Lady Luck

Rhizomes is the debut album from Brooklyn rock quartet, The Inklings. The album was recorded in various borrowed basements, living rooms and old churches in the New York and Connecticut area from August-December 2005.

The album opens with “Eliza,” a layered riff rocker with guitar doubled by electric harp, providing an early indication of the mixture of influences on the album. After the eclectic “Out of Focus” comes the first single on the album, “The Challenger,” a playful tribute to one of Linnetz’s early mentors at summer camp (to whom the album is also dedicated). Other immediately notable tracks include “Burning Edge,” a song written from the perspective of someone wondering if they are looking at a post-apocalyptic wasteland or merely the outskirts of a city, and “The One with the Knife,” a bouncing sympathetic look at B horror movie extras.

The Inklings, based in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, began in the winter of 2004 as the band behind the music of Dani Linnetz, who had already achieved a degree of underground notoriety as a nationally touring singer/songwriter. Guitarist Peter Imbres, a member of the Brooklyn-based avant folk band Royal Nonesuch and leader of The No Name All-Stars recording project, and bassist Eli Schneider, formerly of Zealrecords' Timesbold and also in Royal Nonesuch, had previously collaborated with Linnetz on her first full band recording, “Caller Seventeen” (Sly Dog Records, 2004), and Imbres had toured with her for a summer on lead guitar. After Linnetz reconnected with drummer Mark Willey, the band began scheduling rehearsals around Linnetz's full-time touring schedule and the band members' various other projects, but soon they started squeezing in rehearsal time at odd hours and while Linnetz was on the road and spontaneously collaborating on new songs that were a distinct departure from Linnetz’s singer/songwriter material. The name The Inklings is a reference to the shadowy creatures that live under Tokyo in Haruki Murakami's book "Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World," which somehow painted a more accurate picture of the band’s new sound.