The second long playing album from the Two Man Gentlemen Band is here. Get it now

Great Calamities is the work of a pair of performers wise beyond their meager years. They are also handsome.

Many song titles on this record could convey a sense of impending doom ("The Hindenburgh Disaster," "The Titanic Disaster," "The Memphis Flu," "My Other Half Is Gone") but so infectiously cheerful are the performances of Andy Bean and Fuller Condon that you're liable to forget all about the death, war, plague, infidelities, deceit, and general unruliness that these seemingly god-fearing and winsome minstrels intone about. The tunes are sung forcefully and at frantic, fast-forward tempos. The instrumentation has expanded slightly from the Gents spare debut effort to include percussion, additional vocalists, and the occasional piano, lap steel, clarinet.

"'The Hindenburg Disaster' is the happiest song about a zepplin burning we've ever heard."
BrewCast.Net

"In today's age of decadent self-importance and increasing impersonality, it's nice to know some folks are still espousing good old-fashioned courtesy. A case in point is a pair of musicians from New York City who have incorporated the concept of good manners into their very essence as 'The Two Man Gentlemen Band'...Offering what they call simply 'good-time music,' an amalgam of toe-tapping circus-country, dixieland swing, ragtime and old-time folk peppered with fervent kazoo, the pair mixes original tunes with obscure period covers. And if their music sounds as if it should be coming from some ancient, scratchy shellac 78, they also don a look to match, almost always decked out in dapper suits, ties and hats. Although some might scoff at the vaudevillian shtick of it all, Bean and Condon back up their dandy visages with top-notch musicianship, fine vocal harmonies and a wryly humorous subtext to their anachronism." - Stuart Harmening, Savannah Morning News "The boys are back and they’ve brought their knee slapping sounds with them on ‘Great Calamities,’ their newly released second album. It’s filled with that same banjo picking, Americana sipping, folk swinging blues that made their self titled so good to listen to. It’s a testament to the songs of old, in a style that actually goes back to the grandeur of the glory days when artists actually played their instruments and had a good time doing it. The chemistry these two gentleman have cooked up certainly makes for a powerful sound, and this album stands with the few that actually capture the essence of the age...They have that old soul quality to this album, and to their music in general, even finding time to add an Elder Curry track about the influenza that swept through Memphis in 1929. Those of you familiar with that name will find a good home waiting for you in the folds of these thirteen tracks.

...To any member of the masses out there who think that old folkie music is strictly for old folks, I have to object by playing this album, as loud as it can go. It’s as much an album about history as it is about the beauty of how songwriters spread the word through song. They craft it, arrange it, and spit fire through every chord, fueling the flames of what this album truly is, a top notch induction into that great American love story know as musical expression." - Folk It Up.com's Two Minute Buzz

"With songs such as 'Stuff Your Ballot Box' and 'Let's Make a Sandwich,' this retro dapper duo combines double entendres with a ragtime Dixieland sound that used to make our great grandparents boogie back in the day." - Joe Scott, GoTriad.com "Long Island's Two Man Gentlemen Band pushes the comical curtain wide open, searching for at least a grin on each of Great Calamities' 13 tracks. Sex is compared to a sandwich ('Your skin is brown/Your lips are sweet/I've always said you're good enough to eat'), and a woman's departure is likened to Southern secession ('It's like I'm hunkering down at Fort Sumter and, honey, you're shooting cannonballs at my heart'). Even songs about unnatural disasters like the Hindenberg explosion- full of burning men and crying kids- come spry enough to sound like two men shaking off sadness with musical smiles

Importantly, it never feels as though gents Andy Bean and Fuller Condon are laughing anything off or trivializing it: 'Prime Numbers,' the funniest song on Calamities, tells the tale of a male suitor who takes the measures of his lovers while they sleep. If their numbers are robust composites like 36, he knows he's in a rocky ride through adultery, having to share her with men numbered two and nine...[I]t sports the same all-weather grin that makes perserverance- the oft unspoken dogma of the best traditional tunes- possible." Grayson Currin, The Independent "Playing...gloriously retro string music (drawing on everything from Dixieland jazz, Vaudevillian swing, ragtime, and rural hokum blues), the Gentlemen are slowly making their way around the country, spreading their sunny dispositions and anachronistic gospel of kindness and good humor everywhere they go. Their latest album, Great Calamaties, is a wonderful collection of story-songs dealing with everything from 'The Hindenberg Disaster' and 'The War of Northern Aggression' to the simple joys of stuffing ballot boxes and making sandwiches." - Jim Reed, Connect Savannah

"Old, carmudgeonly backbeats are juxtaposed with intelligent narratives, spliced with some sophomoric lyrics, presented with a smile. It's the Vaudevillian gentleman, a bygone sense of comic civility." -Kevin Crowe, Metro Pulse Knoxville

Of the song "Stuff Your Ballot Box"..."It's a vintage jumped-up vaudeville style tune, performed on banjo and upright bass, and the duo has a sly sense of humor. Voting has never sounded so carnal, in a technocratic way."
Eric R. Danton Sound Check