Ivan & Alyosha

Ivan & Alyosha at Bumbershoot 2013

Seattle folk-rockers Ivan & Alyosha have new album, It's All Just Pretend, coming out on May 5, the follow-up to their 2013 debut LP, All The Times We Had.

They're touring in support of their new album, including a stop in Atlanta on May 31 for what I think may be their first-ever show here.  Oddly, they'll be performing not at The Earl or Terminal West or even Smiths' Olde Bar, but at the Park Tavern in Piedmont Park, not a usual venue for a touring band by any means.

I remember going to shows at The Park Tavern back in the early to mid-90s.  It's a lovely enough spot; perhaps too lovely, as the audiences were much more interested in socializing, drinking, and enjoying the fresh air of the park than in listening to a band perform.  I honestly can't say I remember who it was that I saw perform there, but I do remember the attractive crowd of young people who made up the Park Tavern audience.  My girlfriend was more interested in seeing the d.j.s from show sponsors 99X than the bands performing, and I was more interested in seeing the attractive crowd of young people. 

We saw Ivan & Alyosha at Bumbershoot in 2013, and they seemed poised to break through as the next big folk-rock thing.  Their catchy song, Be Your Man, off their first album seemed to have caught on in the music blogs, and the hometown Seattle audience at Bumbershoot included no small number of teenage girls squealing in delight at the band's good looks.

But for some reason, they didn't seem to tour, or tour very far, or at least tour the Deep South, and I never heard from them again after the novelty of Be Your Man wore off.  In fact, I had sort of assumed that the band had broken up, if I had thought about them at all.  So it's refreshing to see that they're still together, that they've been in the studio, that they have a new album coming out, and that they will soon include the Deep South in their tour, or at least sort of: Atlanta will be the first show after touring the mid-Atlantic Bos-Wash corridor, and after Atlanta, they will play in Nashville, Dallas and Austin, before retreating back to the Southwest and its more familiar environs. Not really much of a Southern tour, but since it includes Atlanta, I won't gripe. 

My hope is that Ivan &Alyosha don't take the inattentiveness of the audience at their ill-advised Park Tavern set as a general indifference to their music in these parts, and not include the Deep South in their future touring plans.