nofatclips
2nd listen: so full of life and energy that you don't even have to know the "actual" album to enjoy this one!
1st listen: very interesting time-lapse of the evolution of these tracks; and some versions are also pretty good on their freaking own.
Favorite track: Love You So Bad [Ezra & Sam & Jamie Riotto at Tiny Telephone in San Francisco, 5-19-2016].
Wexel
absolutely love the Transangelic Exodus album (had the poster up on my wall from the day I received it until I moved recently), and hearing the songs in progress is very illuminating!
Favorite track: God Lifts Up the Lowly (instrumental) [Ben, 1-18-2017, Humboldt Park].
simon attfield
Thanks for this Ezra - such a great idea and amazing to hear tracks in process. My thoughts to go out to all of my favourite bands (and everyone around them) who have lost work at the moment.... I look forward to seeing you play in the UK again some sunny day.
TLDR: we've just released a collection of 26 demos/etc. from the making of Transangelic Exodus (2018) – we ask you to PAY WHAT YOU CAN/WANT for it to support us in a time of canceled shows and lost income (we'll divide the proceeds amongst the band and our teeny touring crew). It's a kind of audio "making of" document for you if you are a fan of that record... thanks all...
TO THEM WE’LL ALWAYS BE FREAKS
aka Making Ourselves Up in the Rearview Mirror
aka “Wing That Shit”
Demos, Rehearsals and Shots in the Dark for Transangelic Exodus
Welcome to a collection of malformed reject recordings, the unpolished refuse of the process of making our 2018 LP, Transangelic Exodus. I’m proud of the final version of the record, but I always yearned to let people glimpse some of the strange process of making it.
We all knew that we wanted to approach making this record differently than we had our other albums. In the past we’d usually listen to my solo acoustic recording of a song, talk about what we might do with it, get the band all together in a room and go with our best instincts of how to bring it to life. This time, we wanted to abandon our first instincts. Tim’s idea was that I should get together one on one with each band member and see what we came up with together when the others weren’t watching. Try out different combinations of band members and think of ourselves as a different band, playing for a different audience, or no audience. We wanted to get weird. Then we’d pool our findings and try to make a record of maximal impact, maximal originality and excitement.
So what we have here are some of the more listenable or potentially interesting artifacts of that process, which began in 2016 and really got going in early 2017. The last recordings featured here are from around March 2017—after that point we were working on the actual tracks for the record, where (as you can hear on the album) we made all kind of other steps forward, toward what I consider the best thing I’ve ever made.
This is for fans of Transangelic Exodus who want to hear a little bit of the process of mutation along the way. There’s a lot more that I won’t ever show you. Also, I’ve only included versions of the songs that made it onto the final album; there were many more songs we left behind as we realized they wouldn’t be part of the best record we could make. I also left off most of the solo acoustic demos; I kept one or two that showed how much the songs progressed from my initial idea for them. But I wanted to keep the whole experience close to the average length of a feature film. One shouldn’t spend too much longer than that being this up close and personal with my psyche.
I have catalogued the tracks with the personnel that appears on that track, plus my best guess at a date of the recording. The band members (The Visions) are: Ben Joseph, Jorgen Jorgensen, Sam Durkes and Tim Sandusky.
I’m very grateful that the weird passionate fictional-conceptual record we made has some fans that appreciate it. This is a little X-Ray of the process if you’re curious. The fact that you’ve let my dark hopeful dreams into your heart means so, so much to me. I hope those dreams are as useful to you as they have been to me.
Love,
Ezra Furman
credits
released April 8, 2020
1. Come Here Get Away From Me [Ezra solo, January 2015, apartment in Oakland CA]
2. Love You So Bad [Ezra & Sam & Jamie Riotto at Tiny Telephone in San Francisco, 5-19-2016]
3. Suck the Blood From My Wound [Ezra solo, unknown date 2016, Oakland]
4. Love You So Bad [Ben, 10-9-2016, at his apartment in Humboldt Park, Chicago]
5. Come Here Get Away From Me [Ezra & Tim, late December 2016, Studio Ballistico, Chicago]
6. Driving Down to L.A. [Tim and Ezra, late December 2016, Ballistico]
7. No Place [Take 1 - Ezra, Sam, Jorgen & Tim, 1-2-17, Ballistico]
8. Suck the Blood From My Wound [full band, 1-5-2017, Ballistico]
9. I Lost My Innocence [Ben, Ezra, Sam & Tim, 1-8-17, Ballistico]
10. The Great Unknown [Ben, Ezra, Jorgen & Sam, 1-9-2017, Ballistico]
11. Psalm 151 [Full band, January 2017, Ballistico]
12. God Lifts Up the Lowly [Ben & Ezra, 1-18-2017, Humboldt Park]
Krill is incredibly inventive musically, weirdly honest and emotional lyrically, and just addictive as hell while being super strange. I love it. Melodies and phrases that haunt you like photographs. Ezra Furman
Just great, great songs, no bullshit, super-emotional and yet totally casual, super-geeky and yet somehow super-cool. The kind of band you decide you want to join 30 seconds into the first song. Ezra Furman