Thomas Dietzel

Thomas Dietzel shows remarkable comfort in his new gig Sutherlin. Straying from his rock roots to bring us his debut in country music and he makes it seem effortless.
The 10 tracks are hand-crafted to a standard of perfection. The lyrics are a flawless fit to today’s modern country. The combination of these songs and the superb production makes for a very strong album.
Thomas admits that as a kid he didn’t really like country music because it was uncool. “My mother listened to it constantly but my intellectual father scorned it as ‘prole-feed.’ She liked Eddie Rabbitt, Mickey Gilley, that kind of shit, and I heard it constantly on the radio until I went back to my hometown of Buffalo to go to college in 1991. I didn’t start listening to radio country again until 2015, and let me tell you: things changed a lot during that time.”

A lot of these songs, Thomas claims, are playing with the lyrical conceits of “bro-country music” specifically and country music generally, both as homage and parody. “I guess they’re kind of like little Quentin Tarantino films, or Don Quixote. I mean, I really love modern country music, but that doesn’t mean it’s not kind of ridiculous.” He pauses. “Especially in Portland.”
Thomas collaborated with pedal steel player Paul Brainard (of The Sadies, Richmond Fontaine, Alejandro Escovedo) and guitarist Chet Lyster (Jayhawks, Eels, Lucinda Williams) took over production duties, Thomas says he’s the one largely responsible for the album’s radio-ready pop sheen.
Sutherlin is celebrating the release by hitting the road. You can catch him out on tour till mid January. - No Depression - The Journal of Roots Music

LPS definitely have more than one string to their bow: their latest album, Seduce Yourself (Discorporate Tape), casually sways back and forth along the border between sticky seventies and glamorous eighties; pompously glam-rock at its peak, with some sweet spacey synth-led New Wave, early post-punk influences, it sounds something like David Bowie meets Ariel Pink meet The Monochrome Set, with still a touch of the distorted screeching guitars and smashing drums used and abused on Billy Callous, and a series of caricatural accents on Roxy Muzak, for a touch of comedy.
An exciting, generously overproduced effort back to front, teasingly dandy, Seduce Yourself is available to download by 'naming your price' on LPS' bandcamp page; Fairway to Hades, their third album this year, is announced for November (probably once again something completely different), and you can see the band perform tonight (7.28) at The Kenton Club. Tracy Mamoun - The Deli - A Blog About Emerging Local Music

1993, when I was seven years old, Thomas Dietze (vocals & guitar)l, Mike Hynes (bass) and Joe Schneider (drums) decided to be in a band together. Just as I had left mine, they created their Kindergarten. For the 25th anniversary of the debut album, Honey Puller Records puts out a re-issue which will be my 1st issue, since I never heard it before. The band, like other curiosities such as Polaris, was a nearly mythical phenomenon that bewitched only the coolest of cool people for a single album and a few summers to then disappear*.

The re-issue will release on February 21st, just in time to get your Valentine a beautifully shoddy grunge album with an old man in a horrible blazer on the cover. So, what do we know about the band? They are band number five (5) named Kindergarten on Discogs. They are impossible to google (there you are again, my music blog-nemesis, the awful-to-research-bandname!). Other than that: Thomas Dietzel might still be making music but I am kinda sure all the Myke Hynes’ and Joe Schneiders I found online are not the original band members.

So, what about “Iphigenia”? Apart from having the name that the first cat had that ever lived in my home, it’s a pretty great album. It’s loud, noisy even, with the kind of clanky, angry drums that mark the early and mid 90s. Thomas Dietzel sounds just a little like Kurt Cobain but not enough to make it annoying. There’s enough of atonal scream-singing (now and then even some female backing vocals) coupled with a beautiful punk rock guitar, the bass the only thing that doesn’t run away but rather turns around to grab your hand and tag you along this ride. It’s hella fun. It’s super loud, it sounds like a sticky floor in a dingy club and it has just the right amount of chaos. It’s also the kind of grunge album that you really love if you love grunge but also really don’t if you don’t.

*Polaris, unbeknownst to me, when I wrote this, recently announced a US-tour in combination with some “Adventures of Pete & Pete”-nostalgia, so if you are from the US, I envy you so much that I want to punch a hole in the wall. - I Lost My Panties in the Moshpit! Music, Movies, Horror, and Bad Puns

Portland-based Thomas Dietzel comes in a line of music-obsessed fans turned vet songwriters who came around to the often exquisite narration and delicious ironies of “Bro-country,” transforming it into personal art slices about quiet heartland surrender and car wreck lifestyles. Like a Tarantino Western, his band Sutherlin plays with gravel-flecked tropes but turns them into gleaming highways of wit and tongue in cheek sass. Still and likewise, the love for the form is there regardless of any nudge nudge wink wink.

The self-titled debut peaks with stories of everyday struggle like “Saturday AM” about “trying to get with a gal with a different schedule than you”; and trying to take a “Sick Day” when it’s not about physical health but having some sense of freedom in the middle of the week’s grind.

Dietzel swings and romps through these backyard BBQ-tasty tracks with his carefully selected group, featuring pedal steel player Paul Brainard (of The Sadies, Richmond Fontaine, Alejandro Escovedo); Arthur Parker (bass, Love Gigantic, Nowhere Band); Anders Bergstrom (drums, Climber, Little Beirut), Michael Nelson (keyboardist, Climber); and with guitars and production by the legendary Chet Lyster (Jayhawks, Eels, Lucinda Williams).

His music partner Nick Peets did the selecting, and produced the affair, allowing the singer/songwriter a chance to tap into the melancholy joys he experienced listening to Gram Parsons, Buck Owens, and Merle Haggard on the radio. Thomas was working at a pizza place at the time, having quit his sales job for an environmental consulting company, and the lyrics for the album were mostly written while he was driving around delivering pizzas or working at the restaurant. “I was extremely high on weed coconut butter during this period, as I had obtained an enormous quantity of it in a manner I can relate some other time. So I would drive around and sort of visualize the songs and work on the lyrics that way, high as fuck.”

Though he was raised thinking C&W was uncool, he came around in allowing it to express himself the angst he felt losing the relationship that fuels key tracks “Jesus and Jack” (a woozy and wonderful Fall break up anthem) and the title-sells-it-all “Falling Down.”

“Writing country songs seemed to be much more like writing sonnets while rock music was like being expected to write free verse all the time,” Dietzel explains. “Advance or die! But country music was fun. They were part of a tradition. Rock musicians weren’t part of anything, not anymore. I wanted to be included, to be part of something.”

-MYRA IVY - Paste Magazine

[Too Much Rock] Last Prick Standing, which has lately been going by the less in-your-face moniker LPS, plays undeniably raw rock that seems based almost entirely on whim. As such, the band recently finished not one, but 2 new records. The first is Billy Callous, which presents LPS as an angular post-punk/post-grunge outfit with candy-coated New Wave tendencies. The second is the yet-to-be-released Seduce Yourself, which the band describes as "a highly (some would say excessively) produced glam rock record." The single leak track from the latter disc, "Push," sounds more like Squeeze than the New York Dolls to me, but either way, I'm happy. There are plenty of good musical ideas at work here and considering that LPS intends to release a grand total of 5 records before 2012 is out - each an entirely different beast - chances are you'll like something this band does.

Casey Jarman - Willamette Week, April 11, 2012, page 36

The song "Falling," written by Thomas Dietzel and performed by Greg Wilson, was submitted to the 2020 American Songwriter Song Contest and listed as one of the 100 songs they loved. - American Songwriter