Listen to i blew on a dandelion & the whole world disappeared below, then go buy the limited edition cassette over at American Pleasure Club's Bandcamp page. They're made to order and only available until the new year.Follow Alex Robert Ross on Twitter.This album, 'Dandelion,' has existed for a long time in the background of everything else we'e been working on. It started towards the end of 2015, when i would fall asleep almost every night listening to either Grouper's Ruins" or the Townes Van Zandt record "Live at the Old Quarter". Something that struck me about both - and Townes in particular - was how the songs worked so much better paired down to just his voice & guitar playing. Even songs that were already big hits in their original way, there was something both very comforting and very haunting about this stripped down take. It's like a moment frozen in time, it's completely unique. The same goes double for 'Ruins,' where each swell of rain behind her voice, or the sound of a "microwave beep" power outage cutting through her piano - these moments are perfect & it would be impossible to replicate them.
After listening to them so much, I started to want to write & record a record in the same style - where the atmosphere, the sound of each room, the time of day - every variable affected the song in a way that would be inimitable. In this way, the album existed & grew in the background of all of the proper projects we took on as a band, every so often a song written for something else would fail to materialize with a more proper arrangement & it would strike me suddenly that it was a perfect fit for this record, and then the record would grow by another song. It just made sense, somehow.
We have a new band name, finally—one we've been waiting to adopt since before our last record was released. We have a proper debut coming under that name, and i'm very excited about it and can't wait for it's release. That said, it felt right to re-introduce ourselves with something like this first, something very comforting but very haunting, textured & atmospheric, both of a piece perfectly with our past work but also new & completely inimitable.