TONE & NICHE
Press:
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Tone & Niche - MetroTimes:
There's a truism among the devoted, those who spend a good portion of their scratch and large chunks of spare time haunting hole-in-the-wall music venues. And it's that the city of Detroit has a very real scene behind the superficial "Scene." In it, conversation is secondary. People listen. Don't bother looking for the emotionally-genuflecting 21-year-old who read about the joint or band in her greasy copy of Mojo. She can't even find this other scene, and even if she did, she wouldn't understand a collective of musically-inclined people as unabashed about their love for John Lennon as they are about having played in high school marching bands. And thick inside this familial environment is a group called Tone & Niche. They are Anthony Retka on guitar and Nicole Varga on (yes!) violin and — while they're adept enough to play just about anything — they are rock 'n' roll singer-songwriters.
"Music's the only thing we know," Niche says. "He'll call me on his lunch hour and sing new melodies into my voicemail so I can write them down before he forgets." Tone's songwriting has a so-cool-I'm-not-cool Harry Nilsson quality to it, and, with the augmentation of Niche's gorgeous violin, the duo gives off an aura similar to college radio of the 1980s. (Think R.E.M., Marshall Crenshaw). When over-produced, over-thought, and image-driven can feel like the name of the game, what wafts from Tone & Niche is built for listening. And an appreciation for great violin licks, of course.
—Eve Doster, MetroTimes - Detroit, MI., 2007
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