brooklyn to see The New Dress. The band’s energetic, thoughtful but undeniably fun anthems made the frostbite totally worth it.

The New Dress

Back in July of 2006 I went to a little club in Brooklyn for the first time, a nice joint called North 6. I’d gone to go see the almighty Latterman play, who didn’t disappoint. But opening up for the evening was The New Dress. There was just two of them, Laura Fiddler on vocals and Bill Manning on the guitar and vocals. It was pretty stripped down, and different from the mostly hardcore/punk bands that were also on the bill.

But there was something about them that really struck me, and after the show when I got home, I looked them up on Myspace. The New Dress, a folk and punk-inspired duo have been at it since 2004 and in the upcoming year will be releasing a full-length on Red Leader records. A fan after that night, I caught them twice after that first show, the second time when they opened up for the Queers the last time Joe Queer and company rolled into New York. This time, I managed to get my hands on a shirt (one of my favorite shirts now) and a copy of their home-made demo. I must have listened to that CD-R about four or five times the next day. Again a few months later I trekked to North 6 to see them perform for Red Leader’s CMJ showcase. The crowd had grown a bit more since that first time I’d seen them, and by now me, as well as most of the people in the crowd, were singing along to every word. Laura and Bill were pretty much just grinning the whole time while they played.

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