" ... and what a stunning voice it is"

October 24, 2014 8:15 AM

We wanted to create something quite muscular and meaty. I was getting a little disenchanted with boring wet music. I wanted something with some kind of punch to it ...

Esben and the Witch formed in 2008 after neophyte guitarist Thomas Fisher bumped into old friend Rachel Davies on the street in Brighton and asked if she'd like to be in a band. Together with multi-instrumentalist Daniel Copeman, they started making a kind of bruised, ghostly electro goth-pop that drew comparisons with dubstep and witch house. Then things changed. Their third album, A New Nature, recorded with Steve Albini after a successful Kickstarter campaign, sees the band step away from their electro-pop origins, combining English-major Davies' lyrical obsessions with Herman Hesse and Jack London with the band's love of uncompromising noise, psych, and transcendent post rock. A New Nature, released last month, can be streamed via Stereogum.
posted by Sonny Jim (11 comments total)

How much did they raise? The Kickstarter page doesn't say.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 8:22 AM on October 24, 2014

I guess the operative word here is "enough," ZenMasterThis.
posted by Sonny Jim at 8:33 AM on October 24, 2014

Which is to say, I don't know what the precise figure was. Sorry, ZenMasterThis! And you're right; the page itself is more than a little coy about the money side of things. So exactly how much a band needs to raise to record an album with Steve Albini will remain an arcane secret, I guess, at least in this instance ...
posted by Sonny Jim at 9:01 AM on October 24, 2014 [2 favorites]

I'd never heard of this band, so I listened to the first track on Soundcloud. It seemed interesting, so I bought the album, and I'm listening to it as I type this.
posted by salmacis at 9:21 AM on October 24, 2014 [1 favorite]

Not available on iTunes though it seems like a lot of their previous work is.
posted by newdaddy at 9:42 AM on October 24, 2014

I basically like every song you linked quite a bit. I don't quite understand how it is that I'd not heard of this band before now. So thanks a lot!
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 9:52 AM on October 24, 2014 [1 favorite]

Sold. Good stuff.
posted by blaneyphoto at 9:55 AM on October 24, 2014 [1 favorite]

So exactly how much a band needs to raise to record an album with Steve Albini will remain an arcane secret, I guess, at least in this instance ...

As far as I'm aware it's still "whatever the hell I feel like", but probably not all that much. I (like roughly 75% of the population of the planet) very vaguely know some people who've recorded with Albini, and the price there was in the low thousands, I seem to recall.
posted by howfar at 10:03 AM on October 24, 2014 [2 favorites]

This FPP reads like and might as well be a press release. "Transcendent" post-rock? What's that? Noise that is also rock can somehow be "uncompromising"? Zuh?
posted by Joseph Gurl at 9:39 PM on October 24, 2014

Fair enough, Joseph Gurl. It's actually surprisingly hard to write band FPPs without somehow crossing over into the language of the press release, particularly when most of the materials you're using to assemble the post ("official" videos, interviews, reviews) are themselves promotional in nature. I usually write music FPPs to a formula to guard against this, but if this one crosses too far into the press release uncanny valley, then ... sorry. For the record, "uncompromising" in that context was simply meant to signal that the song was loud. "Transcendent" was an attempt to describe the structure of the song itself ... it "goes somewhere" in its fourth quarter. I wanted to minimise the word count because the spatial constraints of the FPP impose their own limitations. Sure, the result is a bit telegrammatic, but is it really that hard to parse?
posted by Sonny Jim at 2:15 AM on October 25, 2014 [3 favorites]

Hard to parse as anything but abstract praise.
posted by Joseph Gurl at 10:18 PM on October 26, 2014