Deafheaven - 10 Years Gone - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

George Clarke (vocals), Kerry McCoy (guitar), Dan Tracy (drums), Stephen Lee Clark (bass), and Shiv Mehra (guitar) recorded New Bermuda live to tape at 25th Street Recording in Oakland, CA and Atomic Garden Recording in East Palo Alto, CA in April 2015. It was produced, engineered, mixed, and mastered by Jack Shirley who has worked with the band on their previous releases. Clarke says that he came up with the idea of InchNew BermudaInch to describe a new destination in life, a nebulous point of arrival, and an unknown future where things get swallowed up and dragged into darkness. The album artwork for New Bermuda is an oil painting, dense in brush strokes of darker tones and deep blues, by Allison Schulnik. The layout was designed by art director Nick Steinhardt.

Deafheaven was formed in 2010 by vocalist George Clarke and guitarist Kerry McCoy. They released their debut studio album Roads To Judah in 2011. They added drummer Daniel Tracy to the group and released their breakthrough album Sunbather in 2013. After rounding out their line up with guitarist Shiv Mehra and bassist Stephen Clark-each subsequent live set felt like a religious experience for the bigger (and bigger) shows that followed. Their third album, and first for ANTI-, 2015's New Bermuda, was heavier, sturdier, and more grounded in the dirt than Sunbather. They toured extensively to support New Bermuda playing tours and festivals with Lamb Of God, Anthrax, Danzig, and Gojira. Deafheaven's new album, Ordinary Corrupt Human Love, finds them working with old friends again. The Jack Shirley-produced and Nick Steinhardt-art directed (of Touche´ Amore´) collection gets it's title from Graham Greene's novel The End of the Affair, referencing a moment when someone is looking for love, in all of it's imper- fection and simple beauty. This sentiment is carried throughout the hazy, yearning romanticism of the record with song titles and words as sumptuous as the sounds around them. Clarke describes the composition of Ordinary Corrupt Human Love beginning with Inchsmall seeds of healing, repair, and rebirth,Inch and like each subsequent Deafheaven album, this record is, in fact, a revelation. Defeat has inspired some of our best art. If you survive something terrible, you surface on the other side, walk toward the light, and come back to life. If you're an artist, this kind of new self-knowledge can lead to creating something universal and remembered, something that can live longer than you do. While Deafheaven have managed to cross over this road in the past, they've nailed the feeling wholly with Ordinary Corrupt Human Love, a feeling that comes with experience and wisdom

Known for the sparse, haunting qualities of his mostly solo recordings of what he refers to as 'roots-folk music,' in which his husky voice is often accompanied by little more than a banjo or acoustic guitar, William Elliott Whitmore sought to add some new pitches to his bullpen for his new ANTI- Radium Death. 'I purposefully went into it wanting to make a little bit of a departure, sonically, using an electric guitar a little bit more and adding more instrumentation, more full-band type stuff,' says Whitmore. 'I wanted to switch it up a little bit and plug in to see what that felt like. I was reading a lot about the so-called 'radium girls' of the early 1900's, these assembly lines of women painting watch dials with radium to make them glow in the dark,' he says, detailing how the workers would lick the tips of their paintbrushes to get them pointy while dipping them repeatedly into the chemical substance before it was known to be dangerous. 'So, in my mind 'radium death' came to represent something that you're told is good for you-maybe by a higher power-but really is killing you. It represents those lies that are told, and how we can protect ourselves against them.' The songs assembled, while not a concept album, present a cohesive look into those recurring Whitmore themes of respect, protection, sustenance and survival.