Lead by multi-instrumentalist Paul Fonfara, a virtuoso clarinet player with a handle on just about any music-making device you can throw at him, Painted Saints are perhaps the most accomplished local band you've never heard of. A transplant from an incestuous Denver music scene, Fonfara possesses a technical prowess that has been on display for years; he's a former member of Devotchka and touring sideman to Jim White, but it's his songwriting and orchestral creativity that get the limelight with Painted Saints. Live, Fonfara layers guitar, clarinet, strings, an archaic Colombian squeezebox, and whistles that would make Andrew Bird blush, resulting in a self-described "spaghetti western-heroin-klezmer-chamber country-sad-bastard thing." Also a talented painter, Fonfara pens lyrics that detail the kind of dark and vivid imagery one could imagine Hieronymus Bosch creating, were he raised in modern-day rural America. [Christopher Mathew Jensen, City Pages]

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