Made up of various members of Maps & Atlases, Suns, Joan of Arc and Gypsy Blood, Wedding Dress are about as Chicago as it gets.

Dreamt up as side-project / outlet for Maps & Atlases guitar player Erin Elders, songs were written between tours and slowly released during his “math-pop” band’s fleeting downtime. Wedding Dress is a distinctly different type of band, though. It is more layered, plaintive and measured than anything in Elders’ previous catalog. The songs involve patient, textured narratives. The instrumentation is restrained, a well-tuned
hybrid of real and virtual instruments.

“Even though we knew we were making a ‘bedroom’ record, we didn’t want to think about it within the frame of acoustic guitars to a 4-track,” offers Elders. “When arranging ‘Holy water,’ I tried thinking about it in the way that an electronic artist might: How to use or reject repetition. We experimented with some midi string sounds and that led to one of the big cornerstones of the album – the relationship between acoustic sounds and electronic sounds.”

The songs themselves are beautiful in their sparseness, the palate is selectively lush, and the rotating set of players — both recorded and live — patiently flesh out Elders’ haunting vocals and evocative lyrics.

As Elders’ primary project comes out of a busy record cycle — including over 9 months of touring and support dates with Broken Bells, Frightened Rabbit, Circa Survive and Death Cab For Cutie — he is shifting gears to Wedding Dress.

The band’s lineup has been increasingly firming up and now features Mike Russell & Matt Lemke (Suns), Bobby Burg (Love of Everything/Joan of Arc) and Christian Dawson (Gypsyblood).