Monthly Archives: June 2022

New album, States of America, out TODAY! + American Pancake review

Blog, Press

Today, Friday, June 10th, we release our sixth* album, States of America, on Procrastination Records! We’re really excited to release this because we started writing and recording it at the same time we were working on our last two releases, Unknown Cities and Another Adventure in Red. But this album is particularly special to us because it is the first to feature our lyricist, Dan Gutstein, on nearly every track. It is also first one we fully engineered ourselves at the Princeton University Recording Studios and at Centre Street “Studio”, where we also filmed the music videos for several tracks on the album.

Many thanks to Mat Leffler-Schulman, Dan Coutant, Tommy Hambleton, Gareth Thompson, Bob Boilen, Brian Erickson, Bill Hafener, Ted Schreiber, Zach Herchen, Nick Luciano, Ray Rizzo, Mike Cuomo, Mika Godbole, Mark Isaac, Gabriela Bulisova, Brian Platzer, Dmitri Tymoczko, Jeff Snyder, Joe Martin, Mark Eichenberger, Juri Seo, Damien Davis, Daphne Bacon, Cody Snyder, Adam Lewis, Jacqueline Codiga, Singer Mali, and Bill Pierce.

And we’re super grateful to Robb at American Pancake for the kind words about our single “Happy Holidays.”

Listening to “Happy Holidays” and subsequently delving into the works of [Trenton, NJ]’s jazz punk group Joy on Fire had me doing some free form dancing (without the benefits of alcohol I might add) and I couldn’t help but think of iconic old school punk / alt rock artists like Gang of Four but especially the spastic jazz punk leanings of incendiary 70’s vocalist and saxophone charmer James Chance from The Contortions (later James Chance and the Contortions). Within Joy on Fire’s squirrely jazz punk sound featuring wonderfully, potently feral saxophone by Anna Meadors, jagged heavy bass and guitar by John Paul Carillo, Chris Olsen’s versatile drumming and Dan Gutstein’s darkly drawn existential words, “We’re all gonna spend a lot of time in graveyards” feels wonderfully manic. 

Robb Donker Curtius, American Pancake

We’ll be playing an album release show at John and Peter’s in New Hope, PA, on Saturday, June 18th, and we have several dates along the East Coast in July — stay tuned for details!

You can also check out a playlist of all of our music videos that go with this album HERE!

*sixth album not including two 3RC albums and the Thunderdome EP

“God and Godlessness” single and video out today, full album out Friday 6/10

Blog, Video

John: When we were mixing “Thunderdome,” we were listening to the guitar and drums only, to get a sense of balance. Dan said, “That alone sounds good!” and that’s when the idea for “God and Godlessness” was born. When Mat at Mobtown Studios heard it, he said he felt it sounded like the band Television. Dan’s comment while mixing made me realize that a song with more spaciousness would be good for the record, that it would be an interesting departure. As well as Dan’s lyrics topping off the climax of the song, Anna found the solution for the bass part after the “last day” of mixing, ha ha. So we had to go in and mix again, as in the previous version, the bass had been left out of the final section of the song.

J: The evil sounding thing that runs through several sections of the piece and closes the tune is a crotale sample from FreeSound.org, stretched and pitched a half step apart, hence the witchy sound and the Witchcraft Mix subtitle.

John, Funz, and “video projection”

J: Anna and I produced the video, with Anna as the cinematographer. The idea for the projections came from a video she had done previously for a live Zoom performance. Having our cat Funz in the video was important to me, as she loves to sit on my amp (at her convenience of course), and I just thought it would be funny to have her in the video, essentially doing nothing but chilling. But, just before we started to film in earnest, we dropped her bag of treats on the carpet, she ate like 20 of them, and then we could no longer convince her to stay on the amp via treats. Anna and I were cracking up, blaming each other in jest. Some of the ridiculous things we had to do—it took six times longer to film then it should of—to get her to stay on top of the amp…well, Anna, impromptu animal trainer as well as cinematographer will say more….

Anna: We ended up having to piece together multiple takes into one shot, including cutting me out of the shot while I entertained her with a feather toy. I also had to shoot the saxophone sections without Funz, because, sadly, she hates the saxophone. But it was super fun getting all the footage, and figuring out how to edit it together. Funz also made a brief appearance at the end of our “Thunderdome” video, filmed and directed by Damien Davis. Damien also did the video for “Anger and Decency,” which is a reworking / radical remix of “Thunderdome,” that I wrote. The video is also a remix in that he uses some of the footage he shot from Thunderdome, but completely transformed it. The use of the wave footage, and how he overlaid the band footage with all of these wild effects is just magical, he really brought the music to life visually.

The full album, States of America, will be out this Friday, June 10th, on Procrastination Records. It is available for pre-order on our Bandcamp, here.