http://www.rollingstone.com/rockdaily/index.php/2007/04/07/frickes-picks-chris-whitley-tall-firs/
A gently uplifting highlight of my recent South by Southwest weekend in Austin, Texas, was an afternoon set at the record store End of an Ear by Tall Firs — singer-guitarists Dave Mies and Aaron Mullan and drummer Ryan Sawyer. The music was a welcome, restorative peace amid the big rock and nonstop promo: a psychedelic-folk tangle of spider-leg-guitar arpeggios and hazy, bong-room singalong harmonies. The Brooklyn trio’s debut album, Tall Firs (Ecstatic Peace), is even more of a whisper, like Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation reduced to nothing but daydream. There are flashes of Pavement’s ragged acid romanticism in bare-minimum space-outs like “Go Whiskey,” “The Breeze” and “Soldier On,” but also plenty of the genuine San Francisco article, particularly the ‘67 levitation of Jefferson Airplane’s “Comin’ Back to Me” and the compact sparkle of the Grateful Dead’s original seven-inch version of “Dark Star.”