Yellowbirds sophomore LP Songs from the Vanished Frontier is out next week!
Expect a lot of posts around here tying into its release in the near future, after all it’s The Future Heart’s most anticipated 2013 album not yet issued. Last week the pre-order details were announced, then Yellowbirds joined instagram (follow here). Before that Pitchfork debuted its first single “Young Men of Promise,” with NPR premiering its video – another of their signature stop-motion cutout animations, this time a collaboration with Kara Smith (watch here). Now a second video has been released, Caitlin and Josh Drake’s “The Ceiling” (watch at the top of this page).
UPDATE – May 21st: The Atlantic explains “The Ceiling” video features footage shot by “explorer, naval officer, conservationist, scientist, author, and filmmaker” Jacques Cousteau rescued by the Drakes from the “edit bins at Emerson College,” then blended with their original “hand-painted effects and analog animation.” “The result is a surreal underwater adventure that echoes The Life Aquatic or even the hand-colored restoration of Méliès’s 1902 sci-fi film, Voyage dans la lune.”
Yellowbirds’ Sam Cohen explained to jambands.com in February how recording Songs from the Vanished Frontier was different from creating Yellowbirds’ début, The Color:
“It’s the first album that I got to make in my studio, which is a place I’ve been renting for a little over a year. Josh [Kaufman] and I and Brian [Kantor], they’re both from Yellowbirds, and a few other guys from The Hold Steady and The Dap-Kings share this place. It’s got some great gear, great instruments. It’s a really small, modest little room. It’s like a musical clubhouse and we can get all this stuff done in there. So it was pretty amazing to have my own familiar place to work that was also a fully functioning recording studio. The last record was like some basics in a studio and I did the rest in my apartment…I feel like on the whole, the record has a more open sound, less congested and dense sound because I had more options. Plus I worked with an engineer who shares the room with us, Jim Smith, and he co-produced the record with me. I really admire his approach to recording and sound and together we were able to get singular sounds that we found really interesting, so I didn’t feel compelled to add a lot more. I loved the drums sound, I loved the bass sound, it was almost a question of what’s the least I can add and have this be done? And not from a perspective of speed or laziness cause it still took a long time. But from a perspective of I don’t wanna clutter these sounds. If you listen to the two records, you can see the space around everything, and it feels bigger.”
The new set matches “bracing rock ‘n’ roll and bubbling folk, drifting jangle and swiveling R&B,” according to its official description, “but the thread that unites these nine instantly affecting songs is their search to find the signal amid the noise—that is, to understand the world…” The first 100 pre-ordered copies will be autographed by Sam Cohen, and all LP and CDs include his brand new film score as a free bonus download.
The bonus download of Sam’s new film score included free with pre-order is from the dialogue-less Western, Across the Whipplewash. “A silent adventure movie made on Super8 film about 3 brothers on the lamb in the 1800’s [that] flee into the Whipplewash Valley after a botched robbery.” Caitlin and Josh Drake – the same filmmakers behind Yellowbird’s new video – are finishing the 16 minute indie flick for its forthcoming release and “there’s even been talk about doing some live score events” with Yellowbirds. Watch a pre-Yellowbirds-involvment trailer below (music by Wes Filer).
Yellowbirds will be supporting the new release live at Boston’s Lilypad Lounge next Saturday (May 25th) and with a Record Release Residency at New York’s Rockwood Music Hall every Friday in June (just $8.00 each in advance or $30 for all four shows plus a copy of the album). West Coast dates are expected this summer scheduled around their set the first weekend of August at Pickathon Indie Roots Music Festival (also featuring Foxygen, Ty Segall, Andrew Bird, Kurt Vile, Feist, Sharon Van Etten, and many more).
Check out the LP cover art and tracklist below:
1. Stop Tonight
2. Mean Maybe
3. Love Stories
4. Young Men of Promise
5. The Ceiling
6. The Vanished Frontier
7. Julian
8. For Girls Who Love to Sing
9. Who’s Out There
Yellowbirds played Glasslands this February. Photo above by Pascal, and below by Andrew Doherty.
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The Future Heart 