Posts Tagged ‘New EP’

Sacramento, California’s Ten After Two have recently been signed to Rise Records. You can expect the group’s first EP, the Only If You Don’t First EP, from Rise October 19th.

Join me as I have a talk with Alex Badanes and Eric Grava of Boston’s LOVE VIA DANCE MACHINE. We chat about the band, their debut EP, and the future of the group. You can grab their free EP, “All Is Fair In Love And Dance“, from their newly designed MySpace today!

Hranica, DePoyster, and company are back with The Devil Wears Prada‘s first actual extended play release (despite multiple full-length albums), Zombie, due out August 24th from Ferret Music. And in true TDWP style, this EP does not disappoint.

The five tracks from the release feature some of the band’s most relentless and intimidating music they’ve ever released. But not only is this the fastest set of songs I’ve heard, but they’re also the most unique songs thus far, because they’re not typical to what you’d hear from the Ohio group. The Zombie EP is much more coarse, as it’s not so smooth-flowing as many of their previous songs tend to be, with a lot less clean vocals from Jeremy, and higher-pitched screaming from Mike — I mean real higher-pitched. You’ll also notice certain songs include added background clips, such as shotgun shells hitting the ground, news reports, chainsaws, and frightened people. After all, it is a Zombie theme.

Hell, they even have song titles relating to the song.

Overall, it’s heavier, it’s high-octane, and it’s beautiful. Perhaps it’s giving some insight as to what’s brewing from the group.

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I recently got the chance to have a quick chat with programmer and guitarist Lee Duck of Texas hardcore group Sky Eats Airplane.

So, who are you?
My name is Lee Duck and I play guitar for Sky Eats Airplane.

You just released your latest EP, “The Sound of Symmetry”; why did you decide to only sell it online and on tour, but not in stores?
Well, it’s because we’re planning on having a full-length later on this year, with a few of the same songs on that’ll just be re-done. So, this little EP is just the beginning of what’s to come, and we wanted to get on the road this year, so we would have been out of commission for a good five months before our full-length would be out. So we decided to not have it in stores so we could play on it on tour. We’re really excited, too, for a polished, finished product to be out there when the full-length comes out.

How come you decided to do a softer, simpler song on the EP as opposed to a heavier song?
Really, for that little EP, we just wanted to show every side to the band; we’re not just a heavy band, we really like orchestrating everything. We want to show people that we are dynamic and we have some room to grow–we’re not just a breakdown band.

This was your first release working with the two new members, how was that?
It was definitely a relief. We’ve never really been in a place where everyone’s put in their own effort, we’ve always been in a place where it’s just me and our guitarist, Zack, stressing the hell out doing all the work while everyone else was just watching TV. It was really comforting this time around when I got to focus on what I like doing, the electronica, Brian, our new singer actually wrote the lyrics and melodies and stuff, which is something we’ve never had before with a singer, and our drummer is contributing his part. It’s just a really comforting place; we’ve got a band full of really talented musicians who are glad to be where they are, and it’s a good thing.

You worked with Taylor Larson in Bethesda, Maryland; how was he? Did he bring anything new or useful to the table?
Let me think.. yah! He had a lot of really good vocal ideas and he’s also really good at capturing Travis’ — our drummer’s — best moments. He’s actually a really good long-time friend of Travis’, so they were done with drums in, like, a day and a half, for all three songs. So that was pretty cool. He was really good at what he did, and he had a real nice and casual setting for us to but heads for the first time doing a release with a new band.

Tell me a little about each of the three songs, “The Contour”, “Sound Of Symmetry”, and “Motion Sickness”.
Well, I don’t know about lyric-wise, but let me think… “The Contour” is one of our favourites off the record, it’s more of a dancy-type song, but it does have its heavy moments. I’m more of the electronica side of things so I don’t really know about any cool meanings behind the songs, but I think the “Sound Of Symmetry” is about spying on a girl or something.. that’s all I really know.

Talking a  little bit about the full-length, is it going as heavy and as technical as the EP, or are you going to tone it down a bit?
There isn’t any plans for it, we kind of do what we want, honestly. We don’t really think of it as a thing, like, “Oh, this should be heavier..”; whatever happens, happens. So, it might be a lot heavier, it might be the same sort of style, it’s totally up in the air, which is something pretty cool about this band, it always changes shape; we’re never going to stay exactly the same for every album. Pretty much whatever we’re feeling at the time.

Over the years, how do you think SEA has evolved as a band?
A lot, that’s for sure. We have gone through something that was kind of revolutionary, but very elementary in our musical ability, to more of a rock-style band. And we went from two members to five members, so you can definitely imagine there was a huge amount of differences that happened after a period of just a few years. All of that was striving for better musicianship and people who are really good at their instruments and love what they do, so it was definitely a win-win situation.

Where do you see the future of Sky Eats Airplane heading?
We’ve been on a hiatus for about a year now, working with the new singer. We’ve just been waiting at home, writing new stuff, so we don’t know what the future is to become of us. We’re really excited because we really like the new record we just did, but we’re just hoping to get out there, do better tours, get our name out there, and see where it takes us.