Undoubtedly, one of the stranger phenomena in modern life is when your friend calls you from his cell phone when he’s five feet away.
Really, it’s an emotional transformation that takes place- you start off wondering where said friend is calling from, become slightly perturbed when you see him giggling to your left, quickly begin to doubt your friendship with the spastically laughing man-child, and then it happens: you hear him on the phone. Except you hear the real voice to the left about 2.5 seconds before you hear it nestle into your right ear, which sparks a series of explosive questions. How is this happening? How can we be talking at different times now, but always talk to each other fine when we’re far away? Where are my words being sent to? How, exactly, do these cell phone things work? A stupid prank, like calling from five feet away, has a mental firework effect- it takes cell phones and transforms them from routine and banal into something mysterious and, suddenly, a little strange.
That realization, that new and exciting strangeness, is the feeling you get when you hear Philippians for the first time. Perhaps that’s the reason that the band’s core, Zak Mering and Corey Nitta, bristle at the idea of putting Philippians into a genre box. Not that people haven’t tried. You could call Philippians everything from glitch-folk, to acoustic techno, to singer/songwriter music, if the singer/songwriter were a robot. But none of those really fit the band, because all of them, even the made up ones, have preconceptions that don’t necessarily contain the how-do-cell-phones-work weirdness that new music can evoke at its best.
The difference is that Philippians are willing to do the grunt work to harvest deep organic sounds, creating songs that are dynamic and surprising, unwilling to settle into a drum beaten coma. Zak originally hails from Pennsylvania (he’s does solo work too), but now that the band is in California it’s easy to imagine them using the landscape to create these thick, real sounds. Listen to Zim Plants and you’ll get a guitar that sounds carved out from redwood bark, overlaid on a rustling click that sounds like crunching leaves.
The debut album, courtesy of Brake Records, is out now. But even a listen at the free tracks available on MySpace proves that the work is as diverse as the golden state itself. Ghost Cock sounds like a trip through the desert at sundown; Mirah Remix, ethereal except for a piano pinning it down, picks up the journey just before dawn. Heart Machine, with it’s heavy vocals and spinning intro, is like a dirge after The Big One happened and split the state in half. But it’s a happy dirge. Somehow. Philippians never fall into the easy tear dropped minor keys of depressing songs. They are too busy making new ones.
Really though, instead of imposing arbitrary musical cartography (That third drum beat represents San Jose!), the best way to look at the band is as unmappable. The constant changes in tempo, sound, and feeling within each song make each track refreshingly engaging. The samples are eclectic and unique, but despite the switch ups, each song is unified as a movement. Or maybe you could say each is as fluid as a conversation- but it’s a conversation that’s made strange again, because you’re having it with a truly new voice.
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June 25th, 2006 at 7:43 pm
There’s nothing worse than a drum beaten coma. And there’s nothing better than your article! Awesome debut for Freshout!