Tuesday, December 19, 2017

Haulin' Oats



Whether you're a Quaker or a baker, if you've got oats you need hauled The Brown Christmas can get it done in no time flat. Around the holidays more than ever we get tons of oats that need hauling; and if you're speeding across state lines with a truck load of legally questionable oats, you need some good cruising tunes.

As with our previous album, guitar is featured prominently on Haulin' Oats. The opening track begins with Joemazing chugging away, before messing around with his guitar's faulty wiring to make it scream like a hawk. The synths and drums create a slow moving, lightly textured framework for Jomazing guitar to gradually melt over top. This destruction continues on "Mass of Choronzon," as I play some dramatic string samples and Joemazing screams and distorts things into an unrecognizable mess of feedback.

The tempo takes a more upbeat turn as a circus melody emerges from the ashes of the previous track. A deep bellowing synth line bounces us along drunkenly before building to a growling drone, as silly melodies dance around. The ferris wheel is rusted, the bumper cars are short circuiting, and the carnival barker is in a radiation induced rage.

Overall this album has an aggressive, lo-fi, abrasiveness that is best exemplified with my favorite track, "Missa pro Defunctis." This melancholic march sounds like it was ripped from a withered VHS tape; a simple but effective melody punctuated by drums, is made all the more epic when complimented by the thick analog drone that emerges about halfway through the song.

The closing track is another high point, and possibly the best version of "Nobody Knows what it's like..." we've recorded to date. We take turns belting out the lyrics as over the top as possible, and I do my best emulation of the drums from "In the Air Tonight."

That's about all I have time for, these oats aren't going to haul themselves! We've got deadlines to meet, and the oat hauling business is very competitive. This album is a great example of our grittier, lo-fi, noise sound. Give it a listen.

Thursday, December 14, 2017

Books Suck



Books suck, plain and simple! You can't listen too a book (unless it's an audiobook, but that's just a book pretending it's a recording) they don't fit in tape decks and they're the wrong shape for record players or CD players. Music came first, music rules, books are just a bad sequel.

This album is the perfect example of the inferiority of books; there is no possible way for books to capture the essence of these songs. The driving kick on the first track calls the listener to adventure, an arpeggiated bass line adds a sense of urgency, and Joemazing's drones and melodies add an element of uncertainty and danger.

Things get a little hectic, but there is an opportunity to relax within the cosmic swirling synth tones of the second track. The stars are not entirely welcoming however, and the listener must avoid their supernova bursts. This moment of rest is short lived and the kick drums soon become jittery from all the delicious juice.

Joemazing's guitar work takes center stage, while I stack synth textures and feedback noise on our 10 minute post-rock opus "The Asteroid is Here." If you thought The Brown Christmas couldn't rock sick riffs and kick ass drums, this track will prove you wrong. This leads into our hard rocking closing track; "Sludge Cruiser." Who needs a distortion pedal when you can just crank your mixer up way to hot?

This album is the first release in a long while that hasn't been a single day jam session, and it takes us almost into the present year. There is one more album that was recorded in 2016 that's set to be released, but it's a christmas album so we had to release it out of order. The last 2 tracks of Books Suck are from November 2016; part of our Christmas album jam session. Since there's really nothing Christmasy about them, it was decided they would need to be a separate release. They were too short to be put out as their own album, but luckily we had another short jam session from January 2017 of almost the same length. These tracks were from a brief warm up jam before a very different upcoming secret project.

...But why are you hear reading this? It's so long it's almost a book, and books suck!

Listen to our album.