Chicago’s MV Wells Delivers Le Dauphin, A Sharp and Lush Orchestral Pop Debut

MV WELLS is an American singer-songwriter whose genre-spanning work is tied together by a singular skill for melody and an uncanny knack for creating memorable hooks. Listeners may know his unique pop sensibility from the Chicago indie rock group NE-HI or his more recent work with new wave collective SPUN OUT. Wells has spent the last decade in the Chicago music scene, touring the United States, and opening for bands such as Dinosaur Jr., Marshall Crenshaw, Pink Mountaintops, Whitney, and Twin Peaks. He’s played the big stage at the now defunct Pitchfork Music Festival, the rock clubs of downtown Chicago, and the remote taverns of his native Wisconsin. With his solo debut Le Dauphin, Wells brings his love for the orchestral pop of Burt Bacharach and Harry Nilsson into the forefront - along with a lyrical sneer reminiscent of pub rock troubadours Nick Lowe or Wreckless Eric. Occasionally, Wells’s Le Dauphin ventures into the cosmic and unsettling, recalling early King Crimson or Peter Gabriel-era Genesis. Even the album art is designed by Paul Whitehead, artist for those early Genesis albums! Recorded and mixed by drummer extraordinaire and Wells’s cousin JOSHUA WELLS [Destroyer, Lightning Dust, Black Mountain, Autogramm], Le Dauphin embraces the commercial with the experimental, the exuberant and the contemplative, the soothing and the incensing- covering all angles of a great pop record.